As outlined in Part I of Inbox Reserve, “Why Email must Reverse Engineer Social Now,” future engagement metrics and delivery patterns will be based on how subscribers’ social networks interact with a given brand.   Disclaimer: The strategies outlined below are congruent and/or complementary with advanced “opt-in” best practices.  It is safe to say that behavioral targeted messaging may not achieve the same level of granular social activity that a contemporary preference center would.

Inbox Reserve II: Socialized Subject Lines

Using fresh social data points gathered from an advanced preference center, future marketing based messaging will place your friends’ names or actions in the subject lines of emails associated with a given brand.  These personalized subject lines are a key tool for increasing your brand’s ability to engage subscribers, dramatically increase open rates and manufacture a better delivery reputation.  When you have targeted promotions that build value around this concept, connoisseurs of your brand will flock to this preference center.  Once there, they can opt-in to receive real-time notifications (or weekly digests, if they prefer) that tell them when members of their social ecosystem have taken “definitive” action involving a given brand.  Moreover, once permission is granted, subscribers will also see their friends’ images dynamically inserted into a well-designed email creative. They’ll be able to click on the images and ask their friends’ opinions of a product before making a purchase.  Here are two “plain” examples of future subject lines based on social activity within your network:

·         Real-Time-Notification:   Mark from your network just purchased     Sees Candies at 30% off…

·         Weekly Digest:              14 members of your network purchased                                      Sees Candies? Find out who!

Inbound, highly transparent subject lines of this nature are inherently credible. Their success further supports the theory that curious subscribers are also the most engaged.  Informed subscribers who choose to receive these types of messages are far more likely to engage because these notification are about your network first and the brand second.  Therefore, these subject lines seem more valuable and relevant to the subscribers.

Ever get a notification from Facebook that a certain friend of yours commented on your status?  You are much more likely to react positively to that message as opposed to a “brand first” subject line offering you a product at 30% off.   Moreover, you are less likely to click the “report spam” button because you are more loyal to the people in your network.

Reduced Spam Complaints

The most compelling reasons for brands to earn network permission from subscribers is that it dramatically reduces spam complaints.  Socialized email notifications are important because they prioritize a subscriber’s network first and the brand second. First, it’s far more palatable for a subscriber to open an email message with a friend’s name in the subject line and a friends’ picture in the creative because it creates a perception of relevance and allows for a far more customized experience. For example, if I were a subscriber and received such a message, I would probably refrain from clicking the “report spam” button because my main focus is on my network.  Secondly, personalized subject lines will cause your open rates and engagement index to skyrocket, enhancing your brand’s deliverability reputation.  ISPs will take notice of reduced spam complaints and brands will begin to see a higher inbox placement rate, resulting from more positive actions taken with this type of email. 

Notifications and creatives of this nature are packed with relevancy.  Testimonials from members of a social network will influence subscribers’ purchasing decisions, which will drastically diminish the chances of a user clicking the “report spam” button.  The benefit is increased engagement, as network buddies chat about potential purchases. This leads to more delivered mail to the inbox.  Second Disclaimer:  It’s important that we try not to associate this concept with Facebook page suggestions, simply because there is a monetary investment element in place here.  Members of your social network invested quality time in making a determination about a product or service and gave explicit permission to opt-in and receive exclusive messaging of this type.  So, it’s unfair to be skeptical because of earlier social media spam-related growing pains. 

In Part III of Inbox Reserve, we'll discuss the challenges brands will have in leveraging an advanced preference center and share some of the immediate benefits to any given brand; which include added credibility, reduced costs and subscriber validation. 

Fred Tabsharani

Port25 Solutions, Inc.    

@tabsharani

 

   

Repost from Pivotal IQ Blog

During routine testing today we discovered a problem with the MySpace Email Client. It appears that emails sent to @myspace.com email addresses are being overlayed by a right hand tower ad. The right side of the email is vanishing under the ad and making it impossible to see what's beneath; this poses a potential brand integrity problem for senders.

 

Implications

This appears to be a problem that only affects emails that are sent to @myspace addresses. For messages sent within the MySpace network, the Ad on the right doesn't appear to overlay the message. As a matter of fact the message container has a completely different width all together: 520px. Messages that arrive from outside the network are contained in a larger space 780px with padding on each side, but with the current positioing of the tower ad over the right side of the message it appears to be a maximum viewable left to right space of 620px.

If you're concerned about the display of your emails, and preserving the viewable space then you may want to shrink the width of your overall template until MySpace corrects the problem of the ad being overlayed on emails in the inbox. If you are conducting any kind of messaging from within myspace, as in from a music page/company page then you want to keep your messages to a 520px.

We'll chalk this one up to the fact that MySpace mail is still in beta. Hopefully a fix will come soon.

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Director of Partner Relations
& Industry Communications
www.pivotalveracity.com

I have just read yet another prediction of the death of email. Mostly I just ignore them, but today’s eMarketer Daily with the subject line: Social Nets and Blogs More Popular Than E-Mails is so shocking in its (mis)use of research and gratuitous brownnosing of social networking; that I felt forced to respond immediately.

The article begins as follows: “In the US and several other countries, more people use social networks and blogs than use e-mail. Does that mean the days of e-mail as an effective marketing tool are numbered?”

WHAT? More people use social networks and blogs than use e-mail!!!

My BS meter sprang into life immediately - for starters it is impossible to sign up for any blog or social network without an email address. Then you have to factor in the fact that all social networks and blogs etc. use email to reach the people (most people in the world) who DON’T spend every minute of every day reading blogs or their Facebook page.

So how can there be more users of Social media than email?
  
I decided to take a closer look. The article is based on a piece of research by Nielson entitled Global Faces and Networked Places and shows a chart as evidence of this staggering claim.

I found that the research:

-         does NOT claim that more people USE Member communities than email
-         does not define active reach
-         does not define email
-         does not equate active reach with unique users
-         shows that email use is growing faster than search

Even if “active reach” was a measure of the number of unique users does anyone truly believe software manufacturers sites are more popular than all social networking sites and blogs put together?

Apart from that, what I find most irritating is how lazy commentators become when they see something that panders to their emotional beliefs; especially when it comes to the flavour of the month!

To quote Warren Buffet “it's wonderful to promote new industries because they are very promotable. It’s hard to promote investment in a mundane product. It's much easier to promote an esoteric product, even particularly one [that doesn’t make money], because there is no quantitative guideline.”

Dela Quist
CEO Alchemy Worx
The Email Marketing Agency

So this was bound to happen with a web email provider and I am glad to see it. Just like in many email clients that you have on your computer these days (Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, etc) you can now better manage the copious amounts of different inbound information that comes to you (Email, RSS, Blog alerts, etc)

Yahoo! mail now features a "Smarter Inbox" that gives higher priority display of email customers care most about or receive most regularly like from friends and colleagues. The smarter inbox lets you filter these more important emails right on the welcome page for mail.

They are also tying in the idea of social media management into this launch. So instead of your Inbox being full of not only emails, RSS feeds, social media updates, and spam... you can now more effectively manage these sources separately. GIves you the ability to make priority on what you want in your face when you login. Part of this reminds me of how GMAIL allows you to mange long threads of email discussions.

There is a video example of this new idea here

"We're creating a better, more relevant user experience," said Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo's audience products division. "And we're opening up Yahoo more for third parties to leverage." So this means that Facebook and others can write code or plug-ins to allow user to manage all their communications from one place. Wouldn't be surprised to see Goodmail or Return Path create a plug-in to facilitate delivery of accredited email. 

Again, I love this idea in this era of information overload, but it will take a bit of time for people to understand all of this change going on. Heck, we are just now getting the idea of RSS into the consumers hands.

-Dennis

Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

So I know this post isn't strictly about email, but with the idea of other e-medium's coming around to facilitate communication I thought it might be beneficial.

So the idea or adoption of social media avenue's (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc) looks a little like an out of control brush fire as they grow so quickly. I myself have decided NOT to adopt these technologies in my personal life due to the fact that I just don't have time, tend to lead a private life outside of business, and still am trying to understand what the deal is in me telling everyone where I am at every moment in my day. I do however use some of these in my professional life.

I did open a Twitter account (ddayman) after Gary Vaynerchuk "yelled" at us saying that marketers really need to look at these technologies for their marketing plans within their own companies, but after about six (6) weeks of trying to keep up with all my followers I decided last week to close the account.

The funny here is that originally the Internet was motivated by the need to share information, which has led to a thriving e-business community and then resulting drive for information security and at the same time loss of data as technology has become more mobile and store related.

We as a people will buy anything that’s one to a customer.

• Loyalty Programs
• Express Checkout discounts
• Challenge

The challenge is to create a culture of privacy where people automatically think about whether they are doing the right thing every time they touch any information about another person or what the post about themselves.

We in general have cause this problem as we are comfortable with giving away our information when the perceived benefit outweighs the intrusion.

As personal information becomes more accessible, each of us - companies, associations, government agencies, and consumers - must take precautions to protect against the misuse of our information.

One of my co-workers Jackie Kiley sent me this interesting article on social media security issues that I think you will find as interesting as well.

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/sec/?p=105&nr=ABG

Posted by Ralph DeFrangesco on December 9, 2008 at 11:17 am

Web 2.0 technologies, with their ability to let users create communities, work collaboratively and interact in various online settings, are powerful tools. Some businesses can’t get enough of them for interaction with consumers, networking, marketing, training and project management.

Unfortunately, in the rush to create these powerful tools, security was an afterthought. Some of the more notable Web 2.0 attacks were the Twitter Trojan, the Facebook worm, theSamy worm and Spaceflash attacks on MySpace in which cross-site scripting was used to change user’s profiles. The German version of Wikipedia was used to spread links to malicious sites, and one of the most popular blog platforms, Blogger.com, was used to set up blogs that injected malicious links in valid blogs in the form of comments. Right now, as you’re reading this, the koobface worm is wreaking havocon Facebook users and their contacts.

What should really concern CISOs are the programming techniques that give these sites their interactive capabilities. Currently, most developers use Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) as their development platform. Ajax itself does not create the vulnerabilities, but it does create a larger attack surface that can be exploited. According to Shreeraj Shah, founder of Net Square, Ajax, RIA and Web services are the top three vectors that are promising to affect Web 2.0 technologies. Of course, if Web 2.0 developers prioritize using secure coding practices that include extra testing that focuses on known vulerabilities of the technology, so much the better for the end product.

The fact is that users like the interactive capabilities of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and they will continue to use these sites regardless of security concerns. Security professionals play an important role by educating users on potential risks of Web 2.0 tools and how to avoid them. They can also decrease the chances of their organization having a problem by developing security policies for the Web 2.0 world. These policies should include:

• Implementation of data protection controls.
• Implementation of an acceptable use policy to limit who can use them.
• Blocking unacceptable sites.
• Monitoring content.
• Reviewing potential vulnerabilities on a weekly basis.
• Using a firewall between the Web 2.0 tool and the rest of the network (if hosted in-house).
• Conducting regular penetration tests to check for vulnerabilities.

I guess my point here is to be careful folks on what you use these mediums for. Have a little restraint when posting ideas. They become VERY permeant on the Internet. Think before posting. Audit what you plan on using these for. Don't post EVERYTHING. We don't need overload now in these mediums like we do with email today.

-Dennis

Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

I noticed a new phenomena on Twitter yesterday. I got email notifications from bogus account names that my Twitter account is being followed.

Obviously the first thing one does is checking what user is following you and the only message one sees is a commercial ad.

Here's what I got on my Gmail account:

Maybe Twitter's user account registration system is being "worked on" by hackers or someone was doing this manually, but this definitely is able to put some message and link through.

Maybe Twitter should implement reputation-based mechanisms with Report Spam buttons to their system just like ISPs do. Spammers are trying to appear at every possible place with eyeballs and Twitter definitely has a lot of them.

Did you receive any similar "follow" notifications?

Spam doesn't just happen in email. Facebook just won a lawsuit against Adam Guerbuez for almost a billion dollars. It's unlikely that he can pay even a small portion of that, but we'll take every win against spammers that we can get.

If you use Twitter, you may want to follow @deliverability for a notification of each blog post as well as other breaking email news.

If you're looking for other email industry tweets to follow, check out some of these:

People

• @jordanayan - Jordan Ayan, Subscriber Mail
  
• @joshuabaer - Joshua Baer, Datran Media & OtherInbox
  
• @davidbaker331 - David Baker, Avenue A
  
• @mattb2518 - Matt Blumberg, Return Path
  
• @dtboyd - Dylan Boyd, eROI
  
• @neinstein - Nicholas Einstein, Datran Media
  
• @johnengler - John Engler, Pipeline Success
  
• @davidhhendricks - Dave Hendricks, Datran Media
  
• @LorenMcDonald - Loren McDonald, SilverPop
  
• @Lanadatran - Lana McGilvray, Datran Media
  
• @samrpath - Stephanie Miller, Return Path
  
• @empg - Jeanniey Mullen
  
• @4Stefan - Stefan Pollard, Responsys
  
• @tamaragielen - Tamara Gielen, OgilvyOne
  
• @EmailKarma - Matt Vernhout, EmailKarma
  
• @djwaldow - DJ Waldow, Bronto Software
  
• @RetailEmailblog - Chad White, EEC

Companies

• @blueskyfactory - Blue Sky Factory
  
• @bronto - Bronto Software
  
• @campaignmonitor - Campaign Monitor
  
• @datranmedia - Datran Media
  
• @deliverability - Deliverability.com
  
• @EISummit - Email Insider Summit
  
• @eROI - eROI
  
• @exacttarget - ExactTarget
  
• @mailchimp - MailChimp
  
• @otherinbox - OtherInbox
  
• @returnpath - Return Path
  
• @strongmail - StrongMail
  
• @subscribermail - SubscriberMail
  
• @VR4SmallBiz - VerticalResponse

If you're on Twitter and not listed here, please add yourself to the comments below!

I hear many people predict the demise of email for personal communications in favor of social networking. They say that Facebook makes it hard to get Inbox messages that aren't from real people, so there is much less spam. While this may be true in the short term, I think in the long term messaging within Facebook and social network will have the same fate as email and will become more and more like email over time.

I've already talked about how Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn today are very similar to AOL, Compuserv and Prodigy of 20 years ago - separate networks that are destined to be joined together with SMTP. Do you really want to have a bunch of different social network Inboxes to check? Do you think people who are messaging you will be able to figure out whether they should send a message to on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or regular old email? It's just going to get more and more confusing.

In addition to that, I've already seen many businesses setting up Facebook profiles as if they were people instead of using Pages the way they are supposed to. They do this so that they can send commercial messages to the users Inbox instead of sending Updates which show up in a less prominent spot. They know that more people will read their message if its grouped with the other personal messages instead of the other commercial messages. However, its poisoning the well - the act of putting the commercial messages in the Inbox reduces its value and as others start to do that it will become ineffective for everyone.

For example, here is a Facebook profile for a coffee shop in Austin that keeps showing up on my "People you may know" list. And here is a music venue. I'm sure its a nice coffee shop. Considering that they both have almost 500 friends, the strategy seems to be working. I've seen many other businesses do the same thing.

Yesterday I received my first trojan horse virus in my Facebook Inbox. It looked like it was coming from a friend of mine and linked to a YouTube video I should watch. But the link was funny looking and it was a friend I hadn't talked to in a while, so I was immediately suspicious. I bet that a lot of Facebook users won't be suspicious and will click on it.

Could this be the end of the innocence for Facebook?

Thanks to Ray Springer, Eloqua Technical Writer, for sending this to me.

As Ray pointed out, this involves privacy issues and unintended consequences of poor UI design.

http://loopt.typepad.com/loopt/2008/07/iphone-invite-c.html
http://tastyblogsnack.com/2008/07/14/the-loopt-debacle/

Man, I get so tired of people doing dumb things like this. A lot of us watched a bunch of social site do the same thing and they just never learn. I wouldn’t be surprised to see my 3G iPhone with some sort of security protection to stop this sort of mining thing in the future. The same sort of security protection you currently see in your Outlook clients when a third party app tries to access your contacts without your knowledge or without your EXPLICIT permission.

-Dennis
Eloqua

Scott Richter has agreed to pay $6 million dollars to MySpace in an arbitrated agreement. MySpace claims that Scott's company using phishing tactics to get into unsuspecting users' MySpace accounts and spam them. Scott says he is happy with the ruling and looking forward to putting this behind him.

Scott's company previously paid Microsoft $7 million dollars in a separate issue. MySpace was recently awarded $233 million dollars in a suit against Sanford Wallace.

On April 22, I'll be participating in a webinar with David Daniels from Jupiter Kagan, David Hendricks from Datran Media and Greg Selkoe from Karmaloop.com.

One of the things I will be talking about are the similarities between the way social networking is evolving and how email evolved. While there are some things that are different and/or better this time around, there are many aspects that are the same. It's like watching the remake of a movie when you've seen the original. The actors are all different but the basic story is the same.

Just before email really opened up, we had a number of separate, proprietary networks that looked a lot like social networks of today. There was America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy (okay lets not forget eWorld). Each service a walled garden - users of the same service could send emails to each other but not across different providers. Each service had similar, but slightly different capabilities - for example some allowed the sender to "withdraw" a message after sending it as long as the recipient had not viewed it yet. Others had pictures or styled text.

Then slowly they opened up and allowed their members to send messages outside their service. This was a huge win for users, even though they had to give up some of their fancy features in favor of the "lowest common denominator" solution.

Jump forward 20 years and we see striking similarities. The names are different, but the rest is the same. Now its Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn instead of America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy. Originally closed networks, all 3 have opened up more and more to messaging with outside users. Facebook's platform and OpenSocial both promise to bring standardization to social messaging. It's only a matter of time before you can send an email from Hotmail directly to a Facebook user or from Myspace directly to an AOL user.

Possibly more significant is how deliverability and reputation are evolving similar to email. Social networking marketers will have all the same deliverability challenges as in email, only this time the receivers get more user feedback and are building smarter reputation systems from the start.

Already, Facebook uses a combination of implicit and explicit user feedback to build a reputation for applications and decide how many of its newsfeed notifications actually show up for users. Just because you send a notification to a user's minifeed doesn't mean that all of her friends will see it. Facebook looks at how many active users your application has, how many "thumbs up" you got and how many users blocked your messages to determine how many messages they let you deliver tomorrow.

Applications with lots of users can send lots of messages. New applications are throttled while they build reputation. Applications that get lots of complaints in various forms are penalized. Does this sound familiar?

From a technical perspective, high volume senders will need to customize their solution for different social networks. Just because both networks have implemented OpenSocial doesn't mean that they will work exactly the same. Yahoo and Hotmail both accept SMTP connections, but sophisticated senders customize the number of IP addresses used, number of connections per IP address, number of messages sent per connection, header content and other factors to optimize delivery for each receiving domain. We can expect to see the same technical optimizations for the various social networks. And just like email, we can expect to see them change frequently!

It's not just technology. Email ISPs also have different business rules and quality standards. What permission level is required to send email? How many messages are too many? How many complaints are acceptable? What's the best way to resolve problems? In the same way, different social networking sites will have different best practices for messaging to their users.

As much as it is the same, I'm optimistic that we will be able to learn from our experience with email and avoid some of the same mistakes. Already its clear that social networking sites have better user feedback than with email and are using this to build more sophisticated reputation systems. The email deliverability community should be working together with the social networking community to make sure the new reputation systems have sender feedback, dispute resolution and transparency built-in from the beginning.

You can download the PDF or watch the slideshow with full audio from the webinar.