This embrace of so many levels of counter culture made my day. I think I might have to make one of these…

I saw it on blog.craftzine.com who saw it on sailorcoruscant.com who modified a pattern from gnatkip on LiveJournal.

I think the radio and check boxes are my fav. Though the 404 reference (The error message you get when you try to go to a non-existant web page) is pretty awesomely geeky.

I did lose some points when I had to look up the whole eleventy thing.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Web

Have you ever encountered a situation where you or someone else made an update to a website, but you couldn’t see the change? It’s usually due to how browsers don’t get fresh versions of files from a website you’ve already seen, unless it thinks there are newer versions. Sometimes that process breaks down for various reasons, and a browser doesn’t think there is a new version of a particular file when there actually is, and even clicking the reload button doesn’t help.

In such situations there are special key sequences, different for each browser of course, which force the browser to re-download every file for a page. You can also clear out your browser’s cache for every page in its history. Instructions for both are detailed in this helpful Wikipedia page, broken down by browser for all the major ones, and a couple obscure ones too. Note that the two most common browsers (IE and Firefox) do share one method of cache bypass: Control-F5. Although note that’s Command-F5 in Firefox on a Mac (there’s no IE for Mac).

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology, Web

Stumbled across this article from Wired Mag from the end of last year. They claim Facebook, Flickr & especially Twitter, along with professional blog sites are killing the personal blog. I’m not sure I’m inclined to agree, but it is an interesting perspective. The faulty premise here seems to be that the goal of blogging is to get famous off of it through people finding you on Google. This is certainly not my goal in blogging… though it would be a nice perk. .

It’s a quick article, worth a read.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Web

eNewsletters are powerful brand-building tools, but only if they reach and engage your audience. Luckily, the outlook is good for increasing your deliverability, open and click-through rates. Dodging those mystical SPAM filters and the all-powerful delete button doesn’t really take magic. Just follow our 8 steps carefully to avoid the traps that lead to mediocre metrics.

There are three primary statistics we evaluate when determining the success of a newsletter email campaign:

- Deliverability Rate: The number of emails that get to people’s inboxes.
(Industry Standard: 97%)

- Open Rate: The percentage of people who open the email.
(Industry Standard: 10% of delivered emails)
Read more »

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

Are your marketing emails getting hog tied by SPAM filters? Is your lil’ doggy the only one reading them? Do you even know? Many companies choose to handle the creation and distribution of marketing emails internally, but many are uninformed or under-informed about the consequences of the methods they use to send them. From Outlook to enterprise solutions, we’ll give you a round up of marketing Email Service Providers (ESP’s), and steer you toward the sharp shooters.

Outlook
Sharp Shooter Rating:

Pros

• Free
• Comes from your actual email address, which may help you get through some kinds of SPAM filters (though other SPAM issues can be caused – see below).
• Directly linked to your contact list.

Cons
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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

First, let me get this out of the way… Sending marketing emails through Outlook is not an ideal solution. Keeping your list clean and de-dupped is time consuming, sending mass emails through your company’s email servers endangers the SPAM blacklist rating of your whole company, and most importantly, there is no way to get metrics on the emails you send. And mama always said: “Sending out a marketing email when you can’t view deliverability, open and click-through rates is like throwing a box of chocolates out the window… you never know who you’re going to hit.”

All that being said, there are still plenty of you out there who chose or are told you must send out marketing emails for your company through Outlook (or a similar desktop email program). If that’s you, here are some best practices tips to make the most out of your efforts.
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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

I recently had a client ask me about “purchasing a list” of email addresses and I thought I would give some explanation about this practice.

First, the rules are very different between mailing addresses and email addresses. There are many market research companies that sell lists of mailing address segmented by any number of factors. For instance you could purchase a list of all households with kids age 7-9 in a certain zip code who’s birthdays are in March. Or a list of mailing addresses for CEO’s of Real Estate companies in the Chicago Metro area. This has been going on for a long time and is perfectly legal.

Then email came along and what was once junk mail became SPAM. And where the cost of printing and postage kept junk mail to a manageable level, the incredibly low cost of sending an email caused even well-intentioned salesmen to send so many marketing emails that email was almost unusable. So CAN-SPAM laws were created to give regulations and guidelines to ethical salesmen and allow the prosecution of unethical SPAMers. These laws state that, among other things, you can only send marketing emails to people who have signed up (opted-in) to receive emails from you or who have purchased something from you.

This means that you cannot, by law, send marketing emails to another company’s “list,” because the people on the other company’s “list“ have not opted-in to receive emails from you.

Now, there are still companies who gather names and email addresses the same way they gather mailing addresses. Ever see a box when you purchase something that says something like ”Would you like to receive special offers from our partner organizations?“ If you check that box, you are officially opting-in to receive more emails from them. And those emails will probably be advertisements for products that are not from that company.

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If you are a company that is interested in ”purchasing a list“ of emails, what you are actually going to do is hire a company that has been gathering email addresses to send an email to their list on your behalf. You will never see the email addresses. It is a one-time deal. Those people did not sign up for your list, they signed up for the other company’s list, which means you cannot contact them directly.

But, if anyone sees that email and purchases something from you, then you have every right to add them to your email list. I also suggest putting some kind of call to action in your email that encourages people to opt-in to YOUR email list. This may be asking them to sign up for a contest or filling out a form to receive something for free. If you can get those people to give you their email address, then you have every right to contact them directly in the future.

If anyone ever offers to sell you a list directly – to actually hand over the email addresses – it is most likely a scam (or the other person is very misinformed). However, YOU will be the one breaking the law if you actually email those people. Just say no.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Web

As much as I’m enamored by the potential of all the new social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, it’s important to reflect on the one technology that still ties many of these others together. Email, or electronic messaging, has been around in some form for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that standards began to tie together the various systems that had evolved. The 90s saw a sharp increase in usage with ISP’s like AOL getting into the game. Universities have always led the effort as well.

We take it for granted most of the time. Everyone has an email account these days, or at least everyone with an Internet connection, but we’ll talk digital divide another time. The point is that I don’t see email going away anytime soon. Even as new social media sites pop up, I still generally use my email accounts to keep track of all the updates and messages. Nothing compares to email in terms of being able to ignite a word of mouth campaign and empower someone to send direct trusted messages to their network.

In terms of generating a message that resonates with people, we can all take a cue from the Obama team, which managed to keep 13 million subscribers even after the campaign was over. It’s a delicate balance of appropriate messaging and respect for people’s cluttered inboxes and busy lives.

Is it safe? Generally, yes. But it’s important to remember that email is unencrypted and therefore anyone who intercepts it (or has access to one of the many servers your message passes through) could read your mail. There are tools that help you protect your email, but until everyone adopts a new system, we won’t be able to reliably call email “safe.” For now, it’s best just not to send anything through email that’s sensitive. If you must, create a password-protected PDF for the information and attach it to an email.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

If you’re curious about journalism entering the virtual age, this is worth a watch:

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Social Media, Technology, Web