Dan Soschin

Designing Emails for the Mobile World
If you are an email marketer, you need to be thinking about how people are now consuming email. This activity has been taken for granted for many years, but it has changed dramatically in the past few years with the proliferation of smart phones that can render HTML properly.

So, forget text messages. Make your emails mobile friendly. This is easy, here are the key ingredients:
1. Start with a good, brief subject. This really hasn’t changed and remains to be hugely important. Your subject should compel the reader to open the email instead of pressing delete. Keep it short… think 60 characters…
2. Pre-headers… many email marketers still don’t do this. Don’t create a fancy email with images, tables, and formatting without first inserting a plain text sentence before everything. This loads first and will display as the preview text on many devices (and in many web browsers, AND in MS Outlook. Keep this to the length of your average tweet… and it should include your purpose or call to action. don’t repeat your subject.
3. Links… your links should go to mobile-friendly pages. If they don’t, stop email marketing and start focusing on designing mobile friendly web pages. It’s the future people, get on board.
4. Images… think back to 1999… small, light weight emails were important then, and they are still important now. They open quickly on mobile devices and people don’t want to wait for your images to load.
5. Be brief. Most people don’t want to read 1,000 word emails on their phones. Say what you need to say in 100 words or less. If you have more to say, include catchy headers and hooks and then link to the text.
6. Phone numbers people can click are a real boon to business. Do it.
7. Let people reply. Stop sending messages from unattended email boxes. Why wouldn’t you want someone to reply to you? Isn’t that why you’re emailing them?
Want some more advice? Here’s a great article from ClickZ on email marketing for the mobile world by Melinda Krueger.
Latest Use for the iPad 3

Yes, the video is in German, but you’ll still get it.
You clicked here.

Wow, you actually clicked here. So where is here? It’s my marketing blog. Since you’re here, feel free to browse the site a bit…
Who Manages Social Media for your Company

Laurie Sullivan for Online Media Daily shares her thoughts on a recent Forrestor study regarding the part of an organization that bares the responsibility for social media.

The conclusion is that responsibility is shifting from social-media only teams to marketing operations.

I believe this general trend makes sense as social media becomes more integrated into the daily integrated marketing strategy of an organization and simply becomes yet another channel that is “part of a marketing and branding strategy.”

Marketing ops often manages systems such as CRM, and with social media become a mere component of an integrated marketing strategy, it cannot be isolated from other groups. And, one of the better groups to handle it might be ops, since they should be nimble/agile enough to provide quick responses from a customer service perspective. Obviously customer service is just one component of social media, but it can be one of the most volatile and can strongly influence public perception. What better way to handle it then by shifting it to the folks who understand customers best?
Being Remarkable

Here’s a quick bit of inspiration this morning courtesy of Jeff Haden and Inc. Magazine.

It’s some advice on how to be a remarkable employee. The concepts are fairly straightforward and of course are easier said than done. However, the eight principles discussed can be applied to your work ethic over time to produce long term dividends.

These are also great ideas to look for in new employees, and to praise your existing employees.

So, how will you be remarkable today?
Google Backs Chrome with $1m Exploit Bounty

I just love it when a big company with lots of financial resources puts its money where it’s mouth is.

Today, Google basically put a bounty on any exploits of its Chrome browser by offering cash rewards if hackers can find a bone fide exploit.

This does two things:

First, it’s a public display of Google’s belief that Chrome is solid. In other words, you wouldn’t spend a million bucks (even if you have tons of cash) if you knew you had exploits. So this is Google saying, “we know we’re good” and we’ll prove it with this contest.

Next, its a relatively good way to take advantage of “free” resources within the hacking community that Google would otherwise have to pay. In essence, it’s crowd-sourcing the browser and it will compensate any results. Of course if you don’t find an exploit, you don’t get compensated. So basically Google gets to test Chrome without having to pay the testers.

I’m glad Google continues to invest in keeping Chrome malware and exploit free. It’s not something new (paying hackers for exploits), but it’s still a innovative approach.
Facebook Reduces Ad Text from 135 to 90

Recently, Facebook notified its advertisers that new ads would be subject to a 90-character limit while existing ads at the 135-character limit will be grandfathered.

I have read a few articles about this over the past few weeks and most agree that this will be a new challenge for marketers accustomed to the extra room. A decrease of 35% is substantial, and this will be a big deal for advertisers to update their ads moving forward.

These changes do not favor marketers, they favor Facebook’s bottom line. Reducing ad copy and increasing the number of ads reduces an advertisement’s effectiveness. While initially the extra inventory may lower ad prices, at the end of the day, those will be countered by lower CTR and conversion rates for advertisers.
I’m Hiring Three Positions in March
I’m looking for a few good folks who want to be a part of the best interactive marketing team! My team (maybe I’m biased?)

All positions are located in Manassas, VA and require 2-5 years of experience.
- Search Marketing Coordinator
- Social Communities Coordinator
- Email/CRM Marketing Coordinator
Read the full job listings here.
Demand Media Beats Wall Street’s Expectations, What’s Next

One of my least favorite category of ‘internet companies’ are those like About.com and Demand Media’s eHow.com. These sites create basically useless, non-authorative content that misleads consumers, provides little value and prevents higher quality content from appear in search engine results because that better content is not marketed as well.

Needless to say, it’s a billion dollar business.

And to prove it Demand Media bested Wall Street’s most recent quarterly earnings expectations. The question is, with all the changes Google and the other engines are making to the search algorithms, will that continue to affect DM’s future prospects, or will they remain highly reactive step-in-step?

Like I said, I despise this type of content. It sucks.

The problem is not that they are taking advantage of this market. The problem is the consumer. We need to educate non-technical people that when they are doing searches, sites that purvey low quality content should be ignored. Often this means avoiding the first few search results; or at least understanding which companies produce shitty content, like About.com and eHow.com.

Educate your friends and family and let high quality content prevail.

Amen.
My New Favorite Thing: Word Clouds

I was just doing some work at explaining word clouds (or tag clouds) and have been looking at some tools that create them automatically from your website. Here are some amazing tag clouds generated from my blog using various tools:

Wordle – http://www.Wordle.com

Tagul – http://www.tagul.com (these are fully functional below):