Adventures in Mobile Marketing

I’ve been offline for close to a month, so I’ve finally faced my Google Reader and its notation that I have “1,000 posts” unread in my professional categories. Here’s the original, the newsworthy, and the entertaining!
email marketing, twitter, and social marketing <-- divided into neat little categories.

Email Marketing
The folks at the Google blog don’t post a lot, but each one generates a ton of echo-chamber posts. 2 big things happened this month:
- Archive Email on Your iPhone
- Gmail Goes Offline.
Right, and Yahoo is working with ReturnPath on a Feedback Loop. I’m just assuming everyone knows that.

From Chad White of Retail Email blog…
- Retailers & their lack of Facebook love: Few retailers mention their Facebook pages
- The Oopsy awards! Find out all the flubs
- I was interested to find out that this Christmas we set a new volume record

Here are some interesting bits from EmailKarma
- No reply why bother at all? It’s a repost of Chad White’s no-reply post, and on my Google Reader- and Bloglines- the RSS feed says “respond to: noreply@blogger.com”. Whoops- not on EmailKarma but on RSS feed generators!
- Good old industry news, that was news to me: IBM to acquire Outblaze

Could you possibly say something new about subject lines? Yes! Mark Brownlow at No Man Is An Island introduces the Scrabble Theory.

Usually I don’t like blog posts about blog posts (like this one?) but Mark Brownlow’s insight into Kevin Hillstrom’s was a delight: Finding the missing numbers.

Yum, case studies. Oh, and failures. Schadenfreude! Return on Subscribers gives us… Email marketing fail: Inquisix

Denise Cox lines up some truly hilarious Really bad unsubscription processes.

Nostalgia machine- Tamara Gielen posted a funny old interview with a Hotmail developer/product manager: When hotmail was cool

Bronto’s Kristen Gregory writes an original, and empassioned, plea to clean up lists and other techniques for shedding the inactive: Drop your email lists deadweight without sacrificing ROI

Another Bronto-er, DJ Waldow does a nice recap of the user experience of Obama’s email campaign (OK and I’m a sucker for DJ’s posts AND customer experience posts) Obama knows email at least he’s getting there…

David Greiner at Campaign Monitor wrote the usual focused, practical web developer articles in the email marketing world;
- Track your new subscribers with WordPress and Mint
- How many nested tables are too much?
- And a shoutout to the Email Standards Project. Yay!

Brian Clark at CopyBlogger continues to write about some of the key challenges in this field. Here, he talks about being unique, being yourself, and not being afraid to be yourself, along with some great footage of Marvin Gaye singing the Star Spangled Banner.

MailChimp rocked out a few great posts:
- They laid down the law with their response to “Can I use a purchased email list?” Guffaws were heard in the blogosphere.
- Self-acknowledged 124th good newsletter idea I like the humorous acknowledgement, and it’s not a bad idea either.

OK I didn’t read the 300 or some-odd LinkedIn Q&A quesitons, but I did pick up on one or two good ones.
- Some poor soul asked for examples of re-opt-in emails, of which nobody posted an example (but me!) and lots of people sold them their services.
- Another great question: How do you describe how a blog works to a Victorian gentleman? Similar questions have haunted me at 3 AM too.

Dylan Boyd of Email Wars has such a sincere & unique voice that I easily dogeared about 10 articles:
- Is this emial’s tipping point
- on alternative email addresses: whispr: why do we want thee?
- Oooh! Failures! I love these!!! When landing pages blow
- Could new MySpace email make a dent?

Kevin Hillstrom’s Mine That Data blog is a dense chewy mass, but here are some key tidbits
- He gets a little abstract in the discussion of Business cycles.
- Very useful zip code and geographic analysis project, where readers contribute, Zip Code forensics version 2.0 is free
- Lifeitme Value and Organic Buyers

Yes, Twitter Gets its Own Topic
Alex Williams of Return on Subscriber tells me how to Track email on Twitter. It was new to me, sorry if it wasn’t to you!

MindComet at Email Marketing VooDoo lined up some pragmatic, practical tips on Leveraging twitter for your email. I thought I knew it all until I read his post, seriously.

Kaliya, “Identity Woman” reflects on I’ve been tweeting for a year now… and clicks through to fanboy’s social marketing rant, that I loved.

Kevin Hillstrom of Mine that Data writes about his newbie experience: Twitter update, 2 weeks in. Note, he doesn’t follow anyone on Twitter (at the time of this posting).

Chad White of Retail Email blog starts reposting twitterstreams, which I will of course kid him about, but I find it fun to read all the same:
- on “no reply” addresses
- about sample emails

David Armano of Logic + Emotion has a few great posts… on Twitter of course…
- he lines up an ego list, ““Tapping TWitter’s viral nature” of top twitterers, but we’re not supposed to dismiss it. Or something.
- and the reposted twitterstream, that I love so much: Priceline Rapid Response Prevents a Groundswell

Social Marketing
Of all of the Forrester blogs, I like Peter Kim’s and Jeremiah Owyang’s.
- Peter’s controversial criticism of the echo chamber: It’s Time to Transform.
- Jeremiah’s very useful research on white label communities (check out the neat graph too) Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketers

Karl Long of Experience Curve discusses whether Advertising is worth saving with a delicious photo of Billy Idol.

David Armano of Logic + Emotion has a few goodies:
- Social media experts down there with snake oil salesmen. Ugh.
- and, Wellsfargo doing it right

I couldn’t read all of Mashable’s 350 posts (so true, didn’t read 1,000 posts!), but I did pick out one or two written in the last week that I thought was new & relevant:
- SocialWhoIs helps you extend your profile on twitter/friendfeed
- Facebook’s monetization plan: polls, and lots of ‘em