What good are blogs?

The easy answer is you get to read some random and insightful thoughts from random and insightful people that you probably don't know. Part voyeuristic and part free brain picking, blogs have become more than a niche of the internet marketing world and a worldwide phenomenon.

But my top answer would be the ability to engage in spirited dialogue with people who you would probably not being having a conversation with otherwise.

Some recent posts on this site and others have reinforced my confidence that blogs are here to stay and serve many different purposes on the corporate, marketing and personal enrichment fronts.

EmailMarketingReports.com's blog is one of my favorites. A recent Let's talk bacn post has some thoughts on what to make of this pork infused mess. Buzzwords or real threat to email marketing? Stay tuned.

2 different blog threads from MineThatData provide some interesting viewpoints.

E-Mail Productivity Is Waning ... Or Is It?

Return On Investment (ROI)In Direct Marketing

And our own humble blog - The BrightWave Blog - has some email heavyweights provide their thoughts on the top email stories of the past decade

Labor on and enjoy the long weekend.

They're back! Crazy company names & lava lamps

Shades of the late 90s, early 2000 dot com era (hopefully, sans bubble). The title of this article says it all - Dot-com names get dottier (via LA Times).

What is your email strategy for mobile phones?

This stat indicates all email marketers better develop one: Mobile phones to reach 100% saturation by 2013

Phones will become more of data centers and email will of course be a piece of the content puzzle, so it is time now (if you have not already done so) for adapting your email campaigns for the phone. This goes beyond optimizing for delivery as content, link placements and overall messaging strategy will need to conform to the next generation of phones that will make this 100% saturation number a reality.

My easiest to implement suggestion - start with shorter subject lines that will be viewable on phones/pdas.

Any other suggestions for you go to market now mobile email campaigns?

Yum, Bacn

Homer Simpson would be disapointed of this bacn and spam combo (not PETA friendly) that many may find in their inbox. From the Messaging Times (although this new angle to spam seems to be gaining momentum in the media), we find a new industry term entering our lexicon.
Bacn - The deluge of email that arrives in our inbox as a result of our participation in online communities and other web activities has been allocated a name; ‘Bacn‘. This type of ‘non-spam spam’ includes new friend requests, updates from social networks, newsletter subscriptions, support messages and other automated email that we want to get but nonetheless fill up our inboxes each day.

Top email stories of the past decade? Go figure.

The bright folks at ClickZ are known for having great content on interactive marketing and insightful experts who pen articles for them (sometimes while cleverly pushing their own services/products/agendas) but this one baffles me.

ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards: The First Decade

It doesn't really say much about how, why or what these awards are for or how the finalists were narrowed down or really anything. So I am confused before I even read the categories and finalists.

The email category is certainly a head scratcher.

They don't spell email the right away (according to EEC's previous mandate) and then list the "candidates."

E-mail
CAN-SPAM legislation
Goodmail
Habeas
Responsys
ReturnPath
Sender Score
VerticalResponse

Am I missing something? This is the best the email industry can offer in the past 10 years? A law and 6 vendors?

Clearly, all of the categories and finalists seem to be phoned in. Search has
Google (overall), Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Panama. At least, that makes me feel better. The great strides search has done in the past 10 years and that is all to show?

Anyway, this seems bizarre so my question to you, loyal bloggers, is what are the top things that email marketing has delivered (pun intended) in the past decade?

Surely, we can come up with some items that go beyond infamous law and some vendors.

???

Corporate gifting to your hometown & deep time based targeting by retailers

Via the insightful VC blog, Feld Thoughts,, I learned of an innovative way a company is giving back to their hometown (Boulder, CO), via their employees

For Blue Mountain Arts’ 35th anniversary, they’ve given a wonderful gift to Boulder. Rather than having a big party and spending a bunch of money, they’ve given each of their 100 employees a share of $200,000 to donate to their favorite charities.

Now, if we could just do something about the spoof emails from Blue Mountain Arts.

From the Chicago Tribune, comes an interesting look at how some retailers are sending timely emails to trigger purchases late at night. First, I thought it was refreshing to see mainstream media cover email in a context that wasn't about spam.

Second, I like the fresh approach to email that retailers are trying while utilizing their data and providing unique offers to their email lists.

Lastly, they quote our friend Chad White of the eec and http://retailemail.blogspot.com/. I point this out not as a blog brownnose move, but I sometimes shrug when the media cites a big name traditional agency creative director that likely has no idea about email best practices, much less their own client's email program.

You can read the article here Night's right for online shopping

The Big ISP Postmasters redefine Spam (and out the airline spammer)

Via the Campaign Monitor Blog , we hear that spam is and will be what the ISP Postmasters (and their end users) say it is.

So forget about being CAN-SPAM compliant, try being compliant on relevancy and subscriber expectations. I have an iMediaConnection article coming out on this type of theme. Spam is not just Viagra and Rolex crap. Spam can be from your preferred airline (you know who you are) if they start to send you cross promotional emails too often, irrelevant special offers and generally too much email that I don't care about.

There you have it, that means the emails I get from this airline are spam, even though they are fully opt-in and seem to be fully CAN-SPAM compliant. (Any guesses on what airline I may be talking about?)

The blog post includes quotes from the big dogs protecting the giant inbox in the sky.

Yahoo! Mail - Miles Libbey: Anti-spam product manager
"Operationally, we define spam as whatever consumers don't want in their inbox."

AOL - Charles Stiles: AOL Postmaster
"I don't care if they've triple opted-in and gave you their credit card number," said Stiles, drawing chuckles, but making his point loud and clear: Relevance rules, and catering to end user preferences is his top priority.

Microsoft/Hotmail - Craig Spiezle: Online safety evangelist
"We need to think really a step beyond opt-in and focus on the consumer's expectations, relevancy, and frequency."

Gmail - Brad Taylor: Google Engineer
"Sometimes people are afraid to report a message because they aren't sure if it is "really" spam or not. Our opinion is that if you didn't ask for it and you don't want it, it's spam to you, and it should be reported. "

The New Yorker on the history of Spam

Not the usual email industry source which makes this an interesting tale.