I also just turned in a pair of longer posts on the topic which have a more speculative angle. These will be appearing on another blog in March. I’m looking forward to being able to link to them.

A month ago, I was fretting over the semantic fate of augmented reality, a technology which I believe passionately has critical implications for the way we learn, play, do business, and interact with other people. The first month of AR’s life as a tech buzzword had involved it being co-opted to describe what I call pseudo-AR. Esquire’s AR issue and the toy line for Avatar aren’t true AR; they’re more like at-home greenscreening using fiduciary markers.

Was AR in danger of being identified with a bunch of limited scope parlor tricks, things that only scratch the surface of what this technology is really about? This is a dangerous place for an emerging technology, so I devoted the first part of my talk to Social Media Club Boston last month to disambiguating true AR — the stuff that overlays digital information on your perception of the real world — from pseudo-AR.

Well, I guess I needn’t have worried. Sure, there were already some dynamite true AR apps out there, like Super Pages, Layar, and Wikitude World Browser, but, well… they weren’t made by Google. The conversation was being dominated by the gimmickmongers — until Goggles reared its Googly head and set the conversation back on course. Those who’ve already used Goggles, which I’ll be talking about more in a coming post, might point out that it lacks some of the real time qualities of other AR apps. That said, the essence of true AR is there: a device, in this case your Android phone, takes your perceptions and enhances them with data from the Net.

So, now that we all know that AR is not about pointing your web cam at an action figure and watching it flit around on your computer screen, I can concentrate on writing about why it’s so important and how it will change our lives.

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts about the state of augmented reality technology and likely future developments.

Pages of which you're a fan now appear for Everyone.

This morning brought an updated privacy policy with Facebook, together with some changes to how your profile is displayed. I was disappointed to see that the one feature for which I’d really been rooting — controlling who can see what groups you belong to — wasn’t added.

Here are some things you should check on:

• The one that really annoyed me is that Everyone can now see your fan pages. There are lots of good reasons why users should be able to keep this secret. From a business standpoint, I don’t want competitors who’ve identified me to necessarily know which pages I’m a fan of. I also don’t necessarily want potential employers to be able to see all of my fan pages. Having them know I like Dungeons & Dragons is okay. I work in technology; it’s a given that I’m a raging nerd, right? But what if I want to join a political or religious fan page? Showing fan pages to everyone can have a chilling effect, and it’s a bad move on Facebook’s part.
• Check your photo album settings. Photo albums that were hidden under your old settings might appear to Everyone now.
• Check your notes settings. Old notes might now show up to Everyone.
• Check your post comments settings. This seems to be a new setting; the default allows Everyone to see your post comments.

Most other privacy settings should remain as you had them if you choose the “Old Settings” option on the privacy page you’ll get when logging in to Facebook today.

One thing I do like about this change: you can now override your defaults for individual posts. So if your default is to only show wall posts to friends, as mine is, you can now opt to have certain posts show up to Everyone. I like this level of control, even if I’m unhappy with some of the other changes.

I can haz more than one demo for people over 64?

“Who wants to hang out with 70 year olds?” my grandfather asked once. He was 81 at the time.  It was a funny rhetorical question for a 25 year old to hear, and it’s stuck with me ever since. I’m pretty sure that up until that point in life, I’d lumped everyone who could claim a senior citizen’s discount into the general category of  “old people” and left it at that.

I was lucky enough to get this take on demographics from my granddad, and it’s served me well. My current employer sells travel to customers who average in their mid-seventies. These folks are different from people already well into their eighties, and they’re really different from the Baby Boomers who are now entering their mid-sixties.

So when is Facebook, that coterie of lovable scamps, going to wake up to this? Facebook’s ad targeting and demos for fan pages lump everyone over 64 into one category. That’s 3.3 million people by the Facebook ad creation widget’s own estimation — roughly the population of Uruguay or Lithuania.

One demographic. Really, Facebook?

Listen to my grandpa. Then give me a tool with which I can actually target an ad to my demo, and maybe you’ll make some money off of my employer. ‘Til then, fuhgeddaboutit.

Photo credits for this post: Baby in Sunglasses (Vincent Valenti)

Thanks to everyone who listened. It’s a fun topic to talk about, and I hope people enjoyed it.

Update (2009.12.10): Here’s a link to Brilliant Video’s Vimeo cast of the event.

Could the same thing now be happening to Facebook?

It’s easy to spot the overt symptoms of a social network losing its cachet. Tasteless profile customization, processor hogging special effects, and a preponderance of user avatars resembling anorexic Taiwanese betel nut girls were leading indicators in the case of Myspace. Facebook has largely avoided looking trashy by enforcing a dress code. Even the most obnoxious Facebook apps are confined to the staid corporate blue and white of the standard profile. Users who want to set the makeup gun on “whore” and point it at their profile have largely been kept in check.

But class is more than skin deep. Sure, there were users who bailed on Myspace because, in the words of one user, “Myspace has become a trailer park.” Where Facebook really won the social media war, though, was in keeping the content of the site useful and relevant by curtailing spammy user behavior.

Fan pages are the best example of this. A lot of people bailed on Myspace because every time they visited the site, they were seeing a dozen friend requests from bands, promoters, and porn sites. Facebook’s fan page model meant that if you made a band profile on Facebook, you couldn’t make it a personal profile without knowingly violating the ToS. And Facebook fan pages can’t go around randomly friending people they don’t know; fans have to opt in of their own accord. You can suggest the page to your friends, but that’s it.

So far, this has worked well for Facebook, but where there’s a spammy will, there’s a spammy way. In recent weeks I’ve become concerned that Facebook isn’t enforcing their ToS. I’m seeing friend requests from profiles that clearly aren’t people. I’m also getting friend requests from people with very large friend networks to whom I have no connection. Generally, they’re local music or club promoters. A burst of irrelevant, spammy messages every time I open up my inbox is exactly what drove me away from Myspace.

Facebook needs to enforce their ToS so that people who are on the site to do business stay in the fan page realm. Hopefully, they can do this in a more even-handed fashion than Twitter, a company that has alienated a lot of people by suspending accounts based on sweeping criteria that locked out legitimate users along with spammers. Facebook needs to work on this, and they need to do it sooner rather than later.

Even as the marketer in me strikes up a joyful tune with Google’s announcement that it will soon be including tweets in searches, the part of me that still thinks there might be such a thing as privacy (or a right to it) is battening down the hatches.

On one hand, the potential utility of a more searchable Twitter to marketers is huge. Suddenly, you can data mine the zeitgeist in a way never before possible. You also have a new and creepy way to stalk potential hires online. Of course, you could do these things before, but integration with Google (and it’s developmentally challenged cousin, Bing) makes it so much more convenient. And for busy people, convenience is a chief determinant of how deep they dig when searching on a topic.

My privacy concerns, too, relate to risks that have always been there. I’ve tweeted a few things that I wouldn’t necessarily want showing up on Google; a lot of us have. For many of us, the bet we’re making is that no one cares.

When Google steps into a new realm and makes it searchable, though, it changes the game. There are two degrees of private: that which is hidden, and that which just gets lost in all the noise. Until then, much of what was said on Twitter could fall into the latter category. No longer.

A debate I’ve seen trending today concerns how Twitter will implement this. Will you be able to opt out? If not, will many people suddenly start turning their feeds private to avoid being louder than they’d like? And if they do that, how will it affect the utility of Twitter? Some of the conversations I’ve seen lately suggest that enabling Google search will be a psychological game changer for many users. People who wouldn’t otherwise make their feeds private will do so, probably resulting in a decline in overall usage of the service.

Maybe Twitter should take a look at their declining traffic and think about some of the moves they’ve made that have had a negative impact on Twitter’s status as a giant conversation (along with some proposed fixes):

• Getting rid of visible @ replies from people you follow to people you don’t was a bad move. Turn this feature back on, and traffic will increase.
• Some of the limits on DM are not well thought out. What if you could allow DMs from people you don’t follow? More usefully, what if you could allow DMs from people you don’t follow on specific tweets?
• And most relevantly to this post, maybe Twitter should look at offering more choice in terms of who can see your Tweets. The ability to make Tweets visible to some or all followers, while other Tweets are 100% public, would be a powerful counter to the growing perception that Twitter will somehow become less private once it’s searchable on Google.

Photo credits for this post: Blue Jay (Kenn Kiser)

First of all, let’s look at the results. I now have an e-mail offer with a “Share on Facebook” button. When a user clicks the button, they’re taken to Facebook’s Post to Profile page:

The user can make their own comment and edit the link text as they wish. Once they click Share, a link to a hosted version of the e-mail, complete with thumbnail, shows up on their wall.

More importantly, it shows up in their friends’ feeds. Prior to implementing the Share button, I had a button that sent users to our Facebook fan page. The Share button is a much more powerful way for e-mail marketers to use Facebook, as it drives traffic to your own hosted e-mail offer, rather than to Facebook itself.

On to the How-to, then…

1. Create a hosted version of the e-mail.
   Normally, I wouldn’t have to do this. I use Cheetahmail, which automatically creates hosted versions of my e-mails for me. In this case, though, I ‘m going to need to alter the code of the hosted version in step 3, so I’ll host the HTML on my own site.
   Some bulk e-mail services host images for you and convert the src attributes in your <IMG> tags to point to those hosted images. In this case, I recommend using this converted source to make your hosted e-mail, as hits to the images hosted by your e-mail provider are usually used in reporting. This also avoids potentially skewing the analytics on your own web site.
2. Create a thumbnail for the Facebook wall.
   The thumbnail should be 150 pixels wide. It can be either a thumbnail of the e-mail itself, or a smaller treatment using elements picked up from the e-mail. You can skip including a thumbnail, but wall posts with no images lose a lot of impact. In my example, I’m using a thumbnail of the cover for an electronic catalog we’re plugging in the e-mail.
3. Add meta information used by Facebook to the <HEAD> of the hosted e-mail.
   When you submit a URL to Facebook’s Share function, it parses the document and picks up some info from the <HEAD> of the HTML. It uses what it finds as the default text shown on the share screen, enabling you to control what appears there. Facebook looks for a few <META> tags to fill in the copy and a <LINK> tag for the thumbnail image. Take another look at th Post to Profile screen shot above. The code that produced that default text looks like this:

   

4. URL encode the URL of the hosted e-mail.
   Eric Meyer’s URL Decoder/Encoder is a fast way to do this.
5. Append the encoded URL to the Facebook share URL as a query string.
   Your final URL will look something like this:
   http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fyour.hosted.emailserver.com%2Fhostedemail%2FEP283_hosted.html

6. Create a Share on Facebook button.
   How this button looks and where it’s positioned in the e-mail will vary a lot depending upon how you do your creative. Generally, though, I think putting it in the center column of the e-mail together with any other social media links you want to include works best. My organization normally puts it in the sidebar, but our creative is atypical of how most companies do marketing e-mails.
7. Link this button to your Facebook share URL.
   Voilà! You now have a Facebook share button in your e-mail offer.
   There is one thing to be cautious of on this step, however: some bulk e-mail services might undo the URL encoding you applied to your query string in steps 4 & 5. Cheetahmail definitely does; I haven’t tested it on other e-mail providers yet. Be aware of this issue, as it can lead to broken links. Most bulk e-mailers give you the option to  edit the links after they create redirects, so you should be able to fix this manually.

Happy sharing!

This was the first year they’d done the event in Boston, but it left me wishing I’d attended previous years’ events in NYC. The companies present covered a broad swath, including ad firms, retailers, and one other travel company. I think I was the only person there who was the sole representative of their company.

Most of the presentation revolved around best practices and was given by two people from Cheetahmail’s client services group. At the end, they held a panel with Q&A that included their creative director and a few people involved in strategic services. The presentation was broken down into several broad topic areas, including:

• Acquisition (including eAppends)
• Retention
• Testing
• Segmentation
• Reactivation
• Miscellaneous Topics
  

Acquisition
Here are some techniques that Cheetahmail’s clients are using:

• Acquisition pop-ups for new site visitors. J. Crew and a few other retailers are using an acquisition pop-up to solicit e-mails from all new site visitors. “New” in this case is defined as un-cookied. Once someone visits, they’re cookied and will no longer see the pop-up, whether they choose to fill out the form or not. In terms of the mechanics, one should do this with a CSS overlay rather than an actual pop-up to avoid pop-up blockers. This is potentially a very powerful lead gathering technique. However, I would be somewhat concerned from a user experience standpoint that it would confuse or annoy past site visitors whose cookies expire or who access the site from a different browser.
• As an alternative to pop-ups, some sites use a customized ad banner with lead acquisition call to action for new visitors. (Returning visitors instead see a promo or other information).
• Pop-unders for abandoning users. Some sites attempt to create a pop-up underneath the user’s current browser window if it looks like they’ve abandoned a form. The pop-under is then present when the user closes the front browser window, providing another chance to grab their eyes.
• Automatic opt-in. Automatically opting in anyone who buys from us is CAN-SPAM compliant, provided they haven’t previously opted out. Whether it’s a good idea to do this without getting permission is another policy; it depends on how aggressive your organization is.
• Required fields. Make e-mail fields required in all forms; customers now expect this.
  

eAppends
Although eAppends are CAN-SPAM compliant, data suggests that users don’t like being appended. Big surprise. For most of Cheetahmail’s clients, names added to their list via eAppends performed only 50% as well as organic leads. Cheetahmail recommends doing eAppends only once every six months, or quarterly if volume is high enough, but eAppending more frequently doesn’t appear to affect performance. Most of the discussion on best practices for eAppends had to do with keeping the new user from immediately opting out or hitting their spam button. They recommend doing a series of welcome messages rather than immediately hitting eAppends with promotional mailings. A typical campaign might consist of three or even four mailings: a welcome message (also serving as an opportunity for users to opt-out), an informational mailing about the company, a survey or qualification e-mail, and then maybe an attractive offer.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never thought eAppends were a good idea, and a lot of people who blog about e-mail marketing would agree with me. True opt-in is the way to go, in my opinion.

Retention

• There was a discussion of e-mail preference centers. We were shown a very creative example from Barneys, and while Barneys’ cheeky ad copy wouldn’t fly well with my company’s septuagenarian demographic, the structure of the page was something any business could duplicate. A good preference center should have the following elements, and in most cases they should appear in this order:
  
  1. Frequency controls. Promising users to mail them less is the first line of defense against them unsubscribing outright. This has to be implemented in such a way that users actually do get noticeably less mail, or they might just hit their spam button next time.
  2. Unsubscribe button.
  3. Change of e-mail address.
  4. Receive all/increase frequency. Barneys’ page calls this the “Please Stalk Me” button. Barneys has implemented this so that users who choose this option receive all of their promotional e-mails.
     
• Unsubscribe surveys have been used successfully by some companies to gather data on why people leave their lists. One jewelry retailer found that about 15% of people who unsubscribed responded.
  

Testing
The best practice here is to realize that different things will work in different situations. Therefore, test frequently, and test a variety of different properties of the mailing. Some things to try include:

• Subject line testing. This is a very common test. The most common metric to watch is open rate, but some clients found that subject lines affected clickthroughs, too. Test results can be surprising in some cases. Some examples:
  
  • General subject lines versus sweepstakes. For survey & qualification e-mails, some clients found that a more general subject line worked better than one that called out a sweepstakes or prizes.
  • Recognizable names versus general branding. Companies who had athletic endorsements or other recognizable names sometimes found that using those names in subject lines worked well, although this wasn’t the case 100% of the time.
    
  • Length (short versus long). One company found that subject lines of 25 characters or less performed best, subject lines of 50 characters or more were second best, and mid-length subject lines (25-50 characters) were worst. Cheetahmail speculated that this might be because the shortest subject lines leave a noticeable white space in the recipient’s inbox, while long subjects lines might generate curiosity because they get cut off at the end.
    
• Time of day testing. Strategy people on their panel suggested re-testing time of day and day of week every six months, as the optimal times can change, as well as retesting seasonally.
• Hosted link versus no hosted link. Some companies found that putting a link to a hosted version of the e-mail drew a lot of clicks.
• Mobile-friendly hosted links. In some cases links to mobile-friendly versions of e-mails performed very well.
  
• Creative Testing. Can be based around most-clicked links (i.e., where calls to action or other links are located in layout). Should be done across multiple mailings for a valid sample.
• Remail campaigns. Test lift gained from remailing a campaign within a few days of the initial mailing.
  

Segmentation

• Polling. This is a novel strategy some companies have tried in place of traditional qualification surveys. Rather than trying to get people to fill out an entire survey, set up a poll with results visible to users (e.g., “Where is your favorite destination to travel? … A) Holland & Belgium, B) Southern Africa, etc.). Then record responses to user records. This demands much less of the user than filling out a whole survey but can still yield useful data.
  
• Geographic Targeting. Some companies have tested segmenting by users’ geographical locations. This works particularly well for retailers selling things like sporting goods that might be useful in one part of the country but not another.
  
• Browser Data. With site-wide login and cookieing, it becomes possible to track what a user is looking at on the web site and then use this to segment. Cheetahmail clients who took this approach of tying segmentation to web site usage saw very good performance — as much as a 50% lift.
  

Lifecycle Triggers
Many of the practices here tied in to how users interact with company web sites.

• Remarketing to shopping cart or form abandoners. If someone gets part way through filling out a form or ordering online and then abandons, a campaign is triggered. Staples did an automated cart abandonment program that would send users who browsed a product and then abandoned before completing the order a promo for that product and three similar products.
• Web site reactivation. Campaigns can attempt to target web site visitors who looked around a lot but then don’t come back for 30-1000 days. For the really long-lapsed visitors, some companies tried unusual or creative subject lines to grab attention, figuring they had nothing to lose. (One company send mails with a subject line about marauding aliens attacking the Earth and apparently saw some good results!).
  

Miscellaneous Topics

• Some companies actively solicit reviews and/or testimonials from customers.
• Video. Messages can contain a static video frame that opens a video, or an anigif taken from frames of an actual video. (Holland America uses a product called LiveClicker to do this).
• Go green strategies can convert more offline users from paper mail to e-mail/web.
  

Thought Leaders

Based on what I saw, watching how the following companies handle certain aspects of e-mail marketing might reveal some good ideas:

• Bass Pro Shops & Giant Eagle — for eAppend welcomes (although this would be very difficult to monitor from outside).
• Drugstore.com — for early lifecycle and synchronization of e-mail content with the company web site.
• Barneys — for preference centers.
• Puma & Urban Outfitters — for lead acquisition techniques. I also love Urban Outfitters’ welcome campaign.
  

1. Use tables for layout, not CSS.
2. Embed all CSS styles in block level elements.

And that’s pretty much it. Point 2 deserves a little bit of elaboration, though.

The reason for embedding styles is that some ESPs (Gmail, I’m looking at you) ignore style sheets in the <head>  section of the document. They also ignore <span> tags, and inheritance can be a bit wonky. The safest course of action is to use style attributes in block level elements such as <div>, <p>, <h#>, <a>, and the like.

This makes Dreamweaver a huge pain to use for e-mails, because it does the exact opposite of this. One of my co-workers who’s in marketing hired a freelancer to do some e-mails for her, and she found that they weren’t displaying very well. The freelancer in question had requested a copy of Dreamweaver within minutes of sitting down to work. I’d advise those making hiring decisions on someone to create e-mails to be skeptical of potential hires who indicate that they rely heavily on Dreamweaver. E-mail is still a hand coder’s game.

Some coders use the <font> tag, as well, but I disagree with this on the grounds that <font> is deprecated HTML and should not be used. <font> does allow for the possibility of creating styling inside of a block level element without creating a line break (which happens in some ESPs if you use <div>), but I don’t think it’s a worthy trade-off. I’m advocating deprecated coding techniques (e.g., table layouts), but I won’t advocate deprecated code.

This brings me to my final point. Just because e-mails needs to be coded in a way that flies in the face of what would be considered best practices in building a web page doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to produce lousy code overall. While following these guidelines, one should still strive to produce code that’s readable and validates for whatever flavor of HTML was used.

Photo: Craig Jewell via stock.cchng