Archive for July 2006

Ack! I started off the day with 2500 email messages! 2450 of it spam. Someone used meryl.net to send spam. The sender name had all kinds of first and last names, so my inbox (the catch-all for meryl.net. A catch-all email address gets all emails that have been misspelled or don’t exist.) got all the delivery and confirmation failures.

I make my main email address the catch-all since I check that box most frequently. Hmm, maybe I need to change it to route it elsewhere so I don’t deal with all this garbage.

Why did a spammer choose meryl.net? It’s not like I’m a big company with lots of email addresses like yahoo.com or aol.com. I’m just a little one-person biz.

It’s been a long time since it happened, but I got a few angry emails telling me to stop spamming the recipient. But I haven’t seen those in a long time and meryl.net has been used a few times since. So I hope that means Internet users have a better understanding that spammers rarely use their own email addresses.

Mashable looks at WeblogWire, a new PR service that targets bloggers rather than mass media. Redundant? Unlikely. PRWeb competition… maybe. Bloggers tell it like it is, an advantage over traditional media. If a product or service is blogged by the right blogger with a large (or right) audience, it could lead to buzzing in the blogosphere.

Took a quick glance at WeblogWire’s services and offerings. The pricing is higher than PRWeb’s. I know it’s a different kind of service and all, but what makes PRWeb attractive to a wide audience is its low-priced options for small businesses that can’t spare a lot of funds.

PRWeb’s press releases go out by email, web, feeds, and search engines (depending on the selected option). Bloggers could be part of that distribution. So I can’t see small businesses using WeblogWire when PRWeb does the job for less and probably reaches a few bloggers. I have an account set up so that I receive email notifications when PRWeb has results matching my requirements. I’m a blogger… and I’ve reported on some of these releases.

This isn’t an attempt to shoot down WeblogWire. Just not seeing how it can succeed when PRWeb has more options and lower prices. I agree that marketing efforts should involve blogs as word of mouth (mouse) can spread fast when the right blog mentions a product or service and the right people read the blog.

Marketers who do their homework to find the right blogs and send an email to the blogger without sounding like a promotion stand a chance of making something happen. Like traditional media, building a relationship with the blogger works.

One company kept sending me releases… sometimes two or three in one day! I wrote back and told the company that the product wasn’t right for my audience. Yet, the company continues bombarding me with releases. I’ve set up a filter so its emails go in the junk folder.

I’ve been on the other side where I was sending the press releases. When I write releases, I try to include story ideas where possible, avoid sounding like a PR machine, and make it interesting with the audience in mind — why would the recipient’s audience care about this story? Most important, I stay away from sending too many follow ups and wait between releases (depends on the resource as I distributed releases for different organizations).

If you’re interested in publicity, I recommend Publicity Hound — the best newsletter on the topic I’ve found so far. Here are the archives to get an idea of what it’s like.

Can you write a bad story on purpose? USA Today offers you an opportunity to see if you can write a worse story than the guy who pleased judges with his bad writing.

Here’s a resource to help you get started with lousy English: Common Errors in English. Feel free to commit the errors covered in the reference.

Pocket PC Thoughts (scroll down to find the article) rants about RSS feeds, a problem that’s been around a while. This honesty is an important factor in blogging success — something I’ve done — and I respect Pocket PC Thoughts for this.

Publishers prefer to use excerpts in feeds so that readers will come visit the site where there are ads and other content. Readers want the entire article in the feed so they don’t have to leave their feedreaders at all. My feeds have Google Ads every few entries. I put them at the end of the entry so they’re not obtrusive. It’s the best compromise, I think. Give full articles in exchange for a little ad here and there.

Isn’t an ad better than a tip jar? Since ads are supposed to match up the content, you might very well be interested in the site behind the advertisement — so you get more value from an ad than a tip jar — and the site gets a little change for your click.

What really annoys me is when I do a search and end up on a site full of ads that you can’t help but click the ad as they do a good job of hiding what little content there is. This comes across negative especially on sites that are just keyword-based sites and don’t have real content.

These keyword-based sites waste our time and their bandwidth. They think they can reel us in with false keyword search results and figure that we’ll stick around once we get there even if they don’t have what we’re looking for. As soon as I see the site is useless, I press CTRL+W. Obviously, many people don’t do the same because these sites continue popping up, which means they’re earning bucks.

What do you think of the RSS and ads issue? What’s reasonable?

P.S. Bionic Ear‘s feed is messed up. It’s supposed to be showing full articles not excerpts in the feed. Working to get it fixed. Didn’t want you thinking I was all talk and no walk after reading this — should you happen to look at that feed.

We all know someone who, like Oklahoma's Ado Annie, just "cain't say no." These folks accept every project. Every volunteer job. While everyone around them loves and appreciates them (or not), they're often tired and do little for themselves. Some people who fall into this group may not even realize they're on automated mode when agreeing to help.

The Book of No contains 250 scenarios and how to handle them so that you say no. Before the entering the bulk of the book that contains the scenarios, Newman covers five basics to get you started with this No business as well as a 16-point No Credo to remind you that you have the right to say no. Saying no is a learned skill, and the scenarios can help the yes-person develop the courage to say no.

Each scenario poses a question or statement followed by three parts:

• What's going on here? – Explains the situation and possible motives.
• Response – How to respond so the answer ends in a No.
• Alert – A warning to help you the next time you get into the situation or contains insight so you better understand what's going on.

A person who has the courage to say no may feel terrible and guilty afterward. The scenarios don't simply advise saying no, but instead provide honest and guilt-free responses. For example, someone at work asks if you're available for lunch on certain days. The response, "Thanks for including me, but I can't squeeze another thing into my crammed schedule this week."

The scenarios are grouped into four areas for quick referencing: friends, family, work, and difficult people, which include situations with sales people and those who provide services.

The book concludes with a bulleted list of key lessons to provide reinforcement to keep you focused on the road to accomplishing more of what you want and less of what others want. The brief introduction and conclusion with the well-sorted scenarios in between make the book a great tool for people who need support in their journey to say no.

Title: The Book of No
Author: Susan Newman, Ph.D.
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Business
ISBN: 0071460780
Date: November 2005
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Cover Price: USD: $14.95 Amazon: $9.72

Growing up, I loved musicals and songs from the first 40 years of the 20th century. I never talked about it with friends because it wasn’t rock ‘n roll, therefore not cool. I came across foldedspace.org: Twenty mp3s of Great Songs from 1901-1920.

As a kid, I loved singing “Over There” and other oldies like “Camptown Races” found in an old piano book that belonged to my mom. One of my favorite TV specials aired in 1983 and I still have it on tape. It was “Parade of Stars Playing the Palace,” (NOT this one — this one – requires registration) but it focused on The Palace Theater. It had famous singers, dancers, and comedians performing as Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Mae West, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson played by Gregory Hines, Nora Bayes (who has a few songs listed on foldedspace), and more.

I need to transfer the tape to a DVD before the tape dies. The show already had an interruption in the middle of Al Jolson’s performance because it was a stormy night, which knocked out the cable. I keep hoping a video company will bring it back to life on DVD perhaps the company that produced Broadway’s Lost Treasures. I did exchange emails with the company about this.

What I love about the Broadway Lost Treasures series is its inclusion of performances from various Tony Awards shows (Hey, looks like they came out with part III). I hope the company adds more because there are many other performances I remember from the Tonys that aren’t on those DVDs yet. I did tape and save a few years’ worth of Tony Awards, but unfortunately these were in the later years when there weren’t as many performances and the show cut to two hours.

I didn’t tape this year’s Tonys and of course, Harry Connick, Jr. performs “Hernando’s Hideaway” from The Pajama Game, one of the songs I listen to repeatedly. I also love Mame and All That Jazz.

How do we segue from 1900-1920s music to musicals? Well, “Over There” made me think of George M. Cohan and Yankee Doodle Dandy, and “Parade of 100 Stars” covered the early 1900s and worked its way up to when The Palace reopened for musicals.

Many types of cuisine are award winners and require a variety of special ingredients to be flavorful. It would be easy if one award-winning recipe existed for all newsletters, but newsletters, too, are as different as Creole gumbo is from Korean dumplings. One recipe won’t do the trick.

Fortunately, two newsletters can be opposite in every way possible and yet both be well-savored. By figuring out how to combine the right ingredients, whether that’s by trial and error or through more traditional methods, your audience will be quite satisfied. Yes, even if your newsletter doesn’t have great original content …

Treasure hunters

How can that be? A superior newsletter without great content? While it doesn’t happen often, such newsletters usually point to great content instead of create their own. They’re treasure hunters. They sift the crowded Web for a certain spice amidst heaps of home-grown, organic or manufactured ingredients

This can be a great challenge. Let’s just say that it’s easier to find a single green peppercorn among many food groups than it is to find one within a gazillion pounds of other peppercorns. In the same way, the Web has endless pages of content and to find the best ones isn’t an easy task. That’s where the treasure hunters shine. They save time for their readers and get them the sharpest resources — not just picking out any ol’ resource, but by finding resources that represent the topic covered in the newsletter.

ResearchBuzz and Librarian’s Internet Index (LII) New This Week are super treasure hunters. Both newsletters are all about the sites they mention with a summary or commentary for each one. ResearchBuzz often focuses on Internet research and covers a handful of sites in every issue while LII lists over 25 Web sites with a paragraph on each. You could also say meryl’s notes newsletter falls here, too. Though it has an editorial and a sprinkling of humor, the bulk of its content contains links with commentary on each.

A tasty tidbit

Another quality newsletter “food group” is the tasty tidbit. Each issue typically provides one thing: one article; one editorial; one discussion. It doesn’t sound like much, but these newsletters usually have an interesting take on that one thing.

Furthermore, the audience appreciates having just a bite of something to think about. We’re an overloaded society and sometimes just one thing is all we need to be satisfied. Daily Candy is known for this. Each issue talks about one store and what makes it so special.

The Wizard of Ads sends a weekly memo that usually has one article about 500 to 600 words. Dallas TV reporter, Jeff Crilley, sends a publicity-related tip on an irregular basis and it’s worth waiting for.

100% homegrown

These newsletters are workhorses because all of their content is homemade. Of course, the others work hard, but in a different type of way. “Homegrown” newsletters have multiple articles in every issue, covering a specific topic or industry.

Absolute Write does this on a weekly basis. Every issue contains an editorial, feature articles, columns, interviews and book reviews. The editor also points to interesting discussions in the newsletter’s forums — a great way to build and feed its community. The community is so successful that it published a book to help Hurricane Katrina evacuees with all profits going to charity. The result: Stories of Strength and over $3000 in two months.

Another homegrown newsletter comes from Publicity Hound. With each issue, readers get an editorial, a timely topic and story ideas, advice on public relations, “Help This Hound,” where a reader asks for help, and a dog-related joke.

Smorgasbord

eNewsletter Journal, Cincom Expert Access and Shavlik’s Remediator Security Digest fall in this category, and use a variety of food groups. Every issue brings an editorial, an original article, an advice question and answer, and six “peppercorns” from the world of spices. These six best of Web articles cover three topics related to email newsletters and marketing in some way.

The best advice question and answer is a way to involve readers and give them a chance to share their expertise. Readers provide wonderful gems and insight that publishers and writers don’t consider. Inviting readers to share shows them they’re appreciated. What better way to unite the publisher and the reader and acknowledge each other’s existence?

The right amount of spice

While these food groups are different, they have things in common: content and readability. The content — whether it’s their own or the links they point to — is of fantastic quality. Not only that, but it serves the readers exactly what they expect. They ask for a pot of java and get a steaming cup, not tea or soda.

Readability not only refers to language, but also making the content easy to scan by using headers, bolding, white space and the right size font. Two of the example newsletters given are not even HTML-based newsletters. They do an excellent job in making the most of the text, line breaks, paragraph breaks and symbols like **** to separate sections.

No one says you have to cook an email newsletter rare, if you don’t like it that way. Go for how you prefer it. Cook it well done or medium. These examples show newsletters of all kinds succeed by mixing the most important things: content, readability and topic.

Pocket PC Thoughts rants about the destruction of the English language leading to a lengthy discussion in its forums. Though I’m a grammar geek, I use typing shortcuts when chatting online or on my Sidekick II. Here are a few I frequently use other than the common shortcuts:

wud = would
cuz = because
iunno = I don’t know (thanks to daughter)
tmw = tomorrow

Thanks to instant messaging, email, and MySpace, kids are reading and writing more. OK, so it’s not perfect English… but every bit counts. When kids do homework and school work, they’re expected to use the right spelling. So I don’t think we have to worry too much unless kids’ teachers let them get away with ‘im,’ ‘kno,’ ‘skewl,’ ‘plz,’ and so on.

What matters is the time and place for writing instant messagese. If you’re writing a business email or having a class discussion in a forum, obviously you should use proper English. If you’re emailing a friend or chatting, then anything goes.

This AbsoluteWrite article came out at the perfect time. Recently, I lost a client simply because I didn’t meet his standards.

When we connected and started a trial period, I threw in the towel as I struggled to turn stories around within a very tight deadline. It wasn’t that I couldn’t write the story fast enough, but that I couldn’t reach two people to interview. I had never made so many relay phone calls in a short time frame. I covered the bases by calling as many people as possible and yet, I was lucky if I reached one person within the three hour period.

It was a blow to my pride as one of my strengths is the ability to meet deadlines. Then again, I’ve never run into one this short that required third party involvement.

When I told the editor I couldn’t do it, he continued to work with me by switching to once a week features. This would give me more time to get the needed resources and sit on an article for 24-hours before editing (so my eyes were fresh). Even so, I still didn’t perform to his standards.

It surprised and disappointed me that my work took too much of the editor’s time. I knew the target market, so several colleagues who belonged in that market kindly agreed read my articles before I turned them in. They made suggestions and I updated the article based on the suggestions. Upon request, I sent the article to someone I interviewed before I submitted it. All comments were positive and indicated they were clear, organized, and informative.

Whether or not my work was of good quality is beside the point. If they editor says it took too much time to edit, then I’m not the right person for the job. When clients aren’t happy, I do what I can to make up for it or move on.

Part of being a writer means accepting assignments don’t work out every time, but this one has been difficult to let go. I thought it was a match because of the target market and topics covered. It’s been difficult to stop beating myself up though family members urged me to cut it out.

The AbsoluteWrite article states, “Don’t beat yourself up — OK, you made a mistake. You’re not going to be put on some world wide editors’ list of freelance writers to avoid.” But it wasn’t one clear-cut mistake. Time is the only thing that will take care of this wound, but it helped to read that.

Rejection Injection also gave a nudge.

For a time there, it was all Wright Amendment all the time. Living in the Dallas area, you saw or heard something about the Wright Amendment every day until Mayor Laura Miller helped get the airlines to reach a compromise. The plan is to phase out the restrictions over the next eight years so that by 2014, Southwest can fly to states not next door to Texas (New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana). A quick explanation about the whole deal is at the end of this post.

Southwest also hit the news with an announcement that the airline is experimenting with assigned seating. While I thought the un-assigned seating worked well, Southwest wanted to test a few different approaches to assigned seating. I have no problems there as the company aims to use whatever works fastest. The CEO blogged on assigned seating and there were almost 400 comments. Great corporate blogging stuff here. The company went to the customers through its blog giving them a forum to share their opinions. The Dallas Morning News reports on the results of the seating test saying that the reviews are mixed.

I was curious to see if SWA’s blog mentioned Wright as it was a political hot potato. SWA indeed blogged about Wright. Besides, the company is behind the Set Love Free site.

Check out the blog user guide and how it addresses customer service concerns. The blog has what few others have… entries from all areas of its workforce: captains, flight attendants, managers, and even a mechanic!

No surprises. SWA has many customer evangelists thanks to its high quality customer service and unconventional approach to have fun while flying.

Not all is lovey dovey as Cam Edwards and Geoff Fox report.

In searching other blogs that mention SWA, I had hoped to find comments from SWA staff, but no such luck.

As far as my own experience with Southwest, I don’t recall any bad experiences. The last three times I flew were on Southwest to Austin. I even managed to get an earlier flight one of those times when I arrived at the airport early.

SWA is driven to provide the best customer experiences possible. The blog supports the company in that effort. Though I didn’t see comments on other blogs left by SWA staff, it wouldn’t surprise me if they have or will in the near future.

Wright Amendment explanation: Way back before DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth) International Airport came to be, Love Field in Dallas was the airport serving the DFW metroplex. Airlines didn’t want to move over to DFW since it was a measly little place out in the middle of nowhere (Grapevine). So the Wright Amendment came in to state the airlines could only fly to Texas connecting states. Southwest, of course, would like to expand its flying zone. American Airlines certainly doesn’t want competition from Southwest. Now that DFW International Airport is doing well and Grapevine has grown with the addition of Grapevine Mills Mall (not as good as Washington, DC’s Potomac Mills… unfortunately.), Gaylord Texan Resort, Grapefest — there were no more concerns about getting airlines to go to DFW. So repealing the amendment wouldn’t be as big a problem as in the past — except for the businesses involved. Hence, the eight-year compromise.

See more conversations on Southwest at Technorati.