eROI Days Email Agency

According to a new study published today by eMarketer, “57% of consumers had a more positive impression of companies they had purchased from when they received e-mail from them—and 40% said such e-mail made a future purchase from the company more likely.”

Read the full eMarketer article here on some surprising take-aways on the effectiveness of email marketing >>

eROI employees, significant others, and kids joined in the festivities to help raise $110,000 for Friends of the Children in this year’s smash hit Bowl-a-thon!  More than the dollars raised, we had an awesome time this past Saturday rocking out to Britney Spears (special request from Sydney) to learning more about the Friends organization in movies and meeting a bunch of the kids and mentors in the program. Check out this slideshow:

Geoff Ramsey, co-founder of eMarketer, wrote an awesome tactical article on “How Staying Positive is Good for Business.”  As you know, I’ve been writing blog posts for the past 3 months about how fear is so 2008 and that this year, 2009, is the Year of Optimism.  Well, it keeps getting harder and harder to truly believe that 2009 will be optimistic as the news media keeps reinforcing doomsday news constantly.  So, take a minute to Geoff’s 5 guiding principles of positivity:

1. Understand Your Locus of Control

2. Tighten the Spigot

3. Focus on the Opportunities

4. Leverage Data to Construct Opportunistic Experiments

5. Invest in the Future

I especially like this quote from the article: “I don’t care how hard this period is. You have to have the combination of believing that you will prevail, that you will get out of this, but also not be the Pollyanna who ignores the brutal facts. You have to say that we will be in this for a long time and we will turn it into a defining event, a big catalyst to make ourselves a much stronger enterprise.”
—Jim Collins, management guru, as quoted in Fortune, February 2, 2009

I’d also like to hear from all of you about a specific positive personal or business experience or news that you’ve read that stood out above the rest – please comment below (in haiku format, of course).

Okay, I admit it – I am still more of a Twitter lurker than anything so far. I do occasionally throw a thought or 2 up but find it still a little difficult since I’m usually caught between 6 different things at any given time. One moment I could be grooving to some great new music while scanning the plethora of fantastic news and info beamed to me via Google Reader. Meanwhile, I’m likely having a conversation with one of my super hero Account Execs about a particular client/project situation and also thinking about the email I was in the middle of replying to before I began to think about how much I like this one song…

So then I turn to Twitter and gag. Gee, any of this is really worth a tweet, right?  Then I get distracted by someone or something else that needs immediate attention. By the time I get back to Twitter the moment has passed and I’m on to 6 other things and the cycle starts all over again. Yikes! Therein lies my dilemma. I want to share these things but I don’t want to be one of the those folks suffering from “Twitterhea” either –you know who you are. Your constant blathering has to be a sign of some sort of neurosis.

(more…)

We just had our Software Association of Oregon (SAO) Membership Committee meeting on Friday (full disclosure: I am on the Board of SAO so I’m a bit biased in favor of the organization). I have to admit, I’m pretty fired up about an important cause we are undertaking. With the help of staffer Bryce Yonker, Vidoop’s Scott Kveton, and ViaWest’s Jim Linkous, we have some serious firepower to get out into the software community in many places where SAO is not (and we know that there are a lot of those places).

Our cause is to engage with software freelancers, engineers, tech entrepreneurs, interactive freelancers, bloggers, mobile app enthusiasts, anyone related to the tech industry in Oregon and let them know that SAO finally has something pretty valuable besides great networking and events – SAO is one of the only associations that now offers Healthcare coverage to single employee companies or organizations – yes, freelancers can finally get affordable medical coverage thru SAO (thanks to Regence Bluecross Blueshield for getting flexible with us to make this happen).  When SAO President Harvey Matthews mentioned a year ago that SAO was looking into having this unique health coverage come to fruition at a Bar Camp, he got a standing ovation.  Let’s hope that kind of goodwill is still there in the software community in today’s economy.  To learn more about the healthcare plan, go to SAO’s site >>.

Here are a few of the events we’ll see you (thanks Scott Kveton for heading the charge on this) – source for these events and more is http://calagator.org:
** Lunch 2.0 – AboutUs
** Ignite Portland 5 – 2/19
* RecentChangesCamp – 2/20 – 2/22
** Lunch 2.0 – OpenSourcery
** Innotech – 4/22 – 4/23
** BarCamp Portland – 5/1 – 5/3
* Webvisions – 5/21 – 5/22
** Open Source Bridge (the OSCON replacement) – 6/17 – 6/19

Also: we will try to make some of the Beer & Blog events that happen every Friday, 4-6pm, at the Green Dragon.

The challenges begin. Each month there will be a different challenge. At the end of the month there will be a drawing and a prize will be given to the name chosen. Some challenges are easy, some more difficult, and some are just fun.

February challenge: Show Up

Attend at least one class this month and your name will be entered into the drawing. Each time you attend, your name will be entered.

We start at 7:45am on the 4th floor.

Yoga quote of the week
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Haiku Monday is back like a hurricaine, like a Super Bowl ad that had you laughing and crying in the same 30-second spot.  I was in the backcountry skiing at Mt. Hood this past Saturday and my skiing buddy informed me that he just made the switch from his Blackberry (avid evangelist for 9+ years) to an iPhone a month ago.  Here’s a very technical guy who travels domestically and internationally a whole lot and has a love affair with Blackberry – he survives on his mobile device.  If he made the switch to an iPhone and several others in my office have made the switch, then what’s going to happen to RIM (Blackberry manufacturer).  Well, they’ve got the most powerful man on Earth publicly admitting his addiction to his Blackberry and most lawmakers haven’t switched.  The best thing to do to settle this debate is begin a haiku dialogue.  So, let it begin:

I still love email
on my Blackberry, but the
web + apps on iPhone are crazy sexy

The above haiku did not follow the haiku rules, I apologize.  Don’t use that as an example for your own haiku, but you must express yourself in the comments below.

Our internal agency Friday afternoon sharing and learning meeting called Brews & News yesterday focused on our favorite open-source e-commerce tool, Magento, and some of its capabilities upon implementation.  Here was the email that went out promoting the learning session:

Shopping 101: Today we’ll look at how Magento as an ecommerce platform helps support a shopaholic’s online shopping addiction. We’ll look at the admin side of the software as well as share some sites that are currently utilizing Magento.

Quiz: Shopping is so popular that a single American Mall alone attracts more visitors in one year than Disney World, The Grand Canyon and Graceland combined. Everyone shops, but how much do you know about shopping?

Shopping Quote:
“Shopping is better than sex. If you’re not satisfied after shopping you can make an exchange for something you really like.”
~ Adrienne Gusoff