1. Social media integration – share with your network becomes a key component in every email (and email marketers can segment lists to optimize for Gmail (Google Buzz) or Facebook’s Titan)

2. Mobile – SMS and Email converging has great benefits for things like mobile couponing for retailers

3. Video Lite – animated gifs to appear as a video – see eROI’s Dylan Boyd blog post on “VIV Blows it out with Animated GIFs”

4. Email Browsing – example of Sears using Gmail’s Enhanced Email: browsing module is decided and displayed at the time of open, not the time of send, which allows the information to be as current as possible. An email sent last month pulled today’s best-sellers from Sears.com.

5. Transactions -Email certification of a known trusted sender is especially important for e-commerce clients.

6. Email Management / Sentiment – ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart wrote in a separate EmailInsider article about a “thumbs-up” button in the inbox to re-inforce positive sentiment in email instead of sledge-hammering the negative world of reporting spam as the only option.

If you dig a little deeper, there is a whole lot more innovation coming to the Future Inbox.  Social tools are available to scrape profile info (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other social media sites) and append that to your email lists to allow better personalization and segmenting.  OpenID frameworks will allow information to be passed more freely between email and any online community through a single username/password that will inherently recognize you from your inbox.  The future is near and email is innovating as fast or faster than most other industries.  Get ready.

“For some of you, this might be the first SAO event you’ve been to in a while. For many of the rest of you who have been to a recent event, you have likely felt the buzz – that positive momentum – that SAO is fueling in the software community in Oregon.  There are some awesome new opportunities for you to get involved:

1. With SAO’s goal of drawing more CTOs and CIOs from tech and non-tech organizations into the mix, we are especially pleased to be attracting great speakers like tonight’s Bill Weihl, Czar of Google.
2. We’ve also rolled out a Leadership Exchange program where leaders and managers across each department of your software organization are gaining insights and perspective that are simply not possible within the walls of your own company.  I know it’s had a game-changing effect on my company saving me from some pretty huge mistakes that our execs or I would have made or we would have missed some major opportunities that I would have never known about had it not been for these monthly roundtable discussions and follow-on discussions.
3. Police Chief Sizer has already touched on the value of SAO and the tech community reaching out to the public sector through our Fireside chats. Other gatherings have included also included Portland’s Mayor.
4. Finally, the social gatherings and networking opportunities have gained critical mass.  The last SAO Blazer game I attended was double the size from a year ago.

One thing that hasn’t been talked about tonight, but it’s been bugging me for the past 6 months. In conversations with some software folks about how to grow the software community in Oregon, I often hear complaints that Portland and Oregon as a whole does NOT have 2 things: CAPITAL and TALENT. It’s been the same complaint for the past 20 years and I’m getting tired of it. I think we do have the talent – a lot of it is right here in this room.  IT’S UP TO US to grow our own companies here, start new ones, and invest and mentor promising Oregon start ups.  No one is going to save us.  WE ARE THE ANSWER. SAO is part of that answer.  If we’re making the same excuses and complaints 20 years from now, we’ve failed.  Together, we can create a stronger, growing tech community in Oregon.  I firmly believe this!

I really encourage you to get involved – it will likely be the most valuable and even selfish thing you do this year – to help your career and your company.  Thank you.”

As usual, I learned a ton from the other speakers:
Kimberly Barta, VP of Marketing, Dr. Martens Shoes
Dayn Wilberding, Dir of Technology, Grady Britton
Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media

Enjoy this eROI presentation!

I also included a few of my tweets below as well:
@kentjlewis nice. “remember your marketing budget is unlimited” 11:41 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Top paid placement is based on Quality Score, not just on highest price. 11:32 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Google updates to add report a problem link, “near me now” link – using augmented reality 11:27 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Google maps. Create a dedicated page on maps. Sentiment analysis help sort reviews. 11:25 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Google onebox: local business. Manage coupons, reviews 11:23 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Customer reviews have a big impact on local search 11:19 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

@kentjlewis speaking about local search #forge. Entertaining as always. 11:16 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

@dayn great personal local example of discount tire giving him a rebate after the fact through Twitter conversation 9:51 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Intel has a good set of social media rules. Check em out 9:38 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

2010 will be the year of consumers switching over from evite to facebook events 9:31 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Not hiring a blogger. Hiring a head of consumer conversations. 8:40 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Doc martens Kimberly says invest in engaging content #forge. It still is all about the idea, but the requirements are much higher 8:38 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Key is focusing on a few marketing channels of disproportionate influence. For doc martens, it’s product seeding to influencers 8:33 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

While you may still have the title as Email Marketing Manager, you are likely expected to have some expertise and drive inbound marketing, marketing automation programs, coordinate integration with social media and potentially be the online community manager for your company, closely tie into your search engine marketing program, and all of this is on top of the strategy and implementation of your marketing plan for the year.  It’s exhausting and the pressure is on – 2010 is about action and results – and the tension between marketing and sales is going to increase with the demand for quality leads that convert into real sales.

So, let’s cut to the chase and dig into what will happen in 2010.  Here are my 11 Web + Email Marketing Predictions:

1. Email, Search, AND Social (the 3rd staple of online marketing)
In an online marketing survey study that we did with eM+C in December’09 on 2009 trends (which will be published in mid-January 2010), we asked online marketers which online marketing channels they used.  By far, email, search, and social were clearly the 3 most used channels.  Within the social media channel, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs were the areas that marketers spend the most time and energy into building.  This trend will only increase in 2010 to the point where Email Marketing and Search Marketing will be joined by Social Marketing as the 3 pillars that make up the backbone of online marketing.

2. Location, Geo-Based Apps
Mobile, mobile, mobile. Yes, mobile has reached critical mass. Marketers have noticed. At eROI, we’re being asked to launch mobile-friendly websites and for our client’s primary site, integrate feeds for location-based social media tools.  Additionally, there are several apps that take advantage of broadcasting your location to friends -  like Foursquare, BrightKite, and even a little Portland start-up named Shizzow that are basically like Geography-based Twitter.  The purpose is to get your friends or business associates to meet up through happy accidents of learning you are nearby and stumbling upon a quick informal meetup.  In our voyeuristic times, these apps take transparency and over-sharing to the next level.  And, of course, email alerts are the backbone of this channel so you know when your friends are nearby.  With smart phones automatically detecting your location, this new channel of geo-based mobile apps is incredibly intuitive and its uses will take off in 2010 (pet companies rolling out mobile apps to find nearest dog park or doggie daycare; coffee shops and retailers promoting mobile coupons when you are within 100 feet of the store; the uses are endless and our addiction to our mobile devices and their community of apps grows deeper).

3. Real-time web
Twitter started this trend (and Facebook and Friendfeed quickly caught on) and now the demand is there from consumers to constantly want to know what the collective human consciousness is around any and every topic.  People want to know what is happening NOW and what people are thinking/feeling/perceiving/eating/breathing/doing NOW.  Marketers will adapt and drive this trend even stronger in 2010 by creating ways for people to rate, review, and comment through their mobile phone or laptop on what they are thinking/feeling/perceiving/eating/breathing/doing and those apps will be searchable and able to be filtered so others can gain insight from what’s happening now.

4. Advanced collaboration, online community
To many companies, collaboration tools for internal communication or to create branded online communities for customers were expensive and time-intensive to get off the ground.  Now, Google steps in with a free tool Google Wave that isn’t perfect by any stretch, but is a great start to prove the value of collaboration and idea-sharing within companies.  As far as external communities where customers share insights, tips+tricks, examples, and resources with other customers, there will always be some extra effort put into strategy and user-design to make sure this is thought-out and customized to your brand.  There are some great open source tools like BuddyPress and other enterprise tools like Kickapps, Jive Software, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint.

5. Integration of database apps (OpenID standard)
Email Marketers have seen the advantage of smart integrations between their email marketing application and their CRM (Salesforce.com is most common), social tools (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and publishing RSS to Email), ecommerce apps, and other database apps. This is a big push for us at eROI in 2010.

From a web user perspective, open platforms like Facebook Connect and Twitter allow me to seemlessly scrape my profile info and my friends profiles and connections into new applications (cool client examples to check out are Moonit and Wacom).  In 2010, you’ll see more web applications and online communities really start using OpenID as a standard to port your profile information and have 1 single username/password across the web.  There is such information overload that users are going to demand standards like OpenID to keep it as simple as possible.

6. Email Campaigns: Doing the Unexpected
Email design best practices are great – they tell us all the components we need in a successful campaign – subject line, email pre-header, header, main body, footer, call to action, offer, concise copy with relevant messaging, landing page, lead capture, optimized auto-responders based on subscriber behavior, and the list continues.  However, following the book on everything, including a prescripted design, can make your email predictable and email recipients take notice.  eROI’s Dylan Boyd points out a few unexpected email design strategies and tactics:
Animated GIFs? You Bet.
The Test: Vertical vs. Horizontal Email

7. Analytics: Measure Everything Every Second
Marketers have always dreamed of one marketing dashboard that pulls tracking from all marketing channels (email, search, social, events, referrals, etc) and systems (CRM, marketing automation, POS, financials) into one screen – never going to happen – there is just too much to measure and specialized tools for each medium do a much better job than all-in-one dashboards.  The clear emerging leader in tracking and analyzing social media metrics is Radian6.  It will be fascinating to see how marketers will tie all their tracking data together from these many disparate applications.

8. Information Overload: Content Filters
Based on human behavior since the dawn of time, we’ve always been most influenced with our activities, our buying decisions, and our own worldview by what our friends and family suggest.  In today’s world, this is more tangible than ever – our friends become our filter for most content we consume on the web (Facebook Connect integrated into more and more web services is a perfect example of this).  News aggregators like Google News and MyYahoo will need to integrate friend content filters like Facebook Connect to stay relevant.

9. Augmented Reality
“Beam me up, Scotty.” As Kevin Arthur points out in his iMedia Connection article ‘Techie Toy or Targeted Tool’: “Augmented reality is essentially combining the real world with digitally created images. The technology gives users the ability to control their environment using sound and compelling visuals.  AR brings “tactile” imaginary element to the interactive experience.”  Augmented reality (AR) is really cool technology – it allows brands like Topps bring its physical playing cards alive in 3D interactivity with users. AR allows people to project 3D presentations from their smart phones. AR allows physical products come to life in retail stores increasing sales conversions at point of sale.  It’s the stuff of the future, which is why I think it’s going to take a couple years for people to adopt this technology.  It has a whole lot more value and user scenarios beyond the limited value of Second Life’s virtual world, and AR will be the talk of marketing conferences in 2010 (it just won’t be widely adopted until later).

10. Keep your monitor, Recycle your TV box
What’s the point of your TV box when you can watch most of your favorite TV programs, sports, and films online on Hulu, ESPN, Netflix, and others.  Simply, hook up your laptop or old computer with a wireless Internet connection to a killer flat-screen monitor and you’ve now got a Smart TV to go along with your Smart phone all the while taking advantage of the kinda-smart, real-time web where online video is becoming standard and more engaging then ever before.

11. Anti-ADD; Deep Thinking App
All of us have done some planning (business plan, marketing plan, 2010 marketing calendar) for 2010 over the past couple months, and it makes you very aware of all the distractions that we have throughout the course of the day, the hour, the minute, the second.  Our most effective planning sessions were out of the office, without laptops, in a simple room with a whiteboard and marker.  Even as I write this article, I have new emails pop-up in the bottom right-corner of my screen, tweets from Tweetdeck in the top right of my screen, and I turned my Google Chat off for a little focus.  Fortunately, I have an outline to work from that I actually wrote with pen on paper – so old-school.  For managers and executives (and everyone really), there must be an application that shuts out all other applications, emits soothing white-noise and allows us to really think so we aren’t constantly distracted and reacting.  More of us place a greater value on this “thinking time” for parts of our day as we live and thrive in this increasingly ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) world that we are perpetuating.  Thank you Deep-Thinking App of 2010 – you are my friend.

Being at the right place at the right time is IRRELEVANT.  Jim’s urging to the entrepreneurial crowd got his message across loud and clear – that the tough economic storm can NOT be an excuse for everything that ails you. We, as entrepreneurs, have control of our own destinies and our own company’s destiny.  It’s up to us to dig deep and build great, enduring companies over the next 15+ years.

I learned a lot from reading his book, but one story that cemented in my brain was what Collins called the Jim Stockdale Paradox. Admiral Stockdale was a Vietnam prisoner of war. When Collins asked him about how he made it through years of isolation and torture, Stockdale responded that he had unwavering faith that he’d get out but was still keenly aware of the brutal journey and circumstances in front of him.  Collins then asked who didn’t make it. Stockdale responded “the optimists.” Stockdale proceeded to explain that the optimists died of a broken heart because they always put a time-table on when they’d be released – by Christmas, by Easter, by end of July and so on.  The lesson is to believe in your path for the long haul and don’t let short-term setbacks deter you from your cause.

Last thing that really stuck with me was the leadership success factor of humility and making your mission all about the company in every way, not about yourself. Many of the most successful leaders like Anne Mulcahy of Xerox repeatedly turned down interviews and coverage of most of the top publications as she focused internally to clean up a nearly disastrous cash situation at Xerox and attributed the success to everyone else but herself.  Collins showed example after example of leaders of great companies who did this AND similar great companies with new leaders who didn’t instill that “it’s all about the company cause” mentality and those companies started their decline and ultimately fell from greatness.

Upon my return to the grid (meaning my iPhone on the drive back), I realized that my longing for technology was really in communication of key information and emotional connection through my inbox (email is not, nor will it ever be dead in the foreseeable future), not through Tweetie, Tweetdeck when I returned to my laptop at home, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any website at all – it was spending 6 hours of catching up on all of the things that are hyper-relevant to me in my inbox.  Interestingly enough, I could only really scan and internalize all the issues brought up through hundreds of emails on my iPhone for about an hour, and the other 5 hours of digging way deeper and responding happened through my Outlook inbox on my laptop.  It’s a totally different mode of thinking on a 14″ screen than a 2″ screen.

There is a lot of chatter over the past several months among Email Marketing industry execs (over a hundred of us on a private email list) about whether or not Twitter is a complete waste of time or if it will kill Email, and it seems so obvious to me that Twitter is a useful conversation piece that has its place in the marketing mix, but is not yet the killer addictive app/platform/communication channel that email is.  In each of our daily lives, the large majority of us prioritize our Inbox over everything else.  It took almost a week in the woods to be able to articulate this simple gravitational pull towards email.

If you have little kids around your computer, like I do right now, you might want to watch the frequent, casual F bombs used in the video, albeit educational.

This year, we achieved #1,876.  It’s hard to believe that we have grown 169.7% over the past 3 years.  Actually, it’s not that much of a stretch – we’ve worked our asses off to do great work and push the ball forward.  We were also awarded #30 in the Portland Metro Area, we share the list with others like EthicsPoint, R2C Group and even Papa Murphy’s International.

The top 10 ranged from advertising & marketing to logistics & transportation but the business who earned the crown was insurance.  Miami’s Northern Capitol Insurance topped the list with 19,812.2% growth and $95 million in revenue.  Their business model changed from one of accommodating a more narrow margin of well-off home buyers to one that was focused on managing risk for large groups of re-insurers.  The foresight to change their path greatly helped them achieve the #1 company status.  Another great example of working to the market was #3 Harley Stanfield.  They used a model of sustainable housing and flexible ownership for the unstable housing market.

This September 24-25, I’ll be in Washington D.C. at the Inc. 5000 Conference – I know some friends of mine from Brass Media and Ethics Point will be there.  How about you?  Let me know if I’ll see you there.  It’s my 3rd time going to this conference and get a ton of value from it every year.  I highly recommend it.

It made me think about the wacky stuff that free labor at other large agencies come up with and here’s what I found off of a Google Search:

Crap – I searched and looked at dozens of intern videos with no sound or no humor. Maybe Crispin nailed this better than I thought. There is opportunity for other interns to take their spin on it. This also proves that online video still needs a lot of content – there is very little out there and much much smaller amount of quality.

As for interns at eROI, we love ‘em.  Not sure I want to task any of them with spending 100’s of hours putting together a rap video.  Your thoughts?

Next post…wrapping paper gone wild experiment in the office (video and pics to follow)…