eROI Days Email Agency

Last Tuesday, an articulate, inspiring man was voted into office and people all over the world celebrated. In my own neighborhood, fireworks went off and a group of 25 college and high school students were banging pots and pans and stopping traffic on Hawthorne Street to jubilant honks in passing cars.  My family of four walked thru the misty evening and soaked in the positive energy that had our girls jumping up and down gleefully shouting “Obama.” After my wife and I put our girls down to bed, I headed over to a sports bar, OnDeck, for drinks with some close friends - the place was packed and rowdy with 50+ huge TV screens monitoring all of the events of the evening.  The bar became immediately silent when President-elect Obama gave his acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago.  We hung on every word.

Since then, it’s been an adjustment. The party only lasted one night and reality set in the next day with the stock market down and life moving at warp speed. Every newspaper and magazine has blitzed us with this momentous, historic event and Obama has lived up to the expectation, for now.  Expectations are so high, that at some point, there will be cracks in his armour. But, hopefully, as a human race that values inspiration, innovation, and progress over fear, we will support him when he stumbles.  As an exercise of documenting a few of the videos and articles that mattered most to me, I am showing them below:

Transcript of Obama’s speech >>

Video of celebrations around the world >>

Thomas Friedman’s Op Ed article from the NY Times >>

What a difference a good email makes to motivate, inspire, and deliver a strong message.  Christine Baker (Twitter handle: @cbakes) creates a different yoga email for reminding all of us at eROI that we have yoga practice the following morning.

I’d like to talk about all the things she does right in the email above:

• The preheader “Yoga Friday at 7:45am” reminds me of when it is when I read this email on my Blackberry or in the top area of the preview pane of my email client (even when images are turned off).
• Also in the preheader is “View as webpage >>” which allows me to see the full extent of this graphic-rich email if I’m getting a text view of it on my Blackberry or Gmail or Outlook.
• Solid, consistent branding
• Relevant messaging and imagery (Obama had just won days before and Christine knows her audience well enough to know most of us in the company are big fans)
• Clean email design template
• Tight, functional footer using a lot of email best practices and compliance: Unsubscribe, Update Profile, Send to Friend, and mailing address.

Here is an email that I’ve been sending to my entrepreneur friends in Portland today:

Tom Szaky is one of the hottest, most dynamic, young green / sustainable entrepreneurs in the country.  I’m writing you because I know you’d love meeting this amazing entrepreneur who is coming to Portland b/c of its green, sustainable presence (and because I asked him after getting to know him at the past two Inc. 500 conferences).

Tom Szaky is an absolutely amazing speaker (up there w/ President Clinton as another keynote at the Inc. 500 conference last year).  I invited him to fly out here from Trenton, New Jersey to speak to 45-60 entrepreneurs at eROI and he’s able to be here on Sat, Nov 15 at noon (free lunch). This is a Starve Ups event - thanks to John Friess and the Starve Ups member companies for making this happen.

He really is an amazing guy (27 years old and running a $15 million green / sustainable company called TerraCycle where everything about its product and packaging comes from waste) – please consider coming to this.

Here is my past blog post and a Danny Deutsch video:
http://eroidays.com/2007/09/10/amazing-inc-500-conference/

Please let me know if you are interested.  Thx.

A vote tomorrow
will make a huge difference,
big change will happen

Please share your comments below. It’s the only way to start your week.  BTW - huge thanks to eROI employees who wrote birthday haikus to me on my card for this weekend.  Yes, this is my first blog post as a much wiser and more distinguished (laughable) 34 year old.

This blog post = simple.
Intent = you have more value to add than me. You are the master - show us the way with your wise haiku. I saw KungFu Panda in the movie theater w/ my girls this weekend, I have found peace, and am inspired to read your haikus.

I’m an entrepreneur and I’ve failed in the past. I left Intel and started my first company on March 21, 2000 (the week that the dot com bubble showed its first major signs of bursting). Unfortunately, we had a product that was before its time and the generally techno-phobic, construction industry undervalued our ultra-niche software, so the company failed. Our failure was due to our inability to adapt our business model. It was our fault, not the economy.

As an entrepreneur, I think one of my strengths is that I’m naïve. By definition, no entrepreneur in his right mind would start his first business if he truly knew how brutally challenging it would be to build something out of nothing (knowing that anything that can go wrong will go wrong). Six years ago, I founded eROI, an email and web marketing company. We’ve been fortunate to grow from an idea in late 2002 to where we are today, a multi-million dollar company with 47 employees. I know I’m supposed to be writing about how the economy is going to continue to tank and that you should buy a year’s worth of rations to store in your basement, but instead, I’m going to tell you about the audacity of growth in uncertain times ahead.

A couple of weeks ago, I led an all-company meeting on our fourth floor. The message was clear: be aware of the global economic situation, but it is imperative for all of us to focus on what we can control – to truly go above and beyond in our own jobs. We should collaborate productively with our fellow employees, delight our customers on a personal level, practice frugality, and exude positivity and optimism.

Believe in the Future
When eROI began, we leveraged a good product and built a great service company around it. Now, we are investing in research and development to build powerful software on top of an already strong framework. Many would argue that we made a bad decision to invest precious cash into software that will not generate revenue (and profit) for at least 9 months. However, we strongly believe in growth opportunities in the near future, and there is no better time than now to inspire your team to create a product or service that will have a hugely positive impact on the world. (more…)

Fortunately, in Oregon, we all mail in our votes, and I did so the first day I got the ballot, so I’m off the hook. For those who haven’t voted or don’t intend to vote, you are missing your opportunity to have a very real impact in a critical time in our nation’s history.

Chris - you have insane skills video editing. I had to share this video you did on CrossPixelNYC blog on to eROIdays (in the spirit of re-tweeting). Again - great stuff!

The Freakout from Christopher Masagatani on Vimeo.

Last week, eMarketer published a telling article about online e-commerce sales this year.  They are still growing from previous years, up to $32 billion this year.  Not bad.  Maybe, the sky is only falling halfway and will dangle in suspended animation while the rest of us live our lives normally, but with a bit more caution.

Check out the chart below - intriguing.

We want to know - how does your little brother, sister, nephew, or neice Use Email? We don’t know the answer yet, and need your help to discover how high school kids, college students, and recent college grads actually use email. That’s why we’re conducting this survey >>

All the articles we’ve read pretty much tell us that email marketing will be dead in a matter of years (because kids are only into texting and social networking communities), but we’re a little skeptical of that assessment that email is not or will not be a big part of their lives. So, we are conducting our own survey and we’re primarily using blogs, MySpace, Facebook, and a little bit of email to reach out to our .edu friends. Please help us  to fill out this awesome survey, and you might win your very own, limited-edition KillROI in the process.

We need to know what our kids (or nephews, neices, cousins, brothers, or sisters) futures will look like, so please spread the word to fill out this survey; http://eroi.onlinestudentcommunication.sgizmo.com.

Additionally, I’d love to read your thoughts on the survey in the comments below.  Thank you thank you!

Have faith eROIdays peops
I would not could not forget
haiku tradition

What has begun can
not end. Like energy, it
cannot die or be destroyed.

Please add your Monday Haiku in the comments below.  Even if it’s after Monday this week, you can still contribute.  thx.

Here is my presentation to NACHA - National Automated Clearing House Association on “How Financial Institutions Can Use Social Media to their Advantage”

I’m a huge fan of a quintessential Oregon entity called Live Wire! Radio - a mix of edgy humor, music, and Garrison Keillor-style story-telling and political humor. My wife and I went to the show w/ other folks from eROI and one distinct thing that they do at every show is the Audience Haiku.  Let me preface this blog post by saying that I am clearly no poet, haiku expert.  In fact, they may be so bad, that they are laughable.  But, it’s Monday morning and I want to have you, my loyal blog readers, participate a little more and inspire me with some of your haikus.  Here are only two ground rules - 1. it’s got to be as close as possible to 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables; 2. theme can be edgy, vulgar, random, whatever, but NO excessive swearing please.  Let the absurd poetry of haiku begin.

dark in the morning
cold as hell on my red bike
I am refreshed

Anticipation
of Halloween begins and
finance market scares

Yellow leaves cascade
slick as banana peels squish
under Nike Air

Now, it’s your turn.  Comment with your haiku - you could win a free eROI collectible gift of a robot named KillROI - the famous hero in www.KillSpammer.com!

I’m making the switch from Backcountry Snowboard to Backcountry Alpine Touring Skis - want to try something new.  Get fired up for a huge powder year.  Here’s my Craigslist ad (not sure what I’d do without Craigslist):

Voile Split Snowboard - Backcountry - Excellent Condition - $550 (SE Portland)

I bought this amazing snowboard in 2006. It comes with Skins.

It is 164cm. It’s only been used on 3 backcountry trips.

Feel free to email me first, or call me at 503-701-1956. Thx so much!

My business associate and friend Jerry Ketel, partner at Leopold & Ketel Partners, sent this email to several Portland agency owners to help prove to clients that marketing has been proven to grow a brand and its sales, profit, and market share during a recession (notice how I didn’t use this “r” word in the blog title - I’m not comfortable using it yet).  Here was Jerry’s email to me (I added the image after searching on Google “marketing in recession” - it’s actually quite informative):

“There have been a number of studies over the years proving that marketing during a recession is a good investment in the long run. ‘In a recession, dare to invest aggressively in marketing, innovation and customer quality’, is the clear message to be drawn from PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy) research into which business strategies aid success during and after a market downturn lasting several years. Author: Keith Roberts, Journal: Strategy & Leadership, 2003. 
http://tinyurl.com/4sqx8j
(more…)

Ok - so the Break Media study spins it another way, but c’mon guys, who are the 26% of you how would rather interact with a computer than your partner?  Here’s the study published by MarketingVox:

Men Prefer ‘Net to TV, but Sex Trumps Both

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson. More than two-thirds of men age 18-34 say they cannot live without the internet vs. television, but 74% would rather have sex than surf the web, according to (pdf) a study from Break Media, conducted by Hall and Partners, MarketingCharts reports.

The study, which was designed to determine what men (age 18-34) are doing online and how they respond to internet advertising, found that this demographic - which views itself as responsible and conformist overall - spends close to 22 hours on the internet per week, goes online for entertainment, and prefers to spend time on the internet rather than TV.

To read the full MarketingVox article, click here >>