eROI Days Email Agency

Guy Kawasaki bootstrapping image

Yesterday, Chanin Ballance (founder/CEO of viaLanguage), Mitch Daugherty (founder of Morange Design), and I (the eROI guy) got together to plan what we’d talk about for a webinar about Bootstrapping and our personal experiences with self-induced starvation and endurance thru the early days.  It was like catching up with old friends after a couple years – the instant bond entrepreneurs share in dredging up old stories that weren’t fun at the time, but are great memories in retrospect.  The OEN Webinar is set for June 17 (registration isn’t live yet, but will be shortly) and we’re going to use a different format than the usual put-your-audience-to-sleep-with-powerpoint.  We are going to try to re-create the casual, round-table discussion among entrepreneurs sharing candid stories.  Some of the topics will include:

– Risk vs Reward – How do you know if it makes sense to bootstrap your idea?
– Keep your Day Job – The stress of self funding with no income can sometimes lead to failure
– Cash Flow – How to get a handle on your most important business aspect
– How to market your business on a shoestring budget
– Why most business models don’t need funding as it can be a big distraction

Guy Kawasaki, in his old-school days before Alltop, delivers some awesome advice on this on his 2006 blog post titled “The Art of Bootstrapping”

I’ve attended hundreds of marketing conferences over the years, and spoken at a few, but this one was pretty unique in that the speakers and content were the best of the best from all over the country on leading topics such as email marketing, search marketing, and social media. But more importantly, Online Marketing Summit delivered in making a lot of personal connections primarily through its founder, Aaron Kahlow, who ran an online marketing agency for years and understands the subject material inherently and the crazy breed of people known as online marketers.   Here are my tweets from Aaron’s opening session at the Washington DC OMS on May 14:

• Aaron doing a great job getting audience out of their shells at #oms

• Tip to event organizers – learn from aaron – institute the “boo” rule. It liberates the crowd.

• Aaron opening – marketing in a recession. Fear will cripple your decision-making

• management is all about cya, no future vision to give marketing any resources at all.

• Overall mktg budget wacked, but bigger piece of the pie going online #oms

• 100 percent of people prefer to communicate online

• Pillar 1 is search. Pillar 2 is email marketing. Pillar 3 is analytics. Across all pillars is social media

• @aaronkahlow – guessing on aaron’s handle – what % people here at #oms will tweet immediately vs email a couple days later from your biz card

• Email is like yesterday’s fax. Even facebook uses email to pull you back into the online community

• Need to customize web analytics reports to align with business goals #oms

I highly recommend you attend another OMS – there’s also a good chance you will see eROI folks like Dylan Boyd, Alex Williams, or me speak at some of the upcoming cities – Chicago, Austin, Denver, Minneapolis, San Fran, Portland, Seattle – there are others as well – check it out here >>.  I will try to dig up where my presentation from this event is posted – stay tuned.

It’s first Thursday in the Rose City and that means shops opened late, free drinks, lots of hipsters and UNKL showing at Compound Gallery!  UNKL started right here in Portland with the creativity of Derek Welch and Jason Bacon.

The duo partnered with eROI to create our very own KillROI who has been everywhere from San Francisco to Chi Town!

Come to Compound Gallery tonight at 7pm and experience UNKL!

Alcoa presents (sorry, that’s the beginning of a TV commercial of “The Catch” in the 1982 NFL NFC Championship flashback when Dwight Clark levitated to grab a perfect pass from Joe Montana to lift the 49ers over the Cowboys). But, I digress. My mind faded to the dramatic music to Monday Night Football, but it’s now back on the prize – bragging rights to the Third Annual PAF Battle of the Bands at Someday Lounge in Old Town / Chinatown, Portland, Oregon where the creatives show their true colors after dark.  If you want to take a look at videos from prior year’s Battle of the Band, now is your time to really soak in some entertaining video for 2008.  It’s going to be almost impossible for eROI to win it for yet a third year in a row, but we’re going to bring our “A” Game.  Check it (this is PAF’s main event email and all the info is below):

BATTLE OF THE BANDS

DATE:
Wednesday June 17, 2009

TIME:
6:00 pm

PLACE:
Someday Lounge
224 NW 5th Avenue
Portland, OR

COST:
$300 per band

Register your Band!
Contact Mike Terry at mterry@magnetoworks.com

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Kevin Tate, a buddy of mine, had an awesome analogy featured on the front page of the Oregonian today in the article “Tech entrepreneurs defy recession” by Mike Rogoway.  Here’s the excerpt from the article with Kevin’s quote that really got me thinking from a different mindset:

“Portland fosters the creation of small, furry mammals rather than dinosaurs — the really big things,” said Kevin Tate, 35, CEO of StepChange Group, a social media advertising and marketing specialist in the Pearl District. The “dinosaur” model of big corporate campuses and regimented software development (think Microsoft — or even Google) is going by the wayside, Tate said, in favor of more informal and collaborative arrangements. Portland’s current high-tech foment positions the state well to capitalize when the recession ends, provided its technology entrepreneurs have the appetite to take it on.  “What happens when things start coming back?” Tate asked. “Will the small, furry mammals evolve?”

Nearly 9 years ago, 7 mainly tech start-up entrepreneurs co-founded a group called Starve Ups.  We all survived the dot com implosion, but were influenced by really wanting to scale our companies for growth.  Some Starve Ups companies have grown a little faster than others, but many contain a desire to do something world-changing with our companies through software, social good, amazing company culture or all of the above.  I really like Kevin’s quote because it is accurate and represents a strong contingent in Portland’s software community, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that our dream is to do something bigger and be more like a lion than a forgettable Chihuahua.  So, how do we get there? Lack of capital is usually at the top of the list, but our biggest limitation is our mindset. Let’s grow game-changing, sustainable software businesses in Portland and tout Portland’s livability and balance as a BONUS, not a detriment to growth.

Comment below with your ideas of a more representative furry mammal for Portland.

I love that YouTube videos are timeless and all of us can re-live ridiculous moments years later. At eROI, we have dozens and dozens of those moments captured over the past many years on the eROI YouTube channel here >>. So, why am I doing a Flashback blog post? Yesterday, I had a client meeting with my friend James Adair and the typical client meeting turned into something so much better after watching the below video on our big screen. The second video is of distinguished Portland PR specialist, JulieAnna Little Giannini. She was the winner at eROI Idol, so it was only appropriate to include her video as well.

The PDC (Portland Development Commission) put together this video featuring business folks from Laika, Ziba, Columbia Sportswear, Oregon Iron Works, Vestas, Wieden+Kennedy and eROI. If you dig Portland and the surrounding area, check out the video below.

We, at eROI, have been working the last year on creating a new generation of Event Registration Software, eROI Event, with an enhanced user experience. We are currently in the Beta Launch Phase with a limited feature set, but we are excited to get this early-release version of the product out in front of our clients and the tech community in Portland. Our goal is to gather real user feedback as we continue to develop and enhance the product. We are offering a freemium version of the product for free events, but should a user prefer to hold paid events, we can enable the Payment Gateway feature for a minimal monthly fee of $50.00.

Novel concept, but I actually used our eROI Event tool to create an event for our Employee Disco Party on June 26th (if you are one of the 2 friends that employees can invite, then you too can join in the fun). I thought some screen shots of the back-end admin area would help you see why we are excited about this beta release (even though the feature set is slightly limited for the next 1-2 months until we get feedback from all of you that want to signup for a FREE account for free events (to use for RSVPs to dinner parties, seminars, BBQs, industry networking events, business meetings, etc.)

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Portland, Oregon is a long way from Washington D.C. So, we should be psyched about playing host to the New Media Strategist, Rahaf Harfoush.  She led arguably the social media strategy for the best online campaign implementation of any major politician in the history of politics (love the drama of that sentence even though politicians have really only used the web significantly in the past 4 years). Harfoush is the keynote speaker at InnoTech Portland:

Date: April 23, 2009
Time: InnoTech starts at 8am, Harfoush speaks at 11:30am
Place: Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon
How much: BIG DISCOUNT if you use these codes when you REGISTER HERE >>

(INN48 – gets you a $12 Discount so it’s only $48 for General Administration)
(EMS20AT – gets you a $20 Discount so it’s only $129 for the two day eMarketing summit)

I got a lot of comments on my look (see below) where I sported the 70′s stache for a solid 2 days.  Most of you cringed in pain just looking at me with my stache.  But some of you liked it, like a yearning for the days of Saturday Night Fever.  So, your task is to comment below with a haiku on how you feel about 70′s style in today’s age.

The power of Twitter has never been so apparent in the eROI office as when @The_Real_Shaq tweeted “Anybody in portland touches me rt now will get two tickets I’m at redstar cafe.”  As Megan put it “It was like a stampede upstairs!”

Leading the frenzied mob was Christine and Don who fought their way to the Red Star for a chance to grope the 7 foot 1 mammoth.  Christine, a dedicated Blazer fan, saw the tweet, took off her earrings and ran the seven blocks in moccasins with Don at her side.  Somehow, with the will of true Blazer fans and the hearts of eROI employees, Christine and Don the magnificent were able to reach O’Neal and claim their prize – two tickets each to a rocking basketball game.  A proud day for all.

Follow eROI on Twitter!

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I went back through my 287 tweets from five days at SXSW Interactive with an intention to do a dozen different blog posts.  Instead, I realize that I just need to share bits of inspiration instead of piecing together thorough notes for each session I attended.

Overall takeaways:

• Portland interactive and social media attendees were huge – there were probably 250+ Portlanders attending SXSW and we got to spend more quality time in sessions, restaurants, house parties, and bars in Austin, TX than in Portland – funny how that happens.
• eROI team-building was pretty amazing.  There were 15 of us at the event and it allowed us to learn and share in a very human way, which is a lot tougher to do in the office.
• Informal vibe to the event: thankfully.  Couches were in some sessions, outdoor tent parties just outside the Convention Center. But, the tone that speakers and attendees had was very informal and allowed for the walls/barricades to be down to facilitate networking and learning.
• Rebellious attitude – maybe this is the influence of indie musicians and film-makers filling in towards the end of the Interactive part of SXSW, but one keynote in particular exemplified this: James Powderly explaining his mass-scale graffiti art. I loved this edge to the speakers and sessions.

OK – I guess I need to do separate blog posts to show some cool visuals and videos of my favorite influences there.

This morning, eROI Sales & Strategist, Alex Williams took this fine photo in Los Angeles, of all places. Hopefully, Alex will comment on this blog post with a quick update of what he’s learned from Mediapost’s OMMA Hollywood event, which is all about online media, marketing, and advertising.  A quick reminder that Optimism is the eROI mantra for 2009 and beyond, and what better day to see this huge banner than a day the stock market skyrockets.

I recently wrote an article for iMedia Connection titled “11 Email Design Best Practices” and thought I’d share it with you if you hadn’t already checked it out.  It starts like this:

Remember the last great offer you didn’t see? The savvy email marketer knows that you catch more conversions with honey than you do with vinegar, so make sure your email design is sweet!

If you’re starting a new email marketing program, or looking for an edge to take your email campaigns to the next level, consider these ideas for designing emails that get your compelling offer noticed. These tips and tricks will start you off right, and even help experienced email marketers amp-up existing campaigns, turning precise communication into profits and visibility.

1. Before you start
Prior to constructing your email, make sure that your message is clear and concise. Develop and refine what you want to say so that readers don’t lose interest or get confused about what your call-to-action is. What is your offer? How will reading and clicking through this email help the reader? Make sure they know what’s in it for them. Before and during the building process, continually ask yourself, “What would I think if I got this in my inbox? Would I immediately delete it? Or worse, report it as spam?” Rule No. 1 — don’t be spam.

Even the most compelling message can be rendered ineffective if it’s presented in an undesirable way to your readers. During this process you may encounter many challenges and obstacles. Your design team may want to create something striking and beautiful, but your audience may not want it. At the same time, don’t throw readers for a loop with a design that is off-brand. Your email design should be able to flow well with the look of your website as well as any pieces collateral offered. Consistency is good. Also, design the email around your readers by responding to their personality. Are they tech savvy? Parents? Students?

Check out the rest of the iMedia Connection article here >>

I’m publishing my schedule for SXSW – it’s kind of ridiculous how much stuff there is to see and learn.  This is my first time to the amazing, well-known event and we are showing up in full force – 1/3 of eROI staffers will be there, but clients, don’t fret, we will be on email and working during most of it.  Cheers!

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