Category: Status

Growing Your Business with Email

We handle dozens of email marketing campaigns every week. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of marketing for me, to be honest (I got my start in marketing doing email in 2003 or so). Email marketing is part science, part art, part analytics overload, part psychology, and part gut intuition. When done right, it’s an amazing augment to a wider marketing plan.

Even the popular payment taker Square is getting in on the act.

Here’s a nice intro to email marketing for businesses and groups that are looking to get started…

More than 90 percent of the world’s 2.4 billion email users checked their email at least once a day last year and received over 180 billion emails, according to vero. How are you going to make sure you stand out from the crowd? Marketing is a science and email marketing gives you access to a wealth of data that you can use to grow your results.

Every step in the process – including database segmentation, send number, time of send, subject line, content of email and landing page – is up for testing and analysis.

via How To Hack Your Email For Growth.

Going Viral on Twitter Just Got More Difficult

Yesterday, Twitter released an anticipated new feature that allows users to retweet without using any of the precious 140 characters available. The new feature is only available on the official Twitter app for iOS now, but expected to roll out to Android and desktop apps soon.

In essence, this sounds like a win for users as well as marketers who use the (lucrative) Twitter experience to get their messages out there. The original concept of a retweet goes back to March 2007 when users were searching for a way to share a tweet someone else had published. Originally called an “echo,” retweets became quickly recognizable using the “RT” convention, much like the concept of using # to denote “hashtags” developed from the bottom-up by users. Twitter incorporated RT into its official platform and now provides a means to retweet without having to include RT as it has gained mainstream adoption (though some of us old timers that were there from the beginning still prefer this method).

However, marketers should be aware of a few issues with the new retweet convention as it makes its way into wider adoption. Good post here with some things to think about regarding sharing, stats, images, and “virality” (which is still very important on Twitter)…

Going viral on Twitter? It’s harder. The first retweet with comment is not a disaster, but the subsequent retweet with comment is. Few chances to get one more retweet.The previous Retweet button was a bad choice for marketers. The new one is even worse.

via Retweet with Comment Punches Marketers in the Face | Adrian Jock’s Internet Marketing Tips.

Reedsy For Author Pages

Our sister (is that sexist?) Harrelson Press does a lot of work with author marketing and promotion. One of the key points of that conversation involves authors needing to have their own site or web presence.

Reedsy looks like an interesting go-between to solve some of those issues and needs that authors have.

Anything to blow up the publishing industry and make it more author focused is a good thing.

What do you think, Merianna?

Reedsy just launched author profiles on its website where writers can collect and showcase their work on a single page. This way, Reedsy provides a simple way to share your profile on the web, much like an About.me link.

As a reminder, Reedsy unbundles the good old publishing company and provides all the services you need to self publish a book. The startup helps you find an editor, copy editor and cover illustrator to turn your draft into a book.

via Reedsy Launches Behance-Like Profiles To Let Authors Showcase Their Books | TechCrunch.

Why Your Business Needs a Web Page More Than Ever

I have a similar conversation almost daily with clients or potential clients that involves the need for web sites. Not Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter profiles, or Snapchat presence. A good ole-fashioned web site.

Many of our new clients bring with them at least something like a Facebook page. A small percentage of them may have a site set up on GoDaddy, Wix or the other number of “budget” website builders out there.

However, web sites are just as crucial for business success in 2015 as they were in 1999. Having a presence outside of social media silos means taking discoverability seriously. However, setting up a site is not the end of the story. The site needs to move and evolve with the ever-evolving web.

What many business owners overlook is the notion that having a web site also makes you a part of the conversation about your own name (or brand). Whether you intend it or not (or realize it or not), people will talk about you and your business. Having a site that will be indexed and ranked by Google provides you with the insurance and protection that you need if or when the talk turns to negative.

Don’t forget, we live in the era of the .sucks domain now. Here are a few good examples of cautionary tales that should raise the hair on the back of your neck.

“The biggest myth about Google is they’re somehow the first amendment,” says Fertik. “That there’s a natural order of things of how Google presents stuff that is inevitable, inexorable and correct. That whatever floats to the top of Google deserves to be there.”

via Welcome To The Outrage Machine – Digg.

R.I.P. Terry Pratchett

I first encountered the Discworld books as a young reader trying to find something interesting at our public library, and they changed the way I thought about science fiction, satire, and our own world. I’m sad there won’t be more from him (his daughter might continue the series), but what a legacy (and a good way to leave this world)…

It is with immeasurable sadness that we announce that author Sir Terry Pratchett has died at the age of 66. Terry passed away in his home, with his cat sleeping on his bed surrounded by his family on 12th March 2015.

via Terry Pratchett / Paul Kidby Discworld.

Colonizing the Colonials


To get the full implication of this piece, you have to listen to the Thinking Religion that Thomas Whitley and I recorded yesterday. Great show and the thought piece at the end regarding post-colonialism and the import of valuing plays in nicely with this…

In the same period, American public diplomats tried to influence education reforms in Western Europe, in view of the integration of North-Atlantic school systems and their cooperation in cold-war competition. Not by chance, in the 1950s Conant and his collaborators visited West Germany, Italy, Britain, and Switzerland as policy advisers.

via Why the US liberal arts tradition failed to take hold in Europe.

My Tweets, Links, Music, and Books

Tweets, Links, Music, and Books - Sam Harrelson

I’ve put together a page here on my blog to aggregate all of my updates, music listening patterns, bookmarks on the web, and books I’m reading:

Twitter: updates etc

Music: iTunes / Spotify / Google Play Music / Pandora / Last.FM

Bookmarks: Pocket and Pinboard

Reading and Books: Goodreads

I was pretty proud of myself. I like having all of my consumption in one spot. I’m working on Instagram now, but they don’t have RSS feeds and clearly aren’t fans of users pulling their own pics out of their silo.

Tweets, Links, Music, and Books – Sam Harrelson.

Bob Dylan At the Grammys’ Charity

Mr. Dylan took jabs at music icons like the songwriters Leiber and Stoller (“Yakety Yak,” “Stand by Me”), saying that he didn’t care that they didn’t like his songs, because he didn’t like theirs either. Nashville wasn’t spared. In barely diplomatic terms, Mr. Dylan mocked the country songwriter Tom T. Hall, saying that his sentimental 1973 song “I Love” (“I love baby ducks, old pickup trucks”) was “a little overcooked,” and implying that Mr. Hall was part of an old guard that was bemused and left behind by the musical revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s.

via At Grammys Event, Bob Dylan Speech Steals the Show – NYTimes.com.

Change Your Verizon “Super Cookie” Privacy Settings

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If you’re a Verizon customer like we are, I’d recommend you take a few seconds to go uncheck a few of these “enhancements” to your account that Verizon shares for marketing purposes if you care about privacy and our data…

Consumer information includes information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features,device type, and amount of use) as well as demographic and interest categories provided to us by other companies (such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner).

via Verizon Wireless – Privacy Settings.

Facebook Bloggers as Blogger of the Year??

I’ve been a fan of Dave Winer’s for years, and I’ve always enjoyed his “Blogger of the Year” post because I would normally learn about a new blogger or be reinforced about a feed in my reader. Not only that, but it was an annual reminder that blogging is a worthy endeavor in itself despite how out-of-style it is to call yourself a “blogger” or your personal site a “blog” in 2014.

This year, I was sad to see the BOTY award go to Facebook bloggers…

So, in 2014, Facebook has picked up the ball for blogging. It’s definitely not what I imagined, and I’m not comfortable with where it might be going. But for now, in 2014, the bloggers this year, that made a difference to me, came to me through Facebook.

via Blogger of the Year (2014).

I’m not disappointed out of some sense of the original blogging holding up expression on Facebook as some sort of selling out or a slap in the face to the “indie web.” Dave certainly isn’t the first to espouse the benefits of blogging on Facebook as an enjoyable experience compared to what blogging has become on a web dominated by clickbait and Squarespace sites. For instance, my good friend Wayne Porter once had a great blog (and he helped hire me to run one that he started back almost 15 years ago). Now, he posts a number of great posts and thoughts and links on Facebook. I still get to see those and frequently respond there with others. But it feels different and I don’t know why. It doesn’t feel like Wayne’s old blog any more than Dave’s posts feel like his work on Scripting.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s neat to see Batman pop up in Metropolis to help out Superman in a random issue of a DC comic. However, it never feels like a Batman comic. Batman has his own space(s). That’s where I really get to see his successes and neuroses. I want that experience in the people that I’ve “subscribed” to in my feed readers and really value as sources of quality content and information. That can happen on Facebook, and it certainly does in the case of Wayne and Dave, but I miss the good ole days of personal blogs (and I still think we’ll go back to them in the near future) as the place to read blogging.

I could argue with myself that reading in a feed reader is somewhat akin to what Facebook provides (without the wider audience). I’m altering the experience of reading Dave’s Scripting.com site by subscribing to it in Fever or Feedly or FeedWrangler. I’m not going to the site and seeing the way he deliberately structures content, images, outlines, and information. I’m possibly missing out on comments from other readers. That’s all true. However, Facebook seems like a different blog reading experience to me because of their algorithm. I’m presented with what Facebook wants me to see based on my previous actions and those of others. That’s great for some, but I don’t want a curated algorithmic blog reading experience.

Heck, I even miss Robert Scoble’s blog (the King of Facebook evangelism in 2014, who I blame for all of this).

Years ago, Dave started talking about the notions of rivers in blog reading. From what I remember, I’ll paraphrase him as saying that RSS Readers like the now defunct and much missed Google Reader weren’t that great for blogging because they treated blog reading like an email inbox with unread counts etc. Blog reading became yet another thing to do (or hire an intern to do) for us back in the day. Rivers of information, however, should have flowed by us. We could dip in when we needed or wanted to, but there wouldn’t be the need to read every post. Twitter helped push this paradigm ahead (I still remember trying to read every tweet that I’d missed while sleeping back in 2006). To me, it feels like blogging and blog reading on Facebook distorts this notion of a river or stream of posts and info even more because posts that you see are derived by some magical algorithm in the sky that curates what you see based on math that we’ll never be privy to know.

I’m probably wrong here, and it really doesn’t matter. The world spins on, continues to go around our star, and our way of sharing thoughts and ideas will continue to change along with our still young species. But the idea of my Batmen and Supermen blogging on Facebook makes me sad. Being able to express that here on my blog makes me happy.

Now I just hope Wayne and Dave don’t unfriend me on Facebook, so that I can continue reading their posts there.

Just told my (in)famous “three legged pig” joke on the sixth grade field trip in honor of all my beloved students who had to suffer through it over the years. All is right with the world.

Home Screen on My iPhone 2014

I like to post these every so often (this one from 2010 is historic) for my own archive uses…

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By the way, someone asked me yesterday why I had Lastpass on the front page and what it did as an app. I don’t know any of my passwords as they are all generated by Lastpass. Between that and using 2 factor authentication for everything I can (the Google Authenticator app beside Lastpass on the top row), I feel pretty confident about my security online. Those are two of myost used apps as a result.

Additionally, I’m glad to see services like Mint (my personal accounting app) and Evernote integrate their apps with TouchID on the iPhone so that I have to supply my thumbprint to open them up (Bank of America is releasing their updated app with that integration as well).

Security is my app theme for the end of 2014, evidently.