The following showed up in my mailbox a few moments ago I commented to Steve that social marketing was about connecting with people, and businesses aren’t people. That’s why social marketing for B2B is hard: there are no people involved. Or, as he pointed out, B2B in the social space is bot to bot marketing. Of course, there aren’t literal bots behind most brands. In the B2C...
I’ve been talking a lot about ongoing B2B spam. That is, where senders drop your address into some sort of automation, that sends mail from gmail or amazon and just spams and spams and spams. This is what my mailbox looked like this morning Yes, every one of those emails is sent to the same address. “you are still using the address laura-info@…” Well, no, actually. That...
Yesterday one of the bigger ESPs had their domain registration lapse. This caused a whole host of problems for their customers. It was resolved when someone completely unrelated to the company paid the registration fee. It happens. Most of us know about cases where email or domains were lost due to renewal failures. The canonical case is one person at the company handles renewals, and leaves or...
I’m deeply disappointed in the vote out of the Senate today. We’re a small business. We have paid for our own health insurance since 2002. We’re very lucky – neither of us has any major issues. Before ACA went into effect I worried about what would happen if one of us were to become sick. Would we fall afoul of our lifetime limits? Due to a rare cancer, my mother hit those...
Codified into law in CASL, implied permission describes the situation where a company can legally mail someone. The law includes caveats and restrictions about when this is a legitimate assumption on the part of the company. It is, in fact, a kludge. There isn’t such a thing as implied permission. Someone either gives you permission to send them email or they don’t. We use the term...
We recently moved co-working spaces, after 8 or 9 years in the same place. I’ll be up front here, we left Space A because I was annoyed with them. I’ve been increasingly unhappy with them for a while, but moving is a pain so just put up with them. But their most recent rent increase along with the lost packages, increasing deposit requirements and revolving door of incompetent staff...
A few weekends ago we met a friend for coffee in Palo Alto. As the discussion wandered we ended up talking about some of the projects we’re involved in. Friend mentioned she was working with a group building a platform for community building. We started talking about how hard it is these days to run online groups and communities. One of the things I started discussing was what needed to be...
From the archives: Mailing old addresses: 5 questions to ask first James asked the question on twitter: If you haven’t mailed an address in 5-10 yrs, would you include it in a re-engagement mail? A number of people responded that addresses that old should not be mailed. I think the answer is more complex than can be handled in 140 characters. Five to ten years is a very long time. Think about...
All of the technical security in the world won’t fix the biggest security problem: people. Let’s face it, we are the weakest link. Adding more security doesn’t work, it only causes people to figure out ways to get around the security. The more secure you make something, the less secure it becomes. Why? Because when security gets in the way, sensible, well-meaning, dedicated...
Not the kind we hate. The other kind. That’s best served over sushi rice.
80 years of SPAM
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