Note for CPA conference attendees: due to an error on my part when I submitted my notes, the conference notes for the presentation pointed here instead of the correct location. My apologies for any inconvenience.

As promised, here’s the presentation slides from my session at the Investor Weekly Branding conference today.

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My presentation style means that those slides may not make a whole lot of sense by themselves. I’ve also uploaded a PDF of the slides with my presentation notes (which include stats, links etc.) which may fill in some of the gaps.

It’s not quite as interactive as the workshop I had planned, but hopefully it pulls together some useful ideas around social media and networking and how they may apply in various circumstances.

Previously I mentioned that I was facilitating a workshop for the Investor Weekly Branding workshop happening next week.

Well, a few last minute changes mean that I’m now on the main program presenting a (much shorter) session from 4pm to 5pm Wednesday 27 Feb. The topic remains the same, but the format will be less of a workshop vibe.

The folks at Freshview have introduced yet another great feature to Campaign Monitor, their web-based email management system: Automatic inline CSS styles.

While there are tools out there that do this (most of which I found out about through the Campaign Monitor blog), having this functionality embedded within the tool itself makes it even easier.

While this probably only means something to developers, it actually will save clients a lot of money too – developers have to spend a lot of time maintaining and updating newsletter templates to get them working right in various email clients. This “one click” solution will make that whole process a lot easier.

Having had a long-standing interest in environmental issues I’m very conscious of making environmentally responsible choices for my new business.

I figured it might be useful to others if I shared a little about some recent decisions relating to printing – what I chose and why…

Read the rest of this entry »

Freshview have announced a new feature that allows you to compare the performance indicators (open, bounce, click rates) across a number of campaigns.

I can see this feature being immensely useful for anyone that is using the tool. Previously I’ve had to pull together various reports in a spreadsheet to get nice graphs comparing performance over time etc. and this makes it a lot easier.

I also dig Mathew’s suggestion of doing A/B comparison of different subject lines etc. A great way to tweak the performance of your campaigns.

• Twitter is an Event Aggregator – Interesting use of Twitter – posting news related to the “Super Tuesday” primary voting in the U.S.
• Companies must listen to the Web 2.0 world – I don’t like the “avoid risk” case for social media strategy; I prefer to focus on opportunities. This article provides an overview of the potential risks. I’ve found that blogs can be a bell-weather for broader constituent sentiment, so worth watching.
• Internet fundraising trends 2008 – A collection of predictions for fundraising and donating in 2008, incl. a spot from Priscilla @ Solidariti and Seth Godin.

(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed on 05-Feb-2008.)

There’s been two big announcements in the world of the social media technology in the past few days.

Google Social Graph API

First came the announcement from Google of the Social Graph API. Ajaxian have a quick code example of what can be done from a technology perspective, and Joshua Porter has two posts looking at the benefits and potential dangers of the API, incl. reference to an excellent (though slightly alarmist, I feel) post from Danah Boyd on the risks, esp. to young people.

I’m on the fence with regards to the dangers. On the one hand I agree with the notion that this information is already public, so shouldn’t be an issue.

But where this argument falls down is that it’s not always obvious when data will be made public – in the past I’ve inadvertently exposed both my mobile number and home address publicly online without realising it – a tool like this may make it easier for unscrupulous individuals to mess with us.

MySpace developer platform

Right on cue, MySpace release the details of their developer API – covered well by Ajaxian.

As the article notes, what’s especially interesting about the API is that they are using the OpenSocial API (which has also just been updated), supported by Google, Ning, Bebo, Plaxo and Six Apart.

I’ve yet to dig into the details of either system, but both announcements are likely to change the social media landscape significantly in the coming months…

When I was working at WWF-Australia a lot of effort went into making the organisation’s key email communications as effective as possible. So I was delighted today to see that Mathew from Freshview has chosen the Futuremakers email template as a sample of good email design in his SitePoint article The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email. (Thanks Mathew!)

A lot of “behind the scenes” work went into making sure that the email format worked across all the popular web email software (esp. Hotmail and Gmail). But also we had very clear objectives for the content layout, which is what Mathew highlighted in his article.

P.S. the email was also featured previously in the Campaign Monitor email gallery, which is a great resource for reviewing best practice in email design – as well as providing some nice eye-candy ;)

• Stockvault.net – Another free stock photo site and community. A potentially useful addition to iStockphoto and Stockexchange.
• Sprout Builder – “Sprouts” are widgets that you can add to your site and share with others, created from your own media. Although I’ve not looked deeply into them, they seem a handy and quick way to build promotional widgets for your organisation or cause.
• Is the Tipping Point Toast? – This article has been spreading like wildfire through blogland. A rebuttal, of sorts, to “The Tipping Point” concept where a few “influentials” take trends viral. Thought provoking, and I would say essential reading for anyone in the marketing biz.

(These links were posted to my del.icio.us feed between 28-Jan-2008 and 04-Feb-2008.)

Ning have posted an interview with Joshua Forgotson, who created a social network on Ning for Earth Day. He talks about a few of the features they used in the network. It’s a useful introduction to some of Ning’s features. (Hat tip: DamianM via IM)