Serif Group

Barack Obama is a taco salad. Oh Yeah, well … John McCain is a nacho.

This according to a new web strategy by Qdoba. Tastebud politics is a great new viral tool by the folks at Qdoba. After seeing this, I wanted to send it to all my friends, because after all if you can talk to your friends about what’s going on in politics and not end up debating about healthcare or the economy its a good thing, right? Now Qdoba turns that debate into nachos and quesadillas.

Remember back in the day (1997) when we were all a little less net savvy and we would get the email telling us about how Bill Gates would give you $1000 for sending that email to as many people as possible. Even though I am proud to say that I didn’t bite on that one, enough people did to make it a classic example of how a message can spread virally.

Many people took notice of how effective this strategy would work in the land of the internet. Many others trying to duplicate this viral strategy sent out all sorts of bogus messages telling of great news or tall tales, and luckily today we have snopes.com to determine which of these is true.

Web powerhouses such as hotmail.com, myspace and facebook have grown dramatically from viral methods. Much like a virus spreads, one person tells two, those two tell two or three more and so on, before long without an FCC regulated medium, hundreds if not thousands (or millions in some cases) have heard the message.

Seth Godin calls it interuption marketing and Steve Yastrow calls it ‘Brute Force Branding” Steve was a speaker this morning at the ExactTarget conference. He is the author of two books, the latest being “We. The Ideal Customer Relationship.”

Some thoughts from Steve Yastrow:
We get more than 5000 branding messages. How many actually work? Not many can cut through the clutter with brute force. Yastrow says that we need to use brand harmony-an overall picture that prospects experience from your brand, thus creating an image of your brand.

Most marketers think that they are the ones who brand the company. But it is the customer who brands the company. It is not what is said, but what is heard.

Yastrow says that the goal for marketers should be to create a customer relationship that is an ongoing conversation in which your customers never think of you without thinking of both of you. Not two. We.

More from the conference later.

I hope to be posting from the Connections 2008 conference in Indianapolis next week. ExactTarget is hosting some of the industry’s top experts on permission marketing and Inbox Orange is going with a half of dozen people to catch up on the latest trends in the industry. I will share what I think is interesting or relavant.

(I love new media/technology. I am posting this update from my iPhone).

Yawn.

No surprise here. The Herald Leader’s parent company is again dropping staff. Check out the story here, from none other than the Herald.

Another interesting article about the recent fate of newspapers from ClickZ.

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of SPAM. So what is it exactly and how can you prevent it?

If an email doesn’t meet these criteria, it is considered SPAM (according to the Federal CAN-SPAM Act)

• It bans false or misleading header information. Your email’s “From,” “To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email. 
• It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message. 
• It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor’s email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it’s illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law. 
  
• It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender’s valid physical postal address.Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

Since starting Inbox Orange, a permission-based email marketing firm in Lexington, Ky, I’ve had people ask me “so what do you do if someone Spams you?” The answer is Spamcop.net. It is a free Spam reporting service that allows those who receive unsolicited commercial emails to report the sender to their ISP (Internet Service Providers).

Not all ‘Mass’ emails are Spam. If you’ve provided your email address to a business, then expect to receive communication from them, unless you specified otherwise. And if the information is that you receive from that company is not relevant to you, don’t report them, just unsubscribe from their list. According to the law, it should be fast and easy.

I hope to be discussing this more in future posts, including understanding the difference between explicit permission (where one specifically requests to receive info) vs. implicit permission (where permission is obtained from a previous customer/client relationship.)