Better Targeted Marketing

Google has, at last, added adverts to the blog items. Now, let's be fair. An advert is very much a side issue for a blogger. People don't come here to click the adverts, they come here to read the blog.

I mean that generically of course. After all, it would be a major conceit to think that people came here to read what I have to say! Ok, that's not true. I really do hope you come here to read what I have to say.

Bloggers blog for many reasons. I do it to enhance my professional profile, and to meet new people. Sometimes I'm asked to write for other publications, sometimes it leads to a consultancy contract, and sometimes it's like the sound of one handed clapping.

But, just sometimes, someone clicks an advert here. I confess that is a pleasant outcome in its way, but it does mean that they leave the blog page and end up on another site. I've long wondered why Google doesn't let people open the advertised site in a new window. That would meet the webmaster's needs and the av=dvertiser's needs.

Carnival of the Mobilists, number 88

Xellular Identity holds the latest "Carnival of the Mobilists", well worth a visit. I learn more than one new thing each time I follow the links

Wisdom of Crowds or Academy of Fools?

For perhaps eighteen months I have subscribed to the concept that experimenting with the Wisdom of Crowds is a worthwhile exercise. Yes, I am an editor from time to time on Wikipedia! I am thus part of this collective, consensus based wisdom.

The great virtue of Wikipedia is that anyone may edit. You just do it. The next virtue is that any other editor may edit your work, nominate it for excellence, or nominate it for deletion. Thus we have the alleged wisdom of crowds.

Critics will tell you that Wikipedia is unreliable and wave the unreliability as a banner to discredit it. Wikipedia itself recognises the possible unreliability and makes a virtue of it. As a work of reference it's a reasonable quick first port of call, but requires proper cited works to back any article up. That's good.

But what an experience it can be to be part of the Wisdom of Crowds! It is not a gentle place. It can be, though is not by design, hostile, abusive, even a place of cyberstalking.

And it contains morons as well as educated and capable people as editors. The Wisdom of Crowds makes no distinction between erudite, well crafted work, and the work of idiots with axes to grind, or of the illiterate. That is probably a good thing, too. Though do consider the movie "Idiocracy" before agreeing with me!

But sometimes it suffers from Emperor's New Clothes syndrome. Sometimes editors, led by a vociferous editor who makes a strongly worded argument (eg) for deleting, or for keeping an article or photograph, form unofficial, sudden cliques to gang up in favour of or against a particular action. This happens far too often. In this part of The Wisdom of Crowds, the lunatics do take over the running of the asylum. And they defend vigorously their right to do this by often stating unequivocally that they are not! There is the Academy of Fools

And yet, out of this hurly burly comes a great work - Wikipedia itself - marketed by word of mouth, probably accurate, potentially inaccurate, open to abuse and vandalism, but an enduring icon, insofar as a virtual work can be an icon and endure.

Wikipedia is a hugely good experience, and vastly frustrating. Any marketing professional who thinks they can write good copy needs to spend a few months editing controversial articles there. They will learn more in a week than in a year of copywriting at their desks.

"No Cold Calling" Zones

The UK has just piloted 1,000 of these. And doorstep crime fell by an enormous amount. The BBC discussed it on the radio yesterday, and, while I forget the exact drop, it was substantial. Figures were bandied about that said that 97% of people do not want to be doorstepped by random sales people or other canvassers.

I didn't care much one way or the other until last night. I'm old enough and ugly enough to amuse myself with incompetent idiots, and to allow them to waste their time with me. And yes, I ask for identification.

Yesterday evening, so well timed after the BBC show, I had a call from a neighbour. "Tim, there's a very unpleasant door knocker heading your way. He's pulling bits off shrubs and doesn't take very kindly to being told that we weren't buying from him. We had to go out and check that he hadn't scratched the cars!" Fifteen minutes later he knocked.

Now I don't know about you, but I can tell a lot about what I'm going to find by the way my knocker's used. The phone call gave me a subtle hint, too. So we had the Devil's Tattoo on the door knocker. My technique is to open the door and meet their eyes. I hold the gaze. I don't speak. And in he launched. He did, wisely, say he was selling something. After a while I broke my silence to say "I don't buy things at my door. We're seriously considering making this a no cold calling zone."

He had a mood change. An interesting mood change. I never realised how many different kinds of genitalia I was before, but he lost no time in telling me, at length (no pun intended), and at high volume!

At last I see the purpose of the spam emails. I have male and female body parts I obviously need to enlarge. I must have, because he recognised all of them in me and lost no time in letting me know at sufficient volume for my neighbour opposite's head to turn and him to stare!

The UK Direct Marketing Association says that they wish to deal with doorstepping by education. A spokesperson said so on the radio. Well, educate this guy! Make meeting him a pleasant experience. Make it safe for the typical crime victim to answer the door to him (she is an 81 year old lady, living alone, according to the radio show). And get him off my property without harm befalling me.

As I watched his attitude change yesterday I was thinking how useful the law in Texas is that allows you to shoot someone dead on your property if you feel threatened. I was also thinking that a Tasar might be useful. Possibly over the top, but the mood shift was so sudden that it made me consider that opening the door might not have been such a good idea.

There are less intrusive forms of cold calling. Kleeneze, Avon, and Betterwear. I admit to some pity for these people, especially those in pyramids (sorry, multi-Level Marketing schemes). They have to buy a shedload of catalogues to stuff through letterboxes, and they lose money when they don't get them back. But I am wholly in favour of slamming the door on door to door cold calling. If it doesn't have a storefront, physical or online, I'm not interested. This marketing does not have my permission.

Eating my way through the Spam Mountain

I've been away for a few days. When I got back I was faced with an unbelievable pile of spam. Somewhere in all that trash were some emails I probably ought to have cared about. But, when you face 3,071 emails, 99.999% of which are spam, you delete them all and pray the good ones get re-sent.

I've had really bad experience with RBL filtering. Too many false positives make those things unworkable. Even big ISPs have been RBL blocklisted and found it hard to get delisted. But there had to be a solution. I get upwards of 250 spam emails per day, because I have several email addresses that are necessarily published on the web. I am, in many ways, my own ISP, and I needed to solve my spam problem.

I am non technical, but my business partner is a whiz. First he deployed Spamassassin, just to see what it did. Well, "it" doesn't really do much, but but does flag mail pretty reliably as spam and leaves it to the email client to handle. I use Thunderbird as an IMAP client, and it struggles to handle this stuff, especially in volume. Spamassassin does not defeat the volume, it handles the quality.

The tool that's handled the volume is Postgrey. This greylists incoming mails. This means that it bounces them for a finite time period, after which it allows them through. The rationale is simple. They reason that a spammer is not going to waste server time and bandwidth by auto-retrying (email servers are set to retry in the real world in case of communication accidents) so the professional spammer will just not get through.

My incoming email is delayed by a few minutes, known senders are passed straight through if I whitelist them.

My spam load is now approximately 6 spam emails per day that actually get through. That beats 250 and rising! I am now a very happy bunny indeed.

Bluespam: Is it legal?

This is hot off the presses from Renzo Marchini, counsel at Dechert LLP, and his colleague Kate Tebbut. Apart from this introduction, and the promise to forward any emails on the subject to Renzo and Kate, this is what they say:

"Bluespam: Is it legal?" examines whether so called bluespam falls within the restrictions imposed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive and whether organisations can therefore be prevented from marketing via bluetooth without first obtaining consent. It also considers the practicality of obtaining consent from bluetooth users and discusses the options for Bluetooth users who do not wish to receive bluespam.

The paper is available as a pdf

Bluetooth, BlueSpam, BlueCasting trends

I'm returning to my regular monitoring of terms to do with Spam and Bluetooth this month. With the mobile industry now providing better and better marketing techniques, and with the uptake of bluecasting, or proximity marketing, via your handset, I'm looking at the past 90 days and blog mentions of the terms, and I've added a few relevant terms.

For comparison the mentions, all mentions, of the term Spam are included. I really do hope this excludes the canned meat!

The graphs are presented together for you to draw your own conclusions. They are dynamic - they refresh whenever Technorati refreshes. They are the total of all blog posts recorded there with the terms and are thus likely to have statistical significance.

Posts that contain Bluespam per day for the last 90 days.


Posts that contain Bluecast per day for the last 90 days.


Posts that contain "Proximity Marketing" per day for the last 90 days.


Posts that contain Bluetooth per day for the last 90 days.


Posts that contain "SMS Marketing" per day for the last 90 days.


Posts that contain Spam per day for the last 90 days.


The question is, are we seeing trends?

I can see no discernible pattern here. It looks to me as though the peaks we saw when HSBC, Avenue Q and Nissan started to do local Bluetooth broadcasts were just short duration interest. There seems to be nothing about it in marketing press at present, though, of course, someone will immediately correct me in a comment!

Note: This blog article will result in a spike of 1 in all the terms it surveys, and thus its value should be subtracted from the figures.

Back from vacation

The world has not changed, of course. I just wanted to let you know I was back, tidying up about 2,000 spam emails, and generally getting back to work.

I had a lovely surprise in my inbox this morning. iMediaConnection have asked if they can pick up articles from the blog, and if I'll write for them from time to time. I got back to find this from their 6th August edition.

That Google Recruitment email has certainly caused a stir wherever it's landed. It is genuine, there's no mistake there, and Brad is highly professional with his calls. It's just slightly odd and spammy.

It's holiday time

I'll be offline for a few days, hoping for good weather in Devon.

Marketing an online business

Every so often I get approached to share knowledge "for a share of the profits". It seems odd to me how this approach always comes from folk who have had an idea and failed to research it, and are wondering, now, how to get their great idea in front of the buying public.

I had such an approach yesterday. They own ~idea~.co.uk but not ~idea~.com. Searching on ~idea~ brings them up nowhere in the first 100 results, and when you visit the website there are sufficient glaring errors to ensure they will never, ever come high up the search engine results lists.

I've offered them some basics out of the kindness of my heart, but several things struck me, the most pressing being "How on earth can you bring a product to market without owning the .com address?

I'm working with an entirely different company at present, Business Buyguide. We've made sure the website works, although the content management system makes a few things more challenging than are ideal for search engine optimisation. We've researched the proposition and there is a market for it, we market diligently and always with permission, and we understand what the business is meant to do.

None of this alone means we will succeed, but each of the small elements of understanding lead to good marketing, which leads to good business.

Odd how people choose not to get permission

The blog is rather clear. I have an email address, I publish it, and I tell people that they may contact me but not add me to mailing lists.

Odd, then, that I keep getting obvious mailing list approaches, and that people seem to think that's really ok, and are surprised when I question them.