Four Common-Sense Tips for Using Social Tools in Email Marketing

We exist in a best-practices driven industry. Email marketing has many variables and it's a constantly changing landscape with ISPs and regulations changing rules on us on a consistent basis. We crave the tried-and-true rule, the best practice known to deliver the best result, the sure thing.

We have plenty to learn and use, to be sure! Search for "email marketing best practices" in Google, and you’ll find far more than you could ever digest among the search results.

Best practices for using social tools in email, however, are yet to be clearly defined. In fact, given the pace of change in social media, with constant Facebook updates and new technologies like Google+, these so-called best practices might forever elude us.

Those proven techniques we can turn to with confidence, however, are common sense and come from the email marketing world. Today I offer you four common-sense tips for using social tools that will help you maximize your results: 1) Offer great content. 2) Be very, very clear. 3) Test everything. 4) Go both ways.

Offer Great Content

No matter how much the email marketing industry changes, this common-sense tip will always be. And when you're seeking sharing to social, your content has to be so great that people want to and willingly share it. That idea isn't new. We've strived for "share worthy" content in the past. We had another name for it was all, because what we want back then was a forward. Now we want a share. Great content leads to greater use of your social media links by your subscribers who want to tell their network about your email.

Be Very, Very Clear

When you include social media buttons, be sure to ask for the action you want and let the person know why they should click. A plain, standalone Facebook button will garner only so many clicks compared to a Facebook button with words that ask for action and offer a benefit: "Like us on Facebook for fabulous fan pricing." Everybody knows what a Facebook button is, but not why they should click on it. Ditto for Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social media buttons.

In addition, words help you to be clear on the purpose of a button. A button for sharing is not the same as a button for liking, after all.  

Also be sure to put the buttons where they make the most sense...for your subscribers. Figure out when/where in your email your subscribers are ready to take action. This you might only be able to determine by testing, which takes us to...

Test Everything

Is there a magic spot for your "like" button that will generate the highest number of new Facebook fans? Probably. Can I tell you where that is within your email? No. As far as best practices on technical details when using social media tools, these can only be determined by you. If I could sit here and tell you placing the Facebook icon in the lower right corner will drive the most "likes" on your Facebook wall, I would. But I can't. It all depends. Testing is the only way to optimize placement of social media tools like a Facebook button for your particular business and audience. In fact, testing is the only way to optimize every aspect of your social media tools, from where you put the links to which links you offer. So test. Everything.

Go Both Ways

Yes, using email to drive subscribers to your social media sites or to share is smart marketing. Also be sure your email to social works as your social to email, as well. Your social sites can promote your email subscriptions and offer email signup forms.

And One Last Note...

Even when integrated as part of your marketing matrix and going both ways, email and social differ. And taking a customer relationship into the social realm can certainly alter customer expectations. Once you’ve crossed the social media line, you might need to revisit the tone and personality of your email communications. You've taken the relationship to a new level of intimacy via social channels, and using a corporate or more formal tone in your email marketing might run counter to the warm fuzzies a subscriber now feels for you.

Following these four tips should help you determine your own best practices for using social tools in email...meaning those practices which work best for you and your goals.


- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Source: http://blog.emailexperience.org/blog/clickmail-marketing-at-eec/four-common-sense-tips-for-using-social-tools-in-email-marketing

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How-to: Apps for creating custom ringtones

Custom ringtones. I love ?em, and apparently I?m not alone. While writing this post, I saw a Fierce story that said people still spend more than $2 billion a year on ringtones. I think ringtones remain popular because they?re another way to tell your friends and family ?I?m unique??or simply because they can solicit a gut reaction from people around you (?Did I just hear The Dude?!??my current ringtone, by the way).

I?ve been playing around with a pair of free apps that recently launched for Windows Phone 7.5, and created custom ringtones with classic movie quotes, music tracks, college fight songs and more. Check them out?and don?t miss this colorful overview of custom ringtones.

Myxer

Although not a new app to Windows Phone per se, Myxer recently added the ability to quickly create and use custom ringtones. Start by setting up an account, and then follow these steps:

1. On your PC, go to Myxer and log in.

2. Under Ringtones, click Make Your Own?.

3. Click Browse to choose a sound file on your PC, then click Upload.

4. Customize your ringtone using the on-screen tool, then click Continue.

5. Verify your phone number, then click Next.

6. Ignore Myxer?s instructions and choose one of the download options. (It doesn?t matter which?clicking Send is probably the easiest.) Your new ringtone will automatically appear in the My Ringtones section of your Myxer app.

7. Open the app on your phone and swipe to My Ringtones. Tap a ringtone, and select Download.

8. Myxer automatically open Settings menu. Tap OK to save the ringtone and check Make this my ringtone if you want to start using it right away.

That?s it!

Ringtone Maker

Ringtone Maker from Mobile 17 provides another option for delivering custom ringtones directly to your phone. To get started, I recommend setting up an account first, then follow these steps:

1. On your PC, go to the Mobile 17 website and log in.

2. Click Make a ringtone.

3. Click Browse to choose a song file.

4. Mobile 17 offers a list of possible matches for the song you picked. If you see a match, click Use this. Otherwise, click Skip this step.

5. Edit your track, then click Continue.

6. Confirm your account settings , then click Continue.

7. Open the Mobile 17 App on your phone. Flick to My Ringtones, and tap Sync.

8. Click OK to save your new ringtone.

9. On Start, flick left, then tap Settings>Ringtones + sounds.

10. Select your ringtone and?boom?you?re ready for the audio bliss?or blitzkrieg.

Both of these apps are free (ad-supported) and only available in the U.S. Marketplace. Have your own favorite ringtone maker in Marketplace? Tell us about it!

Source: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2011/11/17/how-to-apps-for-creating-custom-ringtones.aspx

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The Springboard Series Visits Argentina

Our third stop on the tour takes us to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Here we presented Windows deployment techniques to over 100 decision makers, drove on the widest street in the world and of course, sampled the local delicacies.  Our next and final stop is TechDays in Chile.

Source: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/springboard/archive/2011/11/22/springboard-series-visits-argentina.aspx

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Updates: Now delivering to Samsung Focus 1.4

Hello everyone. Busy week?here?s what?s going on:

We?re now sending out Windows Phone 7.5 updates to customers with Samsung Focus 1.4 phones on AT&T. We?re also scheduling the update for Samsung Omnia 7 owners on Telefonica in Spain. Expect us to expedite the scheduling process, now that it?s been fully tested.

We?re also sending out another wave of firmware updates from our manufacturers to select Windows Phone models. As I?ve mentioned before, these updates improve the overall function of your particular make and model of Windows Phone. You?ll see these firmware updates from time to time; they?re easy to recognize because the update information in the Zune software shows your device name. If you get one, I encourage you to install it.

Finally, we?re always paying close attention to your feedback on Windows Phone 7.5?especially when it comes to bug reports. In that spirit, customers of Vodafone, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom in Europe will start seeing notifications for a new Windows Phone service release called 7740 that fixes an issue with new voice mail notifications not appearing for customers on some European and Asian networks under certain conditions. It also fixes an email issue associated with Exchange Server 2003. This service release is being assessed by other mobile operators. You can learn more about it here.

That?s the latest. See you next week.

Eric Hautala, GM, Customer Experience Engineering

Source: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2011/11/17/updates-now-delivering-to-samsung-focus-1-4.aspx

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Android Hacked onto the BeagleBoard OSHW GadgetPack ... with avengance

The time is 3:27 am on the East Coast as I write this. It's Sunday, I have work tomorrow morning.


I'm happy to say... Android has now officially been cracked onto the Beagle GadgetPack. Chris and I just finished hacking it onto the BeagleBoard, with a fully-integrated touchscreen OLED screen, overlay, and interface at the driver level to the BeagleTouch.

It connects to the internet.
It loads webpages, it runs scripts.
It reads and interfaces to sensors.
The touchscreen supports drag, drag and drop, sliding, scrolling, and gesturing.
It can download and run native Android APK files off of Open APK app stores.
It even runs the SL4A rapid prototyping environment that is scriptable in Perl and Python.


This was no easy task. Nick, Will, Chris, Mike all helped here and there with driver help and ideas for how to compile around the early driver problems. Thanks to the TI guys (esp. Gerald!), and the Google Groups community too for their help... and for the guys at embinux.org for a good starting point reference. And of course some special help from Google themselves (names will remain anonymous because I'd hate to see someone lose their job for supporting a hacker like me)... who came in at the last minute to help me crack open the driver access level, which allowed me to make a user-space display driver to the BeagleTouch... FROM SCRATCH.

Now the most important part of all of this is the question I got from Jake, when I talked to him 3 weeks ago: why?


Because I'm sick of the iPad. Every time you go into Starbucks, you see someone digitally frolicking around on their apps, clickety clacking around with glee, pinching and spinning their fingers around a million times just to do what you used to be able to do with CNTRL-+ or CNTRL-- to zoom in and out just as quickly, all the while being wholly restricted and unable to compile any of their own apps natively, and god forbid trying to access the driver level.

The problem is simple: I am fundamentally against the entire principle and idea of the phrase, "there's an app for that(TM)." (Are you serious?!?! I have to put a "Trademark" on that?!?) I think that little phrase is endemic of everything that's going wrong with the hacker world today. It symbolizes the end of an era. It is the antithesis of open, and the optimum of control and limitation.

I don't want an app for that. I want a programming language and access to some low level OS function for that.

I'm fighting back, and this Android hack is the first step in the war. The problem with the philosophy of "there's an app for that" is that it's training the new up and coming programmers and would-be hackers and developers that if you want some hitherto unavailable functionality for your device, you should go onto a tightly controlled ecosystem of apps (iTunes app store), and pay money for a limited, controlled, censored, channel monitored, Apple-sanctioned little app that took WAY too long to write because the darn specs are undocumented.


No thank you. I want to help teach, train, and motivate a new breed of far more open sourced and efficient hardware hackers...


Apple is going to lose. Because hackers are going to use the platform that is the most extensible, most hackable, and most fun to use. Programming the iPod and iPad and app store-compatible apps is an exercise in painful, torturous sacrifice. You start out development thinking you want to build a simple little functioning app. Then you find out, function by function, that Apple has restricted that functionality to a mere fragment of it's former self. Useless!


Android is where it's at. You get driver control if you need it, you have a multitude of programming languages, an Open Source app distribution channel, and raw sensor channels for interfacing with all kinds of sensors (stay tuned for some hacks on this to come). Android is literally the perfect rapid prototyping platform. It is just high level enough to be efficient, it's just low level enough to enable embedded applications development. And it's Open Source, so if you need to, you can just recompile the whole darn thing from scratch yourself if you want to.

And that's powerful. In the coming weeks, I'm going to do my best to integrate open source hardware and open source software together, using this newly cracked Android Gadget as my platform... bring it on!

Source: http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2010/10/android-hacked-onto-beagleboard-oshw.html

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Android vs. the Embedded Programmer Mindset

Eclipse Apps Roasting on an Open Android
ADB nipping at your serial bus.
Yuletide GUIs being compiled through XML,
And freakin' complicated data reference schemes that make you call even a single string from an outside standalone strings.xml file by @string/hello or R.string.hello.


Everybody knows a compiler and some global vars,
Help to make coding simple and fast.
Local functions with their scopes all aglo(bal).
Will find it much easier than dereferencing every gosh-darn string text variable.

What the helloworld, Google! Whatever happened to:

char gButtonText[] = "Option On";

function mytoggle( void) {
  strcpy(gButtonText,"Option Off")
}

Sure, it's ugly code. There's a better way to do it. But it's fast, easy, and simple, and intuitive to the C programmer's mindset. Welcome to the wonderful world of Java-inspired coding on Android. Everything is an object, and needs it's own varspace. Programming Android is like programming in Ruby on Rails' MVC stack. You aren't really writing a standalone app, you're just given the honor - and privilege if I say so - to glue on some function code on top of an existing framework. Programming Android is like programming Java - instead of thinking about building the app from the ground up, you're essentially writing a "diff" file on top of a massive mountain of existing code and functionality. The baseline app already does a bunch of stuff perfectly fine, thank you.

It's as if Android is constantly saying to me, "Oh, what, you want it to do something different? Overload my already perfectly-written function, why don't you. Pffft. I already thought of that. I have a better idea: why don't you *not* write your function, and instead use one of mine, and decrease the surplus population of crappy code!"

Bah humbugtracking
Programming in Android, like Java, I am constantly reminding of how little I know, because someone's already thought of that function, and it already exists - I just have to inherit and object and parent a class, @override a base class, and unprotect a final public method.

Want to make a toggle button change it's text? Duh:

android:textOff="Option Off"
android:textOn="Option On"

Herein lie the central difference in mindset between the Embedded Programmer and the Android Programmer:

Embedded (Arduino) Programming Mindset
In embedded land, we are trained to start from void main(void) and #include math.h and work upwards. From function control, application execution, to variable space definition, everything trains you to think about in a device-first mentality. You're thinking to yourself, "I have a device with XX megs of RAM, a YY MHz CPU, and a ZZ pixel screen." Optimization is the name of the game, efficiency matters, and resources are at a premium so it's worth taking the time to think them through.

Stretching the metaphor a bit for a minute, embedded coding is like heliocentrism - with the device at the center of the world:

Android Programming Mindset
In Android land, you are trained to start from a base, and extend some Activity class. You're writing diff code, pulling objects and their nested functions only when you need them. You are really writing *code*, you're just pulling and gluing together bits and pieces of functionality that were already written for you. The device doesn't matter, and why should it, because you're writing an app that might run on a tablet or a hand-held or an on-screen emulator. God only knows how many megs of RAM, CPU MHz, and pixels you'll have, so you'd better write your code abstractly and cross your fingers that it runs. Everything trains you to think about a user-first mentality.

All things considered, this isn't easy for an embedded programmer to embrace. Dare I say embracing and learning Android coding is the equivalent to the Copernican Revolution:

Device-first vs. User-first
Embedded programmers are more likely to build a new hardware device layer to push the performance envelope of a given piece of hardware. Android programmers are more likely to deliver a fantastic user experience that connects web-to-handheld-to-sensors first and foremost, and who cares if it sits and hangs for a few seconds while it calculates? The user will be stunned by the drop-shadowed jelly buttons, he won't even mind :-)

And the truth is... after several weeks of hacking my Android DIY Starter Kit, I don't mind either. I've found myself converting to a new religion, in the name of developing super-sleek looking GUI's in no time at all, it's really something. Doing the same in Linux would take weeks, maybe months (but that's another discussion for another time). Take my "void main( void)" from me, and give me my "public class extends Activity" any day of the week! But there are some downsides.

One major downside is the need for massively large reference manuals, or the need to constantly be connected to the web, for documentation, specs, and references. Try coding a rails webapp without access to the internet - impossible. On the other hand, all you need to code Arduino is a little cheatsheet - since you're essentially building everything up from scratch out of C primitive functions, all you need is the list of those functions. So what if you re-invent the wheel a few times? On Android, like Rails, you constantly need to know the top-down bigger picture. You need to have in your frame of mind the major high-level code objects, which you then reference down with the . dot-operator until you get to the method/function you were looking for. This means needing large amounts of documentation, and examples that are typically on the web.

Not better, not worse, mostly just different.

Source: http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2010/12/android-vs-embedded-programmer-mindset.html

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How to disable Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications - using the Free RemoveWGA

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jsbi/~3/gveAequQUHo/how-to-disable-microsoft-windows.html

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