1. Do your recipients have to wade through four paragraphs of information to get to the point? Too long, did not listen.
2. Are you using language that could be found in an old Sears and Roebuck catalog? Be a l33t and  pimp your content — step up to the 21st century shorty.
3. Are you still using Times New Roman 12pt? Light a fire on your font library n00b!
4. Are you sending large file attachments with your messages? Get linky baby. Email is a bridge, not a billboard. Keep it light. Use links. Build bridges to your content.

You don’t have to get all gangsta with your emails. Keep it country if you want to. Just make sure that it’s current, active and in step with the times that we live in. Make your email jump out from the others by giving it a 21st century makeover.

To change the SMTP Port settings in GroupMail, click on “Tools”, “Account Manager” and “Modify” to edit the settings of your GroupMail Sender Account.

On the Account Properties screen, click the “Delivery Options” tab and click the “Advanced” button at the bottom of the screen.

Then, simply highlight the SMTP Port Number and change it to the Port number used by your provider.

Some mail servers require a secure SSL connection. If this is the case, ensure that you check the “Server requires and SSL connection” box.

Perhaps they were inspired by my regular motivational talks about how each person is the most important person in the company; how excellence requires a commitment to the most menial of tasks; how the biggest advances come from focusing on the smallest jobs? Whatever it was, something motivated them to work until ten o’clock at night each night that week. They were only earning 14k/year then.

Scanning local job announcements over the years, I see over and over again positions listed with two pages of specifications and responsibilities — many offering a very mediocre remuneration package.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Create a Wholesale 12-month IT roadmap and create the forum and mechanisms to communicate to the Wholesale Partners. Ensure the timelines, resources (people and budget) and requirements are documented to achieve.
• Establish governance forums and mechanisms to ensure alignment between the Wholesale Partners and the cross-functional teams (e.g. regular IT Steering Committee Meetings). Provide regular Wholesale IT status updates to the Wholesale PMO and create mechanisms to de-conflict priorities internally and externally.
• Drive collection of the Wholesale Partners use cases, requirements and timelines for leveraging the Wholesale IT platform. Facilitate evaluation of IT Platform requirements and create a prioritization framework to appropriately package requests working with IT.
• Partner with IT to define the framework for implementing releases that recognizes the uniqueness of a Wholesale business model that includes the requirements gathering and prioritization process, testing timeline and environments required, defect classification and resolution, and implementation support.
• Engage the Operational Support teams to ensure preparedness for new IT Platform releases to ensure the processes and SLA are defined. Ensure the day-to-day operational issues are tracked, evaluated and a plan is developed to resolve.
• Establish a Change Management methodology that supports a process for Wholesale Partners to submit change requests and integrates the Wholesale Operations team into the IT Change Management Process. Define and manage a process for Wholesale Partners to submit change request, have those change requests evaluated by the appropriate teams within the company, and communicated recommended path to support to the Wholesale Partners.
• Establish metrics that define success defining and delivering IT Platform capabilities, including quality, timelines, resources, and Wholesale Partner satisfaction.
• Define the resources (people, budget, systems/infrastructure) needed to support the IT roadmap from the functional teams and ensure plans are in place to manage
• Responsible for hiring, training, motivating and success of team member(s)

QUALIFICATIONS:
• Bachelor’s degree required.
• 10+ years experience managing end-to-end IT Platform in wireless, internet or technology sectors.
• Experience managing direct reports.
• Proven experience managing an IT Platform roadmap, planning and execution in a Wholesale business model.
• Experience working with and an understanding of the Amdocs CRM/Billing platform.
• Demonstrated ability to manage customer relationships that result in mutual success thru frequent communication, prioritization of work efforts, and issues resolution.
• Proven experience in managing IT account management that directs the full lifecycle, from requirements thru delivery, in a matrix work environment and managing multiple stakeholders to deliver results.
• Experience managing a change management process including definition of SLAs, implementation of tools to support execution, and creation of a prioritization methodology.
• Exceptional communications skills with the ability to interact regularly at the executive level both internally and externally.
• Ability to effectively manage subordinates to deliver results in an extremely fast paced environment.
• Honed program management skills to deliver cross-functional team results.
• Exceptional troubleshooting, problem resolution, and customer management skills and abilities.

Remuneration:

Decent base salary and potential for more based on performance.

The example above is evidence of a trend. We seek so much for so little. The salary for the position above is similar to, or less than, a sanitation worker in my town.

When did we start expecting so much for so little?

Motivational speakers and inspirational books appear on stages and shelves in abundance today, each seeking to raise everyone from mediocre workers to confident, driven, dynamic and innovative leaders.

But what would happen if everyone in America was a self-driven, super-motivated, entrepreneurial-minded go getter in search of excellence? What would happen if everyone in America was inspired to continually improve themselves professionally — to continually strive for excellence — to continually advance themselves — to want more and expect more from themselves and others each day? Who would do the work? How much disruption would the constant hierarchical shifting cause? If someone is driven to do more each day — to be more each day; how long will they spend doing the job that needs to be done, like  updating database records or responding to support queries? And what will it cost to replace them?

America was built by a solid mediocre work practice. Factory workers, assembly line operators, construction crews and production facility staff came to work each day because they needed a job. They did a decent days work for a decent days pay. Then, they gladly left work behind each evening and enjoyed a few beers with their friends, complaining about how much they had to work and how they wished there was more time for fishing, or family, or friends.

For most people in the world, work is more a necessary unpleasantry of life than it is a quest for personal or professional greatness. It is something we do to earn our keep in society. If we are really lucky, we spend our time working at something that we really enjoy. And yet, there is this growing sense that we should all be continually striving to do great things and maximizing our potential.

Well, thank God there are so many people who just want to do their job rather than spending their days trying to figure out how to be better or more than they were the day before. This spirit of mediocrity built things in America. It manufactured roads, bridges, cars, machines, clothes, electronics, tools and so many other things. Workers didn’t work because they were inspired to be excellent, or because they thought it was noble to sacrifice themselves for some greater good — for a chance to improve themselves and be more effective contributors to their industry.

They did it because they got paid to do it. It was a fair, even exchange of moderate expectations for a moderate salary.

We’ve shifted a bit in the last several decades. Today, we have great expectations of ourselves and others – regardless of salary. And with everyone so fueled up on high expectations and greatness, not enough people are interested in those important, mediocre jobs that need to get done — or they simply can’t afford to do them because we have stopped investing in mediocrity.

Perhaps we should start to invest more in mediocrity than the potential for greatness?

3H7HZ4J2P4W7

• Who are you communicating with?
• What is the objective of your communication?
• What style of presentation will you use?
• What are your main points?
• What action do you hope your audience will take?
• How will you persuade them to take that action?

In email marketing, some of these points are complicated further because there is technology between ourselves and our audience. Technology is great stuff. Without it, we’d have to gather large audiences together physically every time we wanted to tell them something. But it also creates problems.

• Technology might cause your beautiful HTML message to lose formatting in some email clients.
• Technology might cause your message to be filtered out of your audiences inbox; meaning that some of your audience won’t even see your message.
• Technology requires that you have some skills to covert your ideas to a visually pleasing presentation.

Our latest release of GroupMail will make it easier to jump over some of these technological obstacles. Our web developers added 20 email marketing templates to make it easy to convert your good ideas into a professional email presentation. They tested these templates on the most popular email clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) to ensure that the HTML formatting of the templates render well for the majority of your audience.

This way, you can just concentrate on the message that you want to convey to your audience.

You can find out more about our new email templates on our GroupMail blog.

Before

After

And here’s the video evidence of my emasculation

Still not too late to donate to the Irish Cancer Society in support of my emasculation.

You can see some before and after photos of our Irish team.

Although we love our collective hair; we like the thought of helping to find a cure for cancer more and we want to take part to raise awareness of the continued need for support in cancer research and treatment.

We will provide before and after photos and video of the events, which will take place both in our Ireland and US offices on February 18th. You can keep up with our progress and, most importantly, donate to our cause on our GroupMail blog.

Go on, make our baldness worthwhile!

Donate today to the Infacta Shave or Dye Event!

If you want to sit front row for Brittney Spears concert in Madison Square Garden, you’ll pay about $735.00 dollars. Brittney is sure to offer a spectacular, high tech light and stage show. But, the truth is that for $735.00 dollars, you will be listening to a recording of her as she moves around in front of you.

Here is some concert footage from Las Vegas that isolates Brittney’s microphone from the recorded track of the show.

In contrast, you can stand right in front of Juan on Market Street in San Francisco as he performs. Renee Blodgett talked to Juan recently. You can too, if you find yourself on Market Street in San Francisco. A private, interactive performance costs you nothing unless you are moved enough to drop something in the hat.

Of course, quality is defined differently by all of us. Some would consider listening to a recording of Brittney Spears while she dances in front of them onstage to be worth several hundred dollars. Others, like me, would feel that listening to a live performance by Juan offers much more quality and a more enriching (and engaging) experience.

How do you define quality? What free products or services do you use that offer good quality (according to you)?

Malcom Coles did much more research than I did to find a statistically relevant timestamp on which to benchmark (and optimize) your tweet distribution.

“…The best time to tweet if you want people to notice is … 4.01pm, according to my survey of nearly 120 Twitter users…” continue reading

For email, the old (and consistent for some years) benchmark for the best day to send email was somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday; but recent studies suggest there are even better days to send email.

The danger in getting too caught up in these “best time” benchmarks though is that it is easy to get distracted from the variety of other important factors that will cause your email, tweet or digg submission gain visibility and traction.

Here are other, perhaps more important factors to consider when sending an email or posting a tweet or Digg submission:

1. Frequency — Sending one email or one tweet or one submission to Digg at an optimum time might cause a spike in traffic or even some conversions if the communication offers some sort of immediate value. But long term success in email marketing or social media communication requires a consistent frequency of communication. It’s all about being part of the larger conversation that is occurring across all of these platforms at all time — not just during rush hour. Your strategy should consider the frequency of communication across all channels. That frequency should be enough so that you are noticed as a valuable and reliable contributor to the conversation. Consistent frequency will result in brand recognition over time. If your frequency is too high, however, you may very well fatigue even the most ardent follower. If it’s too low, they may forget about you over time.
2. Content — Content is king, hallelujah! The Subject line of your email, the headline of your Digg submission and the first 50 of your 140 words that you tweet need to pique the interest of the people who read it. There is so much information in front of us that we are instinctively fickle when it comes to what we consume. We simply can’t consume it all, so we scan for keywords and relevancy. Our initial attention to content lasts for only milliseconds. So your key point — your headline — your post glance must capture the attention of potential readers quickly. In this sense, what you send is more important than when you send it.
3. Personality — On the X-Factor, they call it the x factor. The same is true for online communication. In the same way that there is an overall style of the performer that makes her stand out, there is something about the style of your social media and email presentation that causes some tweets to get more attention. It’s not just about the words you use, but the timing, tone and general feel for how you present your information. It’s interesting how two people can present the same content, but one will appear to be self-serving (visit my blog and learn more about me) and the other will appear sincere and helpful (check out this cool/relevant/interesting information I want to share.)

So, yes — timing is important. Sometimes, the right post at the wrong time will fail to meet expectations. Alternatively, the wrong post at the right time can exceed expectations. The luck or good fortune of being in the right place at the right time has propelled many careers.

But for a long term strategy that you can rely on over time, ensure that you include all of the other factors of effective email and social media communication into the mix.

…and good luck!

So, I put together a good list of media contacts and imported them from Excel into GroupMail. I called the appropriate editor for each publication to give them a heads up that I was sending a press release their way in relation to a book I just published. Then, I sent my first campaign, using GroupMail’s database filters, to my media contacts in New York. The next night, I sent it to media contacts in Seattle. The ability to send individual, personalized messages to large groups of people while ensuring the privacy of each recipient along with the ability to filter my campaign to targeted subsets of my list using database filters made my job very easy.

I tracked the open and click through rates of the campaign with our GroupMetrics email tracking service. Because the list was small and very targeted – and because I gave the recipients advance notice with a phone call; open and click-through rates were very high. Normally, average click-through rates for email campaigns range from 2-18 percent of messages sent.

A day after I sent the release, I was contacted by one editor in the Seattle area who was interested in doing a story about the book in the June issue of their magazine. I was also notified by a newspaper in New York that they would be covering it.

The ability to track email and get immediate feedback or requests for followup from recipients makes email my preferred tool for press release and other communication campaigns.

As a customer, I can say that I’m a big fan of GroupMai!

Anyone who has traveled by air lately understands how these measures affect everyone, not just terrorist suspects. The same is true for email marketers. Rules put in place by antispam entities make it difficult for non-spammers to get their messages to the inbox of their customers.

Ironically, no matter how many measures are put in place — and no matter how inconvenient or costly those measures are to those of us who aren’t spammers or terrorists, they do little to stop terrorism or spam.

I mean, really – are terrorists going to change their ideology or desire to carry out their horrific plots because of new TSA measures that make us drop our collective pants at airport screening areas? Are spammers going to stop sending email because the rest of us are finding it difficult to get our message to our customers? And are those measures worth the inconvenience to all of us because they reduced spam volumes by 10 percent? 20 percent? 50 percent? I still get my daily dose of Viagra spam. Are those measures worth our collective inconvenience because it gives us a perception that we are safer from terrorism?

In the last 300 days, there have been over 14 million deaths related to Cardiovascular disease, over 1 million deaths related to traffic accidents, over 250 thousand deaths related to fires and over 5 thousand deaths caused by leprosy. Compare those figures with the amount of deaths caused by terrorism over the past 10 years, 2,929 (remember to divide that number by 10!) and it makes you wonder if our time and money is being spent disproportionately on the least of our problems. But for some reason the fear that we have about terrorism makes us accept the measures in place which affect all of us on a daily basis. Why aren’t we as fearful of traffic accidents, cardiovascular disease or fires? Those things that kill so many more of us each year? Why wouldn’t we let car manufacturers put a regulator in cars that limits the speed of our vehicles? Why won’t we collectively pay for good preventative health care for all Americans?

And why are we so fearful of spam that we allow measures to exist which affect all of us each day? Those measures that cause an important sales query not to reach our inbox; those measures that cause our important announcement to end up in the junk folder of our most important client; those measures that allow someone who signed up to receive our email one day to report it as spam the next because it was easier than unsubscribing.

What cost do those of us who aren’t spammers or terrorists have to pay before terrorism or spam is thwarted? Are we willing to pay that much? Are we willing to stop flying or stop emailing? And then what? Will spammers who were making a gob of money not exploit something else? Will terrorists who are driven by a zealous belief not develop plots that don’t involve airports?

Regardless of how many new measures antispam organizations or anti-terror agencies create, spammers will continue to send spam and terrorists will continue to plot terror. And we will continue to pay.

I wonder if money and time would be better spent focusing on finding and prosecuting those who are actually doing the spam and the terrorism and leave the rest of us alone.