This evening at DemoCamp 5 I will be announcing a new feature here at One Degree called “Interesting”.
For too long Canadian companies have had very low visibility in the market.
Could you name ten interesting Internet ideas coming out of Canada right now if someone asked you to? I’m not sure I could before DemoCamp. Now One Degree wants to take interesting ideas in Canada another step further into the spotlight…
Month: April 2006
Ever send something out to your customer list that you immediately knew was wrong?
Well don’t feel too bad – it even happens to folks like Amazon.com. File this example away somewhere for the next time you have to explain your “oops” to your boss!
The “email signature”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block (“sig file”) is probably the oldest online marketing tool. Sig files originated when email did, way back in 1965. Originally the domain of geeks (and I use the term with the utmost affection), they often contained only basic contact information, but also elaborate creations of “ASCii art”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art, pithy quotes and self-classification systems (e.g. “The Geek Code”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code — yes, this collections of numbers, letters and symbols actually means something to geeks, such as my feelings about Star Trek, my dislike of Windows and my level of education).
And then, the marketers invaded.
Well, invaded is a little strong. Marketers figured out that they could use that space for more than just basic contact information. So, forty-some years after the advent of sig files, where have marketers taken them? The earliest true marketing use of a sig file (and one that is still considered one of the “best uses of sig files as a viral marketing device”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing#Notable_examples_of_viral_marketing ) was by Hotmail; even prior to its acquisition by Microsoft, all Hotmail emails went out with an advertisement for the Hotmail service itself in the signature. This is now standard practice across email services and not nearly as effective as the early days. What has been the next step in the evolution of sig files?