_This is a Guest Contribution by Mitch Joel._
Maybe I got a little over excited but I don’t think so. I think there comes a time in every person’s life when they read something that they knew, felt or saw coming but never put it into words.
It happened to me.
It happened when I read the article, “Inside The New World Of Listenomics by Bob Garfield”:http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId=46329 _(registration required)_. Garfield is an ad critic for Ad Age Magazine and also the author of “And Now A Few Words From Me”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0071403167/imho0b-20 (a brilliant read on the advertising world) and his take on branding and how it is evolving really drove home some strong messages.
Category: Strategy
A few weeks ago we started getting what I called “subscription spam” through our e-mail newsletter sign-up forms. It seems that comment spam attacks are mistaking e-mail sign-up forms for comment fields. Apparently e-mail lists are now collateral damage in the comment spam wars.
Because we use a double-opt-in process we saw bounces from the fake e-mail addresses the spammers were using. That’s how we knew this was happening. And it was getting pretty irritating because these automated tools were becoming more aggressive and we were seeing several bounces per hour from these silly things.
Worse still, the bounces were coming back from big portal sites and from their perspective it looked like _we were spamming them_!
I sent off a note to “Campaign Monitor”:http://www.campaignmonitor.com to see if they had been seeing this with other clients, but it seemed we were the first ones with the problem.
The way Campaign Monitor turned this complaint to their advantage is a great lesson for all marketers…
Interactive marketers never like coming across studies that correlate feeble e-business efforts with their country of origin, so you can imagine how I felt when I received an e-mail from research company “eMarketer”:http://www.emarketer.com titled *”Is Canada Losing Its Edge?”*
In short, “the summary”:http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003559 from the company’s “new report”:http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?ebus_canada_sep05 (which includes additional third-party research) suggests that Canadian small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are “falling behind international competitors when it comes to the adoption of e-business solutions.” Given that “Statistics Canada”:http://www.statscan.ca says 99 percent of all Canadian businesses fall into the category of SMBs, this is bad news for the Great White North.