David contends that the current email complaint system lacks accuracy, granularity and security. For instance, one person clicking the spam button 10 times generates the same number of complaints as 10 people who each click once; recipients can't register the nature of their complaints, which accrue to IP addresses rather than senders; and the system doesn't protect against falsely-generated complaints.

He says the ideal system would be sender-based rather than IP-based. People would only be allowed to complain once per message, and frequency would be accounted for. The system also would also differentiate between complaints for commercial vs. transactional messages, by domain, and allow recipients to specify why they are complaining and what they would like to do about it. Both recipients and senders also would be protected against abuses of the system.

A reputation system based on this kind of complaint mechanism would benefit everyone. Senders would get better feedback and a more equitable allocation of emailing privileges, and consumers would get more relevant messages.

Sort of like Babe Ruth's fabled finger pointing out his home run before he hit it, perhaps David's article will point ISPs and ESPs in a direction of more accurate and more accountable complaint management.

What did Kodak do wrong? For several months in 2004, Kodak Imaging Network sent email marketing messages that were missing an opt-out, a notice of the right to opt-out and a valid physical postal address. The company said the violation was due to a computer error, and that the emails were sent to recipients who had given permission. But the FTC was unmoved.

To settle the case, the Kodak subsidiary agreed to pay civil penalties amounting to the campaign's gross proceeds and to submit to monitoring to ensure compliance with the FTC's order prohibiting future violations.

In pursuing a strict interpretation of the law despite Kodak's otherwise good intentions, the FTC appears to be sending a message: CAN-SPAM isn't just for the bad guys. Mainstream businesses are also subject to enforcement -- even when violations are unintentional or seem relatively minor.

The take-away for me is that service issues are an inherent part of the Internet. So it's critical to have contingency plans in place when the inevitable happens and your servers go hiccup. In particular, AOL impressed many of us in the ESP community with the way it handled communications and updates throughout its outage. Its actions allowed us to communicate the issues to our clients, and the result was a manageable problem that was already old news to nearly everyone involved.

If you are a fan, please take a moment to go their survey and submit your vote (along with the other blogs you might read).

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=803032287919.

The authors of the study, conducted by the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, gathered data in three distinct ways: they interviewed the participants, asked them to keep a diary and, most uniquely of all, followed them around -- for days. We all know that self-reported studies are imperfect, but true observational studies are rare due to their cost and effort. So this more in-depth approach makes the results even more noteworthy:

• TV continues to be king. More time is spent on TV than on the Web.


• The Web now has equaled or surpassed the reach and exposure of radio, newspapers and magazines.


• Not surprisingly, the Web dominates in the workplace. (It's hard to watch TV at work <grin>.)


• The Web's greatest influence is not as a stand-alone medium, but as a partner that drives up results when used alongside other media.


• Web users spend more money in virtually every category than traditional TV-centric consumers.

The bottom line of the report is that online marketing spend as a percentage of total advertising spend still significantly trails the percentage of time consumers spend online.

It's good to be in online marketing...

Additionally, unlike RSS solutions by Firefox or Yahoo!, Outlook actually tags RSS messages as new and read. This feature enables users to easily know when they have new messages, just like an inbox.

As marketers, you have the choice of delivering your messages via RSS or via email. The good news for users of Outlook 2007 (and Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) is that they will be able to seamlessly consume either one. Outlook 2007 is just one more step -- albeit an important one -- in the convergence of the RSS and email worlds into one overall message management experience.

A preview of RSS in Outlook 2007:

While it sounds like self-reported usage of RSS users is fairly low (below 5%), the rate at which sites are adopting RSS is occuring at an astonishing rate.

They polled several hundred popular sites to find out their plans for RSS. Sixty-three percent (63%) of large companies plan to introduce RSS within 2006! Seventy-one percent (71%) of those plan on spending over $50,000 and 23% plan on spending over $1 million.

These numbers are amazing and even if they are double the actual 2006 deployments, there's no question that RSS content will soon be flooding the internet. To be clear, the study doesn't differentiate between RSS publishing, marketing, service, etc. However, the fact remains that RSS content will be available from a majority of well trafficed web site in a year or less.

RSS is exploding onto the landcape - readers are appearing everywhere from Google Mail and My Yahoo to Microsoft Vista and the next version of Outlook. And, from Jupiter's report, the content world is embracing RSS just as quickly.

There is a brand new internet channel being born. Even if only a fraction of the users know the name of RSS, they will all be using it before you know it.

A marketer who has not done video in email wanted to know: Since presumably no one would embed a video file in an email message (would they?), and since it therefore arrives externally through a recipient's Internet connection, does video content in email affect spam filters?

This is a great question. Basically, most solutions deliver video from an external source/url (often the Akamai network) into the email when it's opened. But in order to render the video, recipients require a plug-in application -- such as Windows Media or Macromedia Flash -- which email clients like Microsoft Outlook increasingly disable by default.

Both Silverpop and a company we acquired, Avalon, have extensive experience with video email. Our view is that the playability of video email continues to decline overall, although some of the Web-based email clients have gotten somewhat better at rendering it. Whether it works for you really depends on whether the members of your particular list (B2B, B2C, etc.) can or will play it.

I've seen implementations of video email that actually embed the video into a MIME body. Believe it or not, these seem to play very widely. But they suffer from huge file sizes, and thus, huge outbound pipe requirements.

From a marketing perspective, video is a unique medium that can tell a story like no other. However the production costs and playability have turned most early adopters away. The problem is compounded for prospecting emails. The very people with the strongest aversion to promotional email are also those who leave Outlook on its default settings, which prevent video email from working. In order to view the video, a user must click through to a browser. You can imagine what that does to email response rates.

However, all that being said, we do have a few clients who make regular use of video email in their relationship marketing and enjoy consistently high response rates. Their customers want their messages and are willing to set their security settings so that they work.

The value of RSS to consumers and to marketers has nothing to do with whether it is consumed on the desktop, cell phone, or Web portal. And regardless of whether an RSS user is aware of the term, he or she can receive the content and find it valuable.

RSS continues to penetrate the consumer landscape at a staggering rate. Consumers like it for several reasons that have nothing to do with desktop applications. First, it is easy. Subscribing to an RSS feed requires only a single click. Second, consumers control their permission. They don't have to opt-out and hope that a marketer will quit emailing them. They simply remove the feed from their reader and the relationship is severed. Third, consumers can be anonymous. They don't have to read the privacy policy and trust that their email address won't be shared with unnamed partners.

The only real problem a marketer could have with RSS is that you can't build lists of RSS subscribers to give to partners to prospect with. In my view, that's a great problem to have.

eMarketer also cited an Ipsos Insight study showing that mobile phone ownership is on the rise worldwide and positing that the devices are poised to become the dominant Internet platform outside the home. The Ipsos study did find however, that growth in Internet browsing on mobile phones was flattening in the U.S. and Canada, where wireless Internet access via notebook PCs appears to be emerging as the stronger out-of-home Internet platform.

You can check out the full article here.