eComXpo is October 9,10,11, 2007

Chicagoland’s very own eComXpo is October 9,10,11, 2007. You can join the fun and learning from anywhere in the world though!

eComXpo is the premier virtual Internet Marketing conference that is FREE to attend. I’ve also had the honor of speaking there previously. It’s a great resource for learning Internet marketing concepts and networking. Register now.

Arrington’s Post on Email Interfaces…

Interesting post, notice how the comments are way higher than normal? To me that indicates passion on a topic and need for improvement.

I still wish someone would put signatures on top of replies and that everyone had automated spell checks that worked well.

An Example of the World’s Data Crisis

The World Trade Center had one zip code, 10048. Five years later after their destruction, mail of all kinds arrives there daily! It’s an all too sad and vivid reminder of the crisis in our society with businesses not putting priority on cleaning data. This happens every day with catalogs sent to people who have moved or are now deceased.

In this case it’s inexcusable because it’s all one zip code that would be easy to surpress: 10048.

Whether it’s mail, e-mail, web pages, web 2.0 social networks and/or social media, the value creation foundation starts with data integrity. To build the superior ideas of the future, this area will play a pivotal role. Unfortunately, all too many people do not properly value data integrity or value not been blessed enough to be immersed in a culture who is obsessed with it as I have been in the past.

Consider whether you have a good enterprise data strategy before you launch your next project!   

McKinsey Quarterly E-mail Snafu

Segmenting e-mail audience further to send less e-mail is good.

Sending an e-mail out that has a link like this isn’t.

Email crisis!!!

Yahoo! and Gmail both need to put work into their e-mail software. I’ve outlined this in previous posts.

Yesterday was the last straw though.  My Yahoo! webmail lets spam through that it shouldn’t - all the time - while classifying real email as spam. Yet yesterday I was told that an email from a relatively new gmail account that I sent was classified as spam by a Yahoo! Mail account I sent it to. Gmail lets some spam through to my Inbox, while other e-mails not only haven’t made it to Inbox, they didn’t even go to the spam folder. Then inappropriately classifies one of my shared domain servers as spam.   

Alright enough! How in the world is is anyone supposed to communicate in a reliable fashion? Maybe you guys should have some people work on fixing this stuff?

It’s a serious problem whether you are in London, New York, San Francisco or Singapore. Regardless of what portal you apply, no matter what your job or career.

Southwest Props for Customer Listening - Kinda Sorta

Everyone has heard the rumors about Southwest moving to assigned seating. They gave me the impression that they were clearly listening this morning for a moment or two.

I was sent an e-mail asking me to vote on the issue (Including using my frequent flyer number to create integrity) - though the questions were not detailed and there was no comment box option. It’s clear that they are looking at a few seating options.

OK, Dave, what could they have done better? Well, for one while they sent me the e-mail the poll is not mentioned anywhere on their blog at this time and it should be. Secondly, they should have made the poll results transparent to the voter afterwards so they got the feeling their opinion matters.  But overall, props for taking the time to ask!

Online E-mail Service Reliability Needs Improvement

At present, I have 4 web-based e-mail accounts, Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail/Live.com, Yahoo! Mail and my University of Chicago Graduate School of Business “Email4Life” account.

I can now discuss the issue without being accused of favoritism or bias because all four of the organizations above have now done this recently. This is the issue of e-mail reliability and making large changes in the live environment and ignoring the issues of a continuous and positive user experience is a disturbing trend. All of the above providers have had large outages and/or rollbacks to previous versions in the past month. This is not optimal and should not become the “norm”.

I’d like to ask program managers to please consider the following going forward:
1) Reliability of service is paramount and should not be sacrificed
2) Sacrificing long-standing features in new versions is not a good idea
3) Communicating and explaining the feature upgrades transparently is encouraged
4) Asking for user feedback on new features is encouraged
5) If the application operates more slowly using Ajax than it did before, please optimize it before implementing

I would hope that these organizations would understand the potential attrition and retention implications of actions such as these and change their future actions before it adversely affects them.

I’d like to share a glimpse at the top items on my wish list for improvements:
Gmail
- I love the conversation bundling feature, though there are times when I would like to unbundle a conversation and adding the ability to do this would be helpful
- Automatic spell checking (the new Hotmail/Live.com Beta has spell check integrated as you type - this should become the best practice)
Hotmail/Live.com
- In Live.com, restoration of the radio buttons to complete actions on multiple e-mails at once is necessary
- Stability of Live.com needs to be a priority, I switched back to Hotmail for now (you get kudos for the feedback form - though an acknowledgment that shows someone read it would be confidence inspiring)
Yahoo! Mail
- In the new version, restoration of the radio buttons to complete actions on multiple e-mails at once is necessary
- Automatic spellchecking (the new Hotmail/Live.com Beta has spell check integrated as you type - this should become the best practice)
- In the new version, I’d like it to look and feel more like the old Yahoo! Mail - e-mail me if you’d like more detail
University of Chicago
- Build an understanding that Email4life is a critical alumni networking tool and treat it as such
- Communicate clearly with all members of the community and act on their feedback in an accountable manner; In summary, providers need to fully consider the user experience when making changes in their offerings
Do other people have other suggestions or thoughts on this issue?