Archives / February, 2009

New Email Blogger Extraordinaire

New Email Blogger Extraordinaire My good friend and co-founder George Bilbrey, Return Path’s President, is now blogging. His blog, Monkey Mind Labs, is aptly named in part after Return Path’s long-standing but little-known corporate mascot. His first few posts are up.  My guess is that his blog will be a bit like mine in that it will cover topics about email marketing as well as entrepreneurship, but I can almost promise that George will be both wittier and more insightful than I.  At least, that’s what he tells me. Take a look!  Subscribe. Enjoy.

More Useful Than I Thought

More Useful Than I Thought I’ve had a Twitter account for a couple years but only started using it in earnest in the last couple of weeks.  And while it is to some extent yet another distraction and flow of information, it’s proving to be much more useful than I thought.  Here are some nuggets from literally less than a week of heavy usage: – Nice quick exchanges with three existing customers who I otherwise wouldn’t talk to – Already have over 200 followers, at least 50% just in the last few days – One set of direct messages, and we turned a skeptic into a free trial provided that the client work with us on an important but difficult…

The Evils of Patent Litigation

The Evils of Patent Litigation There have been a lot of posts over the years on the blogs I read about patents and how they are problematic.  I know Brad has done a bunch, including this one. I wrote one once about a dumb patent issued in the email space, which is here.  And of course no listing of great patent posts would be complete without a nod to my colleague Whitney McNamara, who I believe coined the term "ass patent" starting with this post.  In fact, Whit has a whole category of posts on his blog about ass patents.   But one of the most thoughtful, accurate, and proscriptive ones I've read is what Fred wrote a couple days ago….

Book Short: Hire Great

Book Short: Hire Great It’s certainly not hiring season for most of America The World The Universe, but we are still making some limited hires here at Return Path, and I thought – what better time to retool our interviewing and hiring process than in a relatively slow period? So I just read Who: The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.  It’s a bit of a sequel, or I guess more of a successor book, to the best book I’ve ever read about hiring and interviewing, Topgrading, by Geoff Smart and his father Brad (post, link to buy).  This one wasn’t bad, and it was much shorter and crisper. I’m not sure I believe the oft-quoted…

Less is More

Less is More I have a challenge for the email marketing community in 2009. Let’s make this the Year of “Less is More.” Marketers are turning to email more and more in this down economy. There’s no question about that. My great fear is that just means they’re sending more and more and more emails out without being smart about their programs. That will have positive short term effects and drive revenues, but long term it will have a negative long term impact on inboxes everywhere. And these same marketers will find their short term positive results turning into poor deliverability faster than you can say “complaint rate spike.” I heard a wonderful case study this week from Chip House…

Please, Let There Be Another Explanation

Please, Let There Be Another Explanation One of the things I was most excited about with an Obama presidency was that it finally seemed as if we had a real leader in the hot seat.  Someone who might actually be able to run an effective government instead of a bureaucracy paralyzed by partisanship.  I still have this hope. But I also hope what we’re seeing around the stimulus bill is not what we’re in for the next four years.  What I’m seeing is a complete absence of leadership around the problem.  Seems to me, taking lessons from the corporate world, that Obama should have done two things that would have gotten the program passed in a bipartisan way much more…

Desperately Seeking an Owner for "Other"

Desperately Seeking an Owner for “Other” A couple weeks ago in Living with Less…For Good, I mentioned that we’re on a crusade against extraneous expenses at Return Path these days, as is pretty much the rest of the world. After a close review of our most recent month’s financials, we have a new target:  “Other.”  A relatively inconspicuous line on the income statement, this line, which different companies call different things such as “Other G&A” and “General Office,” is inherently problematic NOT because it inherently encompasses a huge amount of expenses, although it might, but rather because it inherently doesn’t have an owner and rarely has a budget. As we dug into the gory details of “Other” our accounting system…

Twitter

TwitterA small administrative note…I changed my Twitter name to mattblumberg from its more obscure predecessor.  Not sure I'll tweet a lot more, but I may give it a try.

Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash

Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job is a good read, as were his last two books, The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link).  They’re all super short, easy reads (four express train rides on Metro North got the job done), with a single simple message and great examples.  This one is probably my second favorite so far. This book, which has a downright dreary title, is great.  It points to and proposes a solution to a problem I’ve thought about for a long time, which is how do you create meaning for people in their day to day work…