Archives / October, 2005

Book Short: Reality Doesn’t have to Bite

Book Short:  Reality Doesn’t have to Bite I just read Confronting Reality (book; audio), the sequel to Execution, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.  Except I didn’t read it, I listened to it on Mariquita’s iPod Shuffle over the course of two or three long runs in the past week.  The book was good enough, but I also learned two valuable lessons.  Lesson 1:  Listening to audio books when running is difficult – it’s hard to focus enough, easy to lose one’s place, can’t refer back to anything or take notes.  Lesson 2:  If you sweat enough on your spouse’s Shuffle, you can end up owning a Shuffle of your own. Anyway, I was able to focus on the book…

Beyond CAN-SPAM: The Nightmare Continues, Part II

Beyond CAN-SPAM:  The Nightmare Continues, Part II A couple of months ago, I blogged about two well-intentioned but very unfortunate new laws on the books, one in Michigan and one in Utah, designed to protect children from advertising that’s harmful to minors, but in fact full of unintended consequences. Today, the Detroit Free Press had a great article about how the law in Michigan is so poorly conceived and executed, that not only is it angering legitimate businesses, it’s actually angering the parents who were supposed to be its principle beneficiaries.  One parent’s quote in the article pretty much sums it up: “What was the whole point in signing up if it’s not doing any good? Is this just the…

links for 2005-10-23

Return Path Solutions for Increased Email Delivery, Performance Return Path’s newly unveiled web site is now a blog, with an online resource center for email marketers and postings by its executive team (tags: Blog Email Email_Marketing Marketing Return_Path ReturnPath)

links for 2005-10-22

Soup for Nuts From our client, Business & Legal Reports, a HILARIOUS read in the strange-but-true category. This is essential reading for any manager who has ever mediated an employee dispute. Tthanks to Tami Forman for citing this one! (tags: Humor)

Return Path Blog is Up

Return Path Blog is Up Today we launched our new corporate web site at Return Path.  We’re trying an experiment.  We’ve reinvented large portions of the site as a corporate blog (for those of you who follow Fred’s blog, the two of us just realized last week that we had both done this to our companies’ web sites at the same time without knowing it). As I said in my introductory post on the new site, we’re casting the blog as an Online Resource Center for Email Marketers.  There are no hard and fast rules for how corporate blogs are supposed to work, so we’re experimenting with it.  I hope all of our friends, employees, customers, and investors, as well…

links for 2005-10-20

eDork: Topic Today: Harvey Balls Get your mind out of the gutter! These are very useful and oddly hard to find graphics for doing checklists in presentations (thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for this link). (tags: Graphics)

In From the Perimeter

In From the Perimeter I’m at the Direct Marketing Association’s annual massive trade show (DMA*05) in Atlanta.  While there are lots of things to potentially blog about, I think the most interesting one is the simplest.  When I started attending the DMA’s shows six years ago, the only interactive marketeing companies who exhibited were email vendors and the occasional sweepstakes company — and any interactive marketing company who did bother to show up was relegated to a small booth space in a corner of the trade show floor, away from the real action.  A friend of mine once told me it was easy for him to hit all the email guys at DMA — just walk around the perimeter of…

Response to a Deliverability Rant

Response to a Deliverability Rant Justin Foster from WhatCounts, an email service provider based in Seattle, wrote a very lengthy posting about email deliverability on the WhatCounts blog yesterday.  There’s some good stuff in it, but there are a couple of things I’d like to clarify from Return Path‘s perspective. Justin’s main point is spot-on.  Listening to email service providers talk about deliverability is a little bit like eating fruit salad:  there are apples and oranges, and quite frankly pineapples and berries as well.  Everyone speaks in a different language.  We think the most relevant metric to use from a mailer’s perspective is inbox placement rate.  Let’s face it – nothing else matters.  Being in a junk mail folder is…

links for 2005-10-11

ClickZ Experts on Email Marketing Strategies (tags: Email_Marketing ReturnPath Return_Path Email Marketing Technology)

Counter Cliche: Failure Is Not an Orphan

Counter Cliche:  Failure Is Not an Orphan I haven’t written one of these for a while, but this week, Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week, Success Has a Thousand Fathers, definitely merits an entrepreneurial point of view.  Fred’s main point is right — it’s very easy when something goes right, whether a company/venture deal or even something inside the company like a good quarter or a big new client win, for lots of people to take credit, many of whom don’t deserve it. But what separates A companies from B and C companies is the ability to recognize and process failures as well as successes.  Failure is not orphan.  It usually has as many real fathers as success.  Although it’s…

What a View, Part II

What a View, Part II In Part I, I talked about how Return Path’s 360 reviews have become a central part of our company’s human capital strategy over the past five years.  While most staff members’ reviews have been done for weeks or months now, I just finished up the final portion of my own review, which I think is worth sharing. I always include my Board in my own 360.  My process is as follows: 1. I send the Board all the raw (and summarized) data from the staff reviews of me, both quantitative and qualitative. 2. I send the Board a list of questions to think about in terms of their view of my performance (see below). 3….