If the results of a recent Forrester Research Study are accurate, email marketing in the United States is expected to reach $2 billion in 2014. It’s easy to understand why email is one of the preferred tools of the day given the economic climate of the last year. It’s cost-effective and delivers a high return on investment.
At Hammock, we not only advise our clients on their email newsletter efforts and are involved in their development and execution, but we also have our own monthly email newsletter about the work we do for our clients.
Here are five testing tips that we use each month to make sure our latest issue is ready when we hit send:

Nothing makes me want to close my browser tab faster than a website littered with graphics, ads and text all jammed in there together, filling up the entire page. Like with print, using white space online is crucial — especially since web readers’ eyes are likely to be taxed more from reading a web page than a printed one.

Association members are increasingly turning to association websites for news, networking and resources, which is why tracking these visits is fundamental to managing a successful site. Here are three reasons why it’s so important for associations to have Google Analytics running on their sites:

5 Questions to Ask Each Month
Have you looked at your website this month? We look at hammock.com every single day. We strive for at least one piece of new content each day of the week. While not every site requires that the content be quite so dynamic, there are things that you should check at least once a month for function, content and freshness.

With newspapers and their social media policies taking center stage in the news recently, I thought it might be interesting to talk to a couple of my favorite local newspaper folks to get their take.

Robert Quigley is Internet Editor for the Austin American-Statesman, and Addie Broyles is their food writer. I connected with both of them through Twitter within the last 12 months, and when I asked some questions this week about social media and newspapers, they were just as insightful and helpful as I expected.

Q: You say in a recent article that there are no rules in place for the way staff conduct themselves on Twitter and other social media tools, do you think it will come to that?
Robert: Our normal code of conduct and ethics rules apply. I don’t think we’ll need to institute more layers of rules to cover social media, unless we need to respond to a serious problem that isn’t covered by our normal rules. Although we have a huge majority of our staff using social media, we haven’t run into any problems that would require new measures. This is an innovative newspaper, and our staff takes chances with new tools. We don’t want to stifle that. That being said, everyone here knows they represent the newspaper 24/7, and they are expected to act in accordance with that, no matter the platform.

Q: Even though the Statesman hasn’t issued policies regarding staff use of social media, are there certain rules or filters that you set up for yourself when it comes to using Twitter?
Robert: Yes, I do have rules that I’ve made up for myself:

1. I re-read every post twice and take a deep breath before hitting “update.” I have no one reading tweets behind me, and it can be a bit unnerving. I’ve sent out more than 4,000 updates on the @statesman Twitter account now, and my typo/other mistake rate is pretty low because of this rule.
2. I try to either attribute every post, provide a link or both. I do not retweet something unless it also has good sourcing. I also I want people to know that they can trust what I’m posting.
3. I try to space out my tweets so I don’t annoy my followers. It can be tough, though. Some days, I just have a lot to share.
4. I follow back people who seem to be following the account because they’re interested in what I have to say. I don’t follow back people who appear to be just looking to increase their own follower counts. The reason I follow people back is so I can exchange direct messages and because I think that’s the way Twitter should work: You follow people back who are interested in you.
5. I aggregate the news: If the Houston Chronicle or New York Times or KEYE-TV has an interesting story that I don’t have, I’ll retweet or link to them. I want people to see the @statesman account as a site that is looking to give the most interesting news, regardless of source.

Q: What do you think the use of social media has done for the Statesman here in town?
Addie: The Statesman‘s use of social media, led with its Twitter account, has brought a new level of attention and helped remove the stigma that it’s for an older demographic and squash the idea that newspapers’ content that is old by the time it gets to readers. Many, many people get the majority of their news through Twitter, which puts tv, radio, newspapers and blogs on the same playing field. Twitter has also allowed people in Austin to feel like they are connected — and eventually invested — in the newspaper. The colloquial dialogue between readers and twitterers strengthens that bond.

Q: How long have you been tweeting? Did you start tweeting as Addie Broyles, Statesman employee, or simply Addie Broyles?
Addie: I’ve been tweeting for about a year, and I started as the food writer for the Statesman. It took Gary Vaynerchuk, the host of Wine Library TV, convincing me to get over my fear that Twitter was a waste of time. It was some of the best advice I’ve gotten since I started this job. I was clear from the get-go that this was both a personal and professional account, which the Statesman supports because they know that the personality behind the tweets is what really makes them sing. I look to @OmarG for inspiration.

Q: How did you balance your personal tweets with your tweets as a representative of the Statesman?
Addie: I try to make all of my tweets come back to food, but I’d say about 95 percent of them end up about food, the other 5 percent are about music, life in Austin or being a parent. I’m constantly thinking about what to tweet and how to tweet, and my Twitter voice changes by the week. As Twitter evolves, its purpose in users’ lives evolves, too.

Q: Are more staff members diving into social media?
Robert: New staff members are joining Twitter all the time. I’ve given a couple of brown-bag lunches to help teach those who are interested in trying it out how to set up an account, why to do it, what they can do, etc. After each session, another handful of reporters signs up. We now have more than 45 staff members on Twitter posting information about their beats.

Q: What would you tell other newspaper folks who are interested in tweeting?
Robert: I’d tell newspaper folks who aren’t on Twitter that they should give it a try. They’ll get out of it what they put into it, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a shot. I personally think it’s the best tool for journalists to come down the pipe in a while, but people have to discover that potential on their own.

Razorfish releases their 2009 Digital Outlook Report

With their annual report, Razorfish, the “agency for marketing, experience and enterprise design” shares their perspective on the year ahead in digital media. At 160 pages, along with their trend predictions for the year, the report is packed with information on how digital ad spending was allocated for Razorfish clients in 2008. Here are some of my favorite highlights from the report:

• Social advertising will grow up.
  Display advertising in the broader Web, too, will become more social, as linking display advertising to forms of social marketing — like blogger outreach, social credits, engagement programs and widgets that let you mix in your own content— become more important. However, there are no guarantees that this will be completely figured out within the course of the year.
• Social influence research will become more important than social measurement.
  Do you want to know how? By focusing on meaning rather than measurement. To think in terms of social as a channel that should be measured like TV, print, radio or digital is missing the point. Instead, the greatest value in social for marketers will be in the real-time insights it provides. Razorfish calls this Social Influence Research and it is going to drive marketing campaigns, product development and customer service programs. There will be an evolution from measuring sentiment to understanding opinion and synchronizing it with the Net Promoter scores. Why? Because marketers care about opinion much more than they do about sentiment.
• Emerging media will not kill advertising but change it forever.
  The digitization of media has empowered people with complete control over their media consumption; they are able to watch, read or listen to whatever they want whenever they want, and that typically includes advertising. Efforts to force attention to ads without providing value will fall on deaf ears and blind eyes, challenging traditional ad models.

  Digital is impacting more than what you might typically describe as “media” — it has created entirely new channels and continues to radically blur the line between the real and the virtual worlds. New, immersive experiences leveraging incredible human-computer interaction models have leaped from the pages of science fiction novels and become reality. Taken together, these trends are NOT killing advertising. They are simply changing its role. According to the report, advertising is now less about reach and less about changing attitudes but about more engaging experiences, which leverage new digital capabilities to deliver value to the audiences that interact with them. It’s about marketer making themselves useful, plain and simple.

We like to stay on the leading edge of the curve when it comes to technology, social media, publishing, business and so much more. So when dates are announced for SXSWi each year, we don’t pencil it into our calendar–we write it in huge letters in permanent marker!

Here’s a book publishing news-note that is refreshingly appropriate.

A new book from the the O’Reilly “Missing Manual” series called “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” is today being published simultaneously in print and is being posted in the Help section of Wikipedia.

In other words, in addition to publishing a $30 version of the book in print, O’Reilly is open-sourcing a free version of the book’s contents in a way that can keep its contents up-to-date — indefinitely.

The drive to post “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” to Wikipedia was spearheaded by author John Broughton, a registered editor at Wikipedia since 2005 with more than 20,000 edits.

My observation: I have a print version of a similar book sitting on my desk — O’Reilly’s MediaWiki, by Daniel J. Barrett — and I can see how having this new book’s contents online will help promote book sales, rather than cannibalize them. A book that serves as a manual has a certain functionality in print that, despite the belief of many, is unique when working in an environment that is new and complex. My copy is dog-eared and sitting there, just where I want it when I’m trying to figure out a nuanced hack. It’s like another monitor, dedicated to some esoteric stuff.

Having a resource that is simultaneously online and in print adds to the functionality and productivity-enhancing roles of both.

Better still would be also having a video-enhanced version.

[Cross posted on Rex Hammock’s RexBlog.]

Just like you wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint, you don’t want to build a website without a wireframe. Whether you’re building an entire site from scratch or just adding on a new page or section, wireframes are a big help to the design team as well as the site developers.
What wireframes do
Essentially, wireframes are the blueprints for your site. They tell the people building the architecture of the site what sections will go where to give them get an idea of what they will have to code, and they give the designers an overview of how the different pages will work together, which is helpful in choosing design elements.

Previously, I provided a practical way for retailers to use Twitter as a means to broadcast a text-message to customers. Another thing you can do with Twitter is tracking messages posted on the service by a specific group of people or on a specific topic.

To track people, you simply set up an account and “follow” the specific people’s Twitter accounts.

To follow a topic, you go to Twitter’s Search page and do a keyword search. After you land on the results page, you will have the URL to a page that will provide continuous updates to any message posted on that topic. But what if you want to track several terms, or want to narrow your search? Twitter Search allows you to use what are called “search operators” to accomplish that. Here is a page that explains how to use search operators like the one I used to set up a Twitter search with several terms about the Tennessee Titans that looked like this: titans OR “tennessee titans” OR “jeff fisher” OR “vince young” OR “LP Field” OR #titans.

You can make links to those two pages — the one where you are following a certain group of people and the one with results to the keywords search and be done with it.

Or, with a little bit of simple, simple work that any semi-geek (I can do it, so there) can accomplish, you can take the content from those two pages and display it on your own website or blog. (As these posts are intended to be “simple things,” I suggest you may want to enlist the help of someone who is familiar with how to use RSS feeds or the “API” of Twitter. You, personally, don’t need to know anything other than how to ask the question, “Can you help me hack the Twitter API to display something on my blog?” In this case, “hack” is something good.)

Here’s a great example of what I mean:

The group Sunlight Foundation has used the Twitter API to create a service called “Capitol Tweets” that collects and displays every new Twitter message shared by any member of Congress who uses Twitter.

So here’s an idea for you: Do you follow a specific group of lawmakers or public officials — say ones from a specific state or region? You can easily develop a version of what the Starlight Foundation is doing.

You can even develop a widget that allows other people to display what you’re doing on their sites — like the one above that is shared by the Sunlight Foundation, but that’s another post for another day.

[Also posted on RexBlog.com]

[via: Read Write Web]