“When it comes to email marketing, the best subject lines tell what’s inside, and the worst subject lines sell what’s inside.” – MailChimp

There are days when I swear at least half of my new emails are marketing messages or SPAM. Filters have helped, but our email inboxes are fuller than ever. Because of “inbox overload” and skepticism caused by SPAM and phishing, email marketing open rates are declining. So, how does an email marketer cut through inbox clutter? Effective subject lines are the first step and here are a few tips for writing them:

• Keep it simple. Straightforward, concise subject lines work best. Anything overly salesy or kitschy will likely turn off the consumer, resulting in an immediate delete.
• Subject lines don’t need to grab attention with ALL CAPS or exclamation points – they need to appear legitimate. You want your email to look like something a consumer asked for – not advertising or SPAM. Anything overly promotional will spark skepticism.
• Don’t nag or beg.
• Personalization/customization can work, but not always. If possible, make the subject line relevant and timely, relating to something happening currently – holidays, sporting events, economy, housing market.
• Test, test, and test again. The surefire way to find out what works for your particular product or service is to test. Guidelines are not absolute and something that didn’t work for one retailer, might just work for you.

Back in the early ’90′s in the UK there was a commercial for the soft drink – Tango. This commercial showed that when you drank a can of their soda, a little orange man would run up to you and slap you in the face – “You’ll know when you’ve been Tango’d”

As you may imagine, this spawned a spate of copycat incidents across schoolyards in the UK, with children suffering ear damage as their classmates would sneak up on them, slapping them, or Tango-ing them. Shortly after this, the commercial was banned. Tango later reshot the ad, replacing the slap with a kiss.

Today, I found out that another orange based company – Cheetos – has decided to go a couple of steps beyond the Tango campaign. With their Random Acts of Cheetos commercials they actually encourage people to commit vandalism. i.e. if someone deserves it, throw some cheetos in the laundry with their best whites… for the neat freak you know, coat their keyboard in crumbled cheetos… and so on.

Aside from the lawsuits, do they realize the potential reputation management hit that they could take from this? Already they have people talking about how irresponsible they are being, what about when people actually start doing what they’re told and damage other’s property? Are they prepared for that kind of backlash? Do they have a Reputation Management plan in place? From the looks of it, there’s one heck of an opportunity for any negative press to hit on page 1 for “Cheetos”. Will it happen? Well, it depends on whether the campaign picks up or not, apparently it’s been running for a while now, and so far it has little traction.

Just a little reminder that your error pages need to be NOINDEX-ed or added in to your robots.txt file to be excluded, otherwise things that you don’t want ranking for your brand … may.

Okay, you just got out of that meeting with your client. They like your idea.  The general plan indicated by your storyboards and treatment seemed to match their concept/mission statement. Time to move on to the next step.

As the producer, you already knew how you wanted this program to look, but you had to ‘comic book’ it for your customer. Now, you need to develop your script – the most detailed exposition you will come up with.

You will be taking the work you have already done and fusing it with further details to create the ready-to-be-shot version of your program. Keep in mind, professional treatments and storyboards are quite a bit more detailed than I explained in Part 1.  Nonetheless, this is your beginner’s guide to how scripted [commercial] video is done.

Let’s once again return to our example. If this were your video (I still hope it isn’t), your script might start something like this:

INT. OFFICE BUILDING – MAIN FLOOR – WS/ESTABLISHING – DAY

This is just one example of how your script might start. It would be important to note here that in this video, there is no fade in – which is why I have put “FADE IN” inside of parenthesis. Just about all of your programs will fade in from black, unless your piece is for a firm that is so avant-garde that even their farts have landed in the Guggenheim.

The two lines that have been put in all-caps are what are called “sluglines.”  These lines in a script tell the reader everything they need to know about the setting. The first line says that this shot is an interior shot in an office building on the main floor, during the day, and that it is a wide shot (or establishing shot). This specifically is a shot that has a wide depth of field and “establishes” setting.

You can then adapt your treatment to fill in the details. The second slugline says that the next shot is closer to the man and that it is a medium shot, or from about slightly above the waist and up. The shot in the video is a little bit further out than your average MS, but for our purposes we will call it as such.

You would follow this formula and work out the rest of your piece – including this information for EACH shot and every piece of action and decription that goes with it. Some basic shots that you will probably use: Wide Shot(WS), Long shot(LS), Medium Shot(MS), Medium Close Up (MCU), Close Up (CU), Big Close Up (BCU).

Anchor text is the text on a Web page that you click which takes you to another page. To get a little bit more technical, it’s the hyperlink text. It’s the text that the search engines look at to get some idea of the context of the page being linked to. If the anchor text says NonProfit Services, then the search engines start to think that the page has something to do with NonProfit services. Simple enough?

Then, why do so many people still insist on using “Click Here” as the anchor text? Back in the early days of the Web, when the average user was still getting acquainted with the Web - informing the user of the action that they should take was more necessary.  These days it’s downright wasteful.

The page on your site with the video on the starving children in Africa isn’t about “Click Here.”   You should motivate users to “View the Video on Famine Stricken African Children,” or whatever keywords you’re trying to target.

If you really do want to rank for “Click Here,” you’ve got one heck of a job ahead of you trying to knock the current champ off that perch…

What’s the most common reason brands find themselves on the “ouch” side of social media?  I started thinking about this after reading Jeremiah Owyang’s list of brands that have been punk’d by social media in the past few years.  As I made my way through Jeremiah’s list and began adding some of my personal favorites, my mind sorted each incident into broad categories:

• Brandjacking for nonprofit cause (Louis Vuitton, Starbucks, Chevy Tahoe)
• Brandjacking for fun
• Silly PR firm gaffe (nothing deceitful, just not terribly smart…like the Johnson and Johnson Baby Camp example on Jeremiah’s list)
• Sneaky, underhanded behavior designed to deceive (Walmart, Sony, Whole Foods, Burger King)
• Poor quality (products that don’t work properly, bad service, mistreating customers, etc. – Dell, Kryptonite, Delta, Ted, AOL, Best Buy, Panasonic, Comcast)

Sadly, deceitful tactics like fake Blogs are the reason for a big chunk of the social media problems companies have experienced.  Hopefully enough of these incidents have been exposed to frighten big brands (and their PR firms) into better behavior in the future.

But the biggest category, hands down, is the last one on my list:  Poor [fill in the blank].  In the days of Web 1.0 (i.e., the digital newspaper, the uncomplicated landscape of “one to many” communications), companies didn’t have to worry too much about trivial things like product quality or making customers mad by holding them hostage on a runway for ten hours (Delta). 

Those days are obviously over.  Today, if you abuse your customers (by selling them a poor product, not delivering the customer service you promised, or letting rats run rampant through the kitchen you use to cook the food you are selling), chances are, you’ll be busted in a big, very public way. 

It really isn’t that complicated (Bull Durham: You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you run around the bases), but some companies seem to be having a hard time grasping the new realities of a Web 2.0 world.  Perhaps, come to think of it, this is why we’ve seen so much deceitful behavior.

Here’s a thought: Instead of hiring a PR firm to create a fake Blog and convince America that the Blog is real and that people really love, love, love you, why not…

Play fair.  Clean up your own mess.  Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone.  Share/give back. 

Oh, wait…those rules are for kindergartners, right?

No company can protect itself from the ”ouch” side of Social Media completely.  However, if you focus on delivering what you promise and treating your customers with respect, you’ll go a long way towards mitigating the risk of being punk’d.

Recently, I found myself on a plane with no computer, no ipod, not even a book. Armed with only the airline magazine and a pen, I decided to try to figure out how to play Sudoku. I had always been intimidated by the game because it looks pretty difficult. The airline magazine actually had really good instructions on how to figure the puzzles out. One of the most interesting things that I learned was that just as important as what numbers should go in the boxes, was what numbers should not go in the boxes.

The same rings true in successful Web reporting. With all of the available metrics, it is very easy to become defeated and overwhelmed by information overload when looking at your Web analytics.

Jim Sterne wrote a great post about this topic. I could not have stated it better. I have spoken with so many marketers who are in the habit of providing monthly ‘lists of meaningless data’ with no insight and context. Using analytics to measure success really does recast effective marketing deparmtents as strategic business consultants.

One problem that I’ll frequently hear when gathering requirements for a Search Audit, is that a site used to rank well for a particular term, but no longer does.  I’ll ask what content they had that used to rank for that term.  Sometimes I’ll hear that it was either pages that were taken down due to redesign, or due to seasonal content.  The most common response is – “We don’t know, that’s why we called you in.”

In those cases, a simple 301 redirect could be used to preserve those rankings by redirecting the page equity to a page with similar or like content.  What you don’t want to do is have a 404 page (always No-Index them) or some other stop page be presented to the user.

In the example below, Oxfam had a page calling for donations for the 2004 Asian Earthquake.  This campaign is now over.  So, what did they do with that page?  They changed the title to “Campaign Expired” and presented a “This Campaign has Expired” page to the user.  As you can see, this doesn’t look good in their search results.

What should Oxfam have done?  I would recommend that they put together a landing page that talked about the results of the 2004 campaign which would be linked to current campaigns – with strong calls to donate on the page.  This lets people see what’s been done with money in the past, gives them a chance to donate to wherever the need is now (opening up the previously closed conversion funnel), and preserves the rankings by providing like, relevant content for the search.

I was shocked when I saw the stats from the recent BlogHer study: 36.2 million women are active in the Blogosphere each week!  And almost half of female Gen X Bloggers are publishing and posting about parenting. 

What’s more shocking: 55% of these women would give up alcohol, 42% would give up their Ipod and 20% would give up chocolate rather than give up their Blogs!  Seems a little extreme to me (go ahead, try to pry that glass of Sauvignon Blanc out of my hand — and don’t even think about touching my stash of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.)

But then last week, as I was pouring through hundreds of Blog and Forum posts (pulled in the course of a Buzz Monitoring project for a client who sells to Moms) it hit me.  As I read through the “HELP!!!” thread on the Infant Reflux forum, I remembered what I was doing 18 years ago around this time: Calling (at least a half a dozen times a day) my best mommy friend, Cheryl, who had a daughter just three months older than my Kate.

She’s STILL crying! 
Did you try putting her in a basket on top of the dryer? 
How about putting her in the car and driving around until she falls asleep? 
Did you massage her spine?
Did she spit up after that last bottle? 
What does her poop look like? (No, seriously.)

Colic doesn’t seem to have changed much since my little princess was screaming her lungs out eighteen years ago.  What has changed – thanks to the social media phenomenon – is the size and efficiency of the mommy network. 

Today, Cheryl wouldn’t have to drive over to my house to take a look at the diaper.  I would simply post the poopy picture online and wait 5 minutes for my Mommy network to review and respond. 

Now that’s progress. Just one more reason to love Social Media.  Those crazy lady Bloggers might not be so crazy after all.