Quick e-mail CRM thought...

Just stumbled across another (reasonable) e-mail CRM vendor called MailChimp.

They also had a pretty interesting December 1st, 2008 report of e-mail open rate statistics.

They seem a bit costly, but I don't know what you get and what their forte is. They've got this cool functionality which lets you see your e-mail in "the major e-mail client's" inboxes called the "Inbox Inspector".

Might be worth checking out.

Returning to Roots...

I believe frame of reference is critical to all people.  It gives them a simile by which to make sense of the world.  It helps them cram an infinite amount of data and combinations into a comprehensible set of information.

As such, I seem to always return my my roots -  IT and Marketing.

This has proved to be problematic for one of my partner agencies who pulls me in on work, regularly (O'Keeffe Communications)...  He asks, "Ray, what can you do that's Web 2.0'ish to advance the PR efforts on this business?"

And Ray returns a bunch of (really good but really inappropriate) MARKETING ideas.

Today, over breakfast, he clarified it for me.  He said PR was:

"The generation of awareness through 3rd-party resources."

Wow.  That's clear and clarifying... He continued by saying, 

"Some of the true magic comes from what I'm sure your mom used to tell you.  It's way better when others toot your horn than when you toot your own...  Leveraging the 'resources' (i.e., media, bandwidth, opinion, expert-status) of others lends way more credibility to your efforts than anything you can do yourself."

That makes sense.  That's something I can dig my teeth into.

Now it's time for me to wander off to my happy place and think about how my efforts can be used to affect change with this endpoint in mind.

- Ray