Needless to say, these same politicians probably have no idea that far more personal information, such as credit card purchases and family status, is routinely bought and sold between marketers with virtually no ability for consumers to control it. But the price we pay for being Internet marketers on the leading edge is the inevitable shots by people who don’t like change they don’t understand.

My guess is that such legislation will never see the light of day. Few consumers would volunteer their permission to be silently tracked from site to site. The drop-off in available advertising views would destroy countless Internet businesses that depend on that advertising revenue. On the other hand, it's a pretty interesting thought exercise to consider if most of the marketing on the Internet moved toward a fundamentally permission-based model... That could be a very good thing for everyone who reads this blog.

What makes the Goodmail solution interesting and potentially ground-breaking is the company’s ability to offer this at scale. First of all, it is including marketers as a target audience, which opens up a whole new realm for legally-certifiable emails. Marketers communicate with large audiences and can potentially create massive cost savings over the more traditional paper and stamp approach. Second, Goodmail is smart to be open about their pricing. My assumption had been that the company would price this as a premium service. Surprisingly and fortunately, its press release states the pricing as 3 cents per message. Considering how much the alternatives cost, this is a huge savings and will likely spur wide adoption.

My hat is off to the Goodmail team for this innovative new product. I’m interested in learning more about just how legally binding this solution is and whether it’ll take a major court case to put the question to rest once and for all.

1. Limited resources. Necessity is the mother of invention.

2. Limitless upside. Incredible rewards drive incredible effort; anything seems possible.

3. Individual impact. People at all levels can directly impact the company’s success; they tend to act like owners.

4. Tight community. True interdependence minimizes "free riders," and creates virtuous culture that ensures maximum productivity.

5. Unique people. The risk profile of small businesses attracts “out of the box” people.

6. Lack of process. Little oversight and limited processes result in risk taking and non-standard approaches.

7. Extreme flexibility. The business can easily shift to accommodate new opportunities.

Creativity is very hard to measure, but it is just as much the lifeblood of marketing as it is the key success factor in young businesses. The bottom line is that creativity and innovation derive from a willingness to try new things, to be flexible and, above all, to take risks. So, the next time your boss is pressing for more creative campaigns, tell him/her that creativity is easy--as long as you're willing to try new things, and be wrong from time to time.

Most of the ideas for location-based marketing are either interruptive (e.g., SMS someone when they walk near your store) or based on old media (e.g., text a request for a coupon based on seeing a printed placard in a store). But now a Chicago-based company, Akoo International, has created something entirely new: a cross between a jukebox and an SMS coupon delivery solution. In a nutshell, the firm places an interactive, large-screen display in a store, bar or other venue. The device allows people nearby to text in requests for videos, music or other short form types of entertainment media. Like a jukebox, it queues up the requests. However, it takes it one step further by using those request interactions to offer coupons, ads and other forms of marketing. The best part is that marketers can now know exactly where a customer is located physically without all the fancy technical challenges of GPS.

I don’t know whether this is the much anticipated killer-app for mobile marketing, but it is most definitely a great example of the next generation of out-of-the-box marketing approaches we'll be seeing in the coming years.

Well, a funny thing happened.

The mobile revolution went ahead and happened, but it apparently didn't pay any attention to all of us marketers predicting its future. Let's look at the revolution as it is playing out now.

SMS did take off. It's used so often now that I wonder how we lived without it. It's become the instant messaging solution for the mobile world, but it's barely budged the needle for marketing messages.

WAP is everywhere, but most people don't seem to care. Dramatically faster networks coupled with increasingly powerful mini-browsers have brought the full Web right onto our little phones. If you haven't tried surfing the Web on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, then you need to rush out and give it a try. WAP didn't change the world; long live the mobile Web browser.

And, while the carriers are trying to figure out how to appropriately make your location data available to marketers, along comes Google. Try downloading the latest Google Maps for your phone. (It works on tons of phones, but best on the iPhone.) Do a map-based search for, say, a sushi restaurant and it'll pop up a list of matching restaurants right near you--all without you even typing in your ZIP code or location. Did I mention Google Maps is free? This is permission-based (implicitly) and non-intrusive, and it completely bypasses the telcos. Who would have predicted that?

So, what has been the biggest impact of the mobile marketing revolution? It's not advertising. It's not even closed-loop, permission marketing. It's branding. Yes, the original stalwart of marketing has taken the early lead on transforming the marketing world onto our phones. Ring tones, wall papers, screen savers, branded games and other applications appear to be dominating the eyeballs and dollars on the mobile marketing front.

This is why I love technology revolutions. They do change everything, but no one (and I mean no one) can ever predict how. I guess that’s why they call them revolutions <grin>. The most exciting news of all is that the mobile revolution is barely underway and, while I have no idea how it will play out, I can absolutely guarantee the most exciting parts are yet to come.

From Scott:
It dawned on me the other day, that I spend more time with my inbox than I do with... well... anything! Seriously, this is sad, but totally true. Staring at Outlook (or at least having it stare at me) for more hours than I spend with my wife and daughter, what's up with that? Even worse, given the inordinate amount of time that I allocate to the inbox, I still don't feel in control of it. Calgon, take me away!

Unfortunately, I suspect that too many of us suffer from the same symptoms of email overload. The good news is that help may be on the way. As I mentioned last week, there are a number of start-ups that are creatively using technology in an attempt to make life in the inbox more efficient. Of the many inbox tools that I've tried, Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) might be the most interesting thus far.

Xobni (which is pronounced Zahbnee despite the fact that its logo has a macron over the "o"), is an Outlook plug-in that non-intrusively embeds itself at the right side of Outlook and provides a number of nifty inbox productivity tools. (To name a few: email search, quick access to previously received attachments, and a nice view of previous threads that have transpired with specific contacts.) For me, however, one of the most interesting aspects of Xobni is its ability to provide insightful, metric-based views into my personal email habits. Xobni's user-friendly analytics tool let's me slice the data any way I see fit:

• Who do I email the most?
• Who emails me the most on Saturday? (A: Bill Nussey. (Take a weekend every now and then, Bill.))
• When do I spend the most time catching up on email?
• Do I send more than I receive? (A: Yes. I guess I'm part of the problem.)

With this data at my disposal, I've been able to identify ways to take regain a little control over the inbox. For example, I was able to see that one of the folks on my team sent me a steadily increasing stream of emails leading up to our weekly meeting on Friday. By adding a 15-minute check-in meeting on Tuesday, I was able to eliminate a large number of time-consuming back-and-forth email threads.

Xobni has been in beta testing for a few weeks, and, like most beta products, still has a few kinks in the system. (It still doesn't seem to be counting all my incoming messages.) Regardless, if your life revolves around email, I'd recommend that you take it for a spin. Beyond productivity improvements, Xobni will give you a glimpse into factors that are going to play a huge role in the future of the inbox. Next week, I'll dig a little deeper into some of those factors and how they might eventually influence how a consumer views and interacts with messages in the inbox.

Until then...

From Scott:
A few months ago, the Internet was abuzz with the meme of Inbox 2.0. A couple of articles in the Wall Street Journal (here and here) and a post in the Bits section of The New York Times, pointed to a future where the inbox would begin to take more proactive role in managing communications, acting as much like a social network as it does a hub for receiving good ol' SMTP messages. Leading the charge on this new frontier are a number of start-ups (Boxbe, ClearContext, and Xobni to name a few) that are, in essence, using technology to help consumers manage their overload of email. More recently, we've seen some of the big inbox providers indicate that changes were indeed on the horizon. To wit, at this year's CES, Yahoo's Chief, Jerry Yang demonstrated a future version of Yahoo! Mail that included a "simplify my inbox" button, which, once clicked, would reorder messages based on "people that are important to me."

My colleagues and I pay careful attention to anything that has to do with changes (perceived or real) that may impact the inbox. As such, a number of us have been testing these new inbox tools, talking to inbox providers and holding late-night bull sessions in an effort to intuit email's future and its impact on email marketers (all the better if we can devise new offerings to better serve them ). At the most recent Email Insider Summit, I shared some of our initial findings in a presentation that contemplated the factors present in a hypothetical "inbox algorithm" that inbox providers might use to categorize, prioritize and sort messages. Bill has been kind enough to lend me some real estate in his blog to expand on this topic. So, over the next few weeks, I'll try to contribute some additional commentary on the future of the inbox. (I just can't bring myself to call it Inbox 2.0.)

Until then...

Loren is well known throughout the industry for his keen understanding of email marketing and insights into methods to maximize the benefits and returns the channel offers. His development of white papers, studies and articles over the years has helped move the industry forward. His leadership and deep experience will benefit not only Silverpop and its clients, but all marketers eager to maximize customer relationships in ways that build lifetime value.

Loren will be a regular blogger and contributor to Silverpop's e-newsletters, as well as help drive thought capital through the development of white papers and original research for both Silverpop and Vtrenz audiences.

To read the announcement about Loren, click here.

It's been a while since I've posted, but a colleague sent me an interesting article from MediaPost that seemed like a stimulating and provocative way to kick off 2008. The story is about social networks and the future of email. The writer, Max Kalehoff, defends email’s role in the much-hyped world of social networks. He notes that email is the engine behind many social networks, and that as young people mature, email may well replace social networks as their core communication tool.

To me, it’s more about the difference between business-to-business and consumer-to-consumer communications. In BtoB, the variety of traffic, the need for people to be able to contact you uninvited (e.g., “Hi, I’d love to buy your product”) and the age-old manage-your-life-via-email-folders make a strong case for email’s continued prevalence in business. For purely interpersonal email, however, social networks can provide a powerful alternative: no spam, better tracking of threads, control over who can contact you, deep context with the individuals you’re communicating with and so on. I don’t think everyone necessarily will use two email addresses for personal and business communications, nor will those who do necessarily use social networks exclusively. However, I do think we’ll continue to see a rise in social networks underlying our daily CtoC communications.

Either way, this line of thinking misses what may be the most interesting question of the day--what about business-to-consumer (BtoC) email? After all, this is how many of us make our living.

As a consumer, how will I want the companies that serve me as a consumer to communicate with me? Frankly, it seems like I’m going to want them to come through whichever channel I use for CtoC communications. This could seem threatening to our business but I believe it also represents a huge benefit. The fact is that consumer channels are diverging. In addition to social networks and email, there’s an increasing use of RSS and chat not to mention the explosively growing mobile channel. I believe that our industry is uniquely well-suited to provide the universal marketing dashboard/tool suite that enables marketers to reach their permission-based audience regardless of channel.

And, as some of you are well aware, many companies in our industry, including my company, Silverpop, are already well on their way. Speaking for the industry, I hope that 2008 will be looked back on as the year where email marketing took the next step.

Now, I need to point out that my colleague is about as technical as it gets, so it was unlikely that she'd used a weak password or let her computer get trojaned. In fact, her MySpace account showed that no messages had been sent from it. Nonetheless, the people she heard from were part of her MySpace friend list and the messages came from MySpace.

It's very unclear how this could have been perpetrated other than MySpace, itself, getting hacked. Regardless, this kind of phishing may be the most insidious kind to ever exist and definitely something for all of us to keep an eye out for.

A recent pronouncement from Google states that the volume of spam is actually dropping for the first time.

A lot of people may disagree with Google, but I suspect that there are many ways to measure spam volume and that Google’s take may not represent the overall Internet. Nonetheless, it’s an early and positive indicator that the battle lines against spam can shift back toward the good guys.

There are several ways you can subscribe to my RSS feed, which automatically delivers each new headline and blog posting to you in full.

To subscribe using an RSS aggregator or feed reader application:

• Click the orange “XML” button that appears near the top of this blog.
• Copy the URL of the page that appears from the browser address bar (http://feeds.feedburner.com/QuietRevolutionInEmailMarketing).
• Paste the copied URL into your existing RSS feed reader. Or, if your RSS feed reader appears as a one-click button or in the drop-down list on my RSS feed page, you can select it there to use the one-click feature to add my feed.

RSS has also been integrated into Gmail, iGoogle and Outlook 2007. To subscribe directly from these applications:

• In Gmail: Click “Settings.” Click “Web Clips.” In “Search by Topic or URL” box, paste the URL of the RSS feed. Click “Search.” Click “Add.”
• In iGoogle: Click “Add Stuff.” Click “Add RSS Feed.” Paste the URL of the RSS feed.
• In Outlook 2007: You can find the instructions for adding RSS feeds to Outlook at this Microsoft Office Online Web page.

If you’re not yet using RSS, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s a fabulous way to stay up-to-date with all your favorite news, blogs and any other Web sites you follow that offer updates via this exciting and convenient technology.

In many ways, I like this idea even though this kind of change can feel very threatening. Anything that helps recipients make sense of all their inbound communications is a good thing in the long run. For instance, a message from your boss, your spouse or your project leader might climb right to the top of your inbox, whereas messages offering college degrees (that your spam filter misses) would live down at the bottom. As a consumer, I find the idea somewhat compelling.

The idea faces some definite hurdles. For instance, while I absolutely want to see my e-boarding pass from Delta the moment it comes in, the latest promotion from Delta may not be as urgent. It’s not clear to me how an inbox provider could distinguish between these two extremes. Additionally, older ideas like challenge/response have never been widely adopted, even though they offer a more robust solution to managing the inbox.

Only time will tell whether this is the beginning of a paradigm shift or just another good idea to add to the “never reached critical mass” heap.