Getting email responses

“Sim­ple name-slug per­son­al­iza­tion can lift the click-through rate by up to 30%. We’ve seen true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion lift response rates by 300%.”

– Rachael Heapps (Rap­pDig­i­tal) in an inter­view with Direct

Obvi­ously this is talk­ing about email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns (though it’s prob­a­bly not a bad idea stick­ing the name of the per­son you’re writ­ing to on per­sonal emails, either!) and is prob­a­bly quite unsur­pris­ing. With a lit­tle bit of intel­li­gent mail­ing (time-of-day sched­ul­ing, etc.) it’s quite triv­ial to make mass emails appear to orig­i­nate from a real per­son. In my last job we sent out over 110,000 “name-slug” cus­tomised emails each week in a lit­tle over 8 hours (~15,000 an hour) and then a lit­tle faster after some opti­mi­sa­tions (I think it was cut down to six), so if you start it not too late in the morn­ing it’s quite pos­si­ble to get out mes­sages over the course of the day that appear as though they have a gen­uine, per­sonal, author. (The pur­pose, of course, being the pro­mo­tion of Australia’s num­ber one cult-of-celebrity morn­ing show!)

Of course that was newslet­ter con­tent, not the “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” [sic] that Heapps speaks of, but for the most part it’s dif­fi­cult to see the appeal of “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” more broadly — busi­nesses will gen­er­ally have a core focus and if their cus­tomers are receiv­ing emails from them it’s prob­a­bly in rela­tion to that core area. Excep­tions are obvi­ously out there… two that spring to mind are wholesalers/distributors and mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary cre­ative agen­cies (web/print, event/web, print/vision, etc.) that have fairly dis­tinct groups of clientele.

For churches, “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” could take a vari­ety of forms but prob­a­bly won’t in the kind of auto­mated capac­ity Heapps sug­gests. For exam­ple, you could poten­tially have dif­fer­ent email mes­sages for youth/adults, par­ents (kids ministry)/unmarried/childless adults, men/women. How­ever, I do think these would be dif­fer­ent email mes­sages and not merely “per­son­al­i­sa­tions” of the same core email. Then again, if your church sent out a weekly newslet­ter this might be some­what different.

The way St Matthias does things is sim­ply to send out emails as required to rel­e­vant peo­ple. This isn’t man­aged ter­ri­bly well at present and I’m hop­ing we’ll be able to change that over to a proper email cam­paign sys­tem some­time in the near future (when, you know, spare time rears its ugly head!) — BUT, tech­ni­cal aspects aside — it does mean that there is a cer­tain free­ness in the way things are run.

We can send out emails any time, not just when it’s time for a newslet­ter to drop around — and we don’t need to send out emails at all unless there is some rea­son to. That last point is pretty impor­tant, because it means that peo­ple aren’t stress­ing about cre­at­ing a newslet­ter each week/fortnight/month unnec­es­sar­ily. It also means that email from Matthias, in the eyes of our mem­bers and part­ners receiv­ing mes­sages, remains a vehi­cle emi­nently for the pur­poses of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In a way, this is our ver­sion of “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion”: irrel­e­vance is not expected, and, pre­sum­ably, we get a bet­ter response for it (though email and web cam­paigns are still quite sep­a­rate… by which I mean to say web cam­paigns are non-existent, and we can’t track email responses accordingly!)

There is, of course, a fac­tor of size. A youth­group with even 40 kids and six or seven lead­ers is prob­a­bly going to strug­gle to write enough con­tent for a newslet­ter each week — or, even if they’re not strug­gling, there are per­haps bet­ter ways they could have spent that time. A larger group might find it immensely help­ful to keep in touch this way.

“Newslet­ter” is a fairly abstract term, how­ever, and don’t hear me say­ing there’s no role for emails that don’t com­mu­ni­cate any­thing new. They’re great for send­ing reminders (auto­matic or man­u­ally crafted) about events even where peo­ple have known about the events for ages. They’re also great for con­sol­i­dat­ing things that have already been said or done (though I per­son­ally see much less of this hap­pen­ing — reflec­tion is more the realm of blogs these days than email, per­haps). Most of all, they’re great when they’re per­sonal and rela­tional. A cold form-mail doesn’t have the same impact as a warm or slightly jovial form-mail, and even the slightly jovial form-mail pales in com­par­i­son with a tru­ely per­sonal mes­sage (in com­po­si­tion and content).

Which raises the ques­tion as to whether this whole thing seems strangely verisimil­i­tudi­nous for a rea­son. We strive to emu­late this per­sonal essence in mechan­i­cal utter­ances (oh, gosh, it’s AH all over again) and find that we can lift our response rates with “true” (there’s the verisimil­i­tude, I guess) con­tent personalisation.

But this is just shout­ing in the mar­ket­place. If we will blame email and elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions for the decay of inter­ac­tion in soci­ety, we must remem­ber that it is cer­tainly not the first one-to-many medium. The only dif­fer­ence I can see is that, in this mar­ket­place, there are some­times walls of one-way glass that pre­vent reply. That metaphor is inter­est­ing, because it sug­gests that the speaker (the observed one, speak­ing to the mar­ket­place) is the one most dis­ad­van­taged by this cir­cum­stance. We have no right to reply, but they can­not even see us. They know noth­ing about their audi­ence; their audi­ence can­not steer them in the right direction.

This isn’t some Clue­train bea­tup, but an obser­va­tion of what is, upon a lit­tle reflec­tion, self-evident. Essen­tially, if you have a mes­sage to get across to peo­ple, don’t make their job in receiv­ing it any more dif­fi­cult than it needs to be. If you have ambi­gu­i­ties in your mes­sage, let them ask. The ten­dency of organ­i­sa­tions to use no-reply@example.org email addresses is com­pletely con­trary to rea­son with regards to this issue of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The one excep­tion is mass media, which is, it must be said, def­i­nitely not most of us.

# by Josh on September 22nd, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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On the follies of Copyright expectations

I’ve been occu­pied the last few days try­ing to get an effec­tive fileserving/sharing/roaming pro­file (domains) envi­ron­ment work­ing with Samba, and was think­ing this evening about the impli­ca­tions of a network-wide media share. At present, it’s ille­gal, though not par­tic­u­larly morally rep­re­hen­si­ble in view of the fact that all con­tent on it would be ‘licensed’ (just not for dupli­ca­tion in a dig­i­tal form, under present copy­right law — sched­uled to be over­turned).

It is a truth uni­ver­sally acknowl­edged… that the absence of a fair-use pro­vi­sion in Aus­tralian copy­right law is sim­ply an over­sight on the part of leg­is­la­tors. (Apolo­gies to Austen fans :P)

What if it’s not?

There is, now, what Paul Shee­han termed “lit­tle squares of light”, sig­ni­fy­ing con­nec­tiv­ity in an “advanced, ironic, post-ethnic poly­glot societ[y]”. Before that? The “Dark Age” (also Shee­han). It did exist. There was a time before com­put­ers and mul­ti­me­dia were intrin­si­cally con­nected (depend­ing on your def­i­n­i­tion of mul­ti­me­dia – mul­ti­modal media is per­haps more apt). There was, indeed, a time before mul­ti­me­dia existed — though we can, per­haps, trace its ori­gins to Wagner’s 1849 essay, “The Art­work of the Future” and the notion of Gesamtkunst­werk — which, in turn, traces back to Greek drama, but no matter!

Yet irre­spec­tive of when this arose, leg­is­la­tors are meant to have acknowl­edged the immi­nent rise of the copyright-violating, citizen-empowering, content-producer-collaboration–dic­tat at the hands of the web. We’re expect­ing the wrong thing. Media has pro­gressed, the law hasn’t. Yet.

But what if it doesn’t? Does this mat­ter? Speak­ing to an influ­en­tial podcast-media per­son­al­ity yes­ter­day after­noon, it became clear that there had emerged between cit­i­zen media and con­ven­tional mech­a­nisms a fis­sure that cer­tain peo­ple were very reluc­tant to bridge. Sus­pi­cion exists between the two ‘indus­tries’ (though it was sug­gested that an ‘indus­try’ can­not exist until some­one is mak­ing money: per­haps not the case with cit­i­zen media, overblown acqui­si­tions aside) where ‘cit­i­zen media’ is con­cerned that any part­ner­ships with ‘con­ven­tional media’ will sti­fle inno­va­tion. Clearly, this is wrong, and ignores the ‘cit­i­zen’ part of ‘cit­i­zen media’: any part­ner­ship can­not exist with­out the ‘cit­i­zen’ remain­ing, thus chang­ing con­ven­tional media. And if the ‘cit­i­zen’ com­po­nent is dis­solved, it becomes a mean­ing­less acqui­si­tion as ‘media’ already exists, and ‘cit­i­zen media’ with­out the ‘cit­i­zen’ has no impe­tus whatsoever.

How­ever, that aside, this (per­haps mutual) hos­til­ity raises inter­est­ing notions.

If we con­sider the two to exist in entirely dis­tinct and dis­parate spheres, then new pos­si­bil­i­ties arise. We accept that cit­ing and re-using ‘mass media’ mate­r­ial in new cre­ations is, for a time, impos­si­ble. We accept that a ‘nor­mal­i­sa­tion’ is tak­ing place, to cite the much-lauded ‘vil­lage square’ con­cept of com­mu­nal media: that we are return­ing to a ‘nor­mal’ state, and that broad­cast top-down media was a tem­po­rary hic­cup in the state of human being. The dif­fer­ence, then, is that we now exist in a glob­alised state where those with whom we com­mu­ni­cate (or, share media/experience) is not lim­ited by geog­ra­phy… but remains lim­ited in scope (sen­sual expe­ri­ence, for exam­ple, is rather inhib­ited by the tyranny of distance).

In two hun­dred years, assum­ing mass media assim­i­lated back into ‘nor­mal­ity’ today, all copy­right would have expired and all work could be cited, quoted, re-used and abused as peo­ple willed it. There is clearly no great pos­si­bil­ity of this hap­pen­ing: acknowl­edged even by the mass-media-hostile per­son­al­ity inter­viewed. Should we care? Maybe. If there is mate­r­ial worth repro­duc­ing, that is.

The web is a tem­po­ral media, still. Never before have such vast vol­umes of infor­ma­tion been so volatile, in part because such vast vol­umes of infor­ma­tion have never been so acces­si­ble (in an entirely un-web-standards-related sense). Hence, it is pos­si­ble that the alle­vi­a­tion of this access will hurt more than it would had we not known what was pos­si­ble. The nature of this detach­ment from the web isn’t some­thing to be dis­cussed here — suf­fice to say, global energy cri­sis, war, cen­sor­ship (because the web remains rel­a­tively depen­dent on a small num­ber of servers — DNS root servers par­tic­u­larly) and a vari­ety of other fac­tors could all play a part. But what would this mean?

Ear­lier, I alluded to the ‘glob­alised vil­lage’ con­cept, and how that, in some senses (no pun intended), fails. What we are now see­ing is a series of online ‘com­mu­ni­ties’ exist­ing in par­al­lel, with very occa­sional (but also very com­plex) per­pen­dic­u­lar rela­tion­ships. There is no global vil­lage. There are a series of global com­mu­ni­ties, with which peo­ple can choose to par­tic­i­pate and engage to what­ever extent they deem desir­able. A series of fac­tors aside from the web and MSM have also led to the decline of the phys­i­cal ‘vil­lage’ envi­ron­ment — urban sprawl, glob­al­i­sa­tion in a phys­i­cal sense (highly mobile pop­u­la­tions, etcetera) and the like are exam­ples of such — but there is some­thing wrong with an entirely directed, spe­cific, no-overlap envi­ron­ment. Ben remarked a day or two ago that it’s intrigu­ing his three best friends all have an affin­ity for Eng­lish (and two of those teach­ing it), whilst he is indif­fer­ent about the lan­guage, as about teach­ing (though remarked it is ‘fun’ where maths is con­cerned!).

Rarely, in Internet-based com­mu­ni­ties, have I seen some­one engage with peo­ple out­side of their own area of prin­ci­ple inter­est. Web sites work like that. They are sites with a pur­pose: and, if they do not have a pur­pose, the traf­fic they attract is often spo­radic and undi­rected. Even this blog has a pur­pose — it must, to have attracted (and retained) the atten­tion of an Amer­i­can with an inter­est in web pub­lish­ing. Once atten­tion is engaged on one front, it is pos­si­ble to explore oth­ers — it’s pos­si­ble that peo­ple with an inter­est in web pub­lish­ing and acces­si­bil­ity will read this post sim­ply because it popped up in their feed reader and looked vaguely inter­est­ing (though length is doubt­less a deter­rent!). Back to the term ‘site’ — clearly, this word’s ety­mol­ogy ensures it can­not be divorced from its real-world meaning.

Peo­ple do not sim­ply enter a build­ing for no rea­son. This par­al­lel fails to some extent as the power of search-engines come into the equa­tion — but, remem­ber, search engines must also dis­cover a ‘site’ at some point (impos­si­ble with­out incom­ing links). Which brings us back to the parallel-with-occasional-perpendicular-bridges image (note, par­al­lel can­not mean lin­ear because of the nature of hyper­links. Per­haps I speak of par­al­lel Möbius strips?)

Irre­spec­tive of the mech­a­nisms for web-based explo­ration, web media and main­stream media both fail to serve an encom­pass­ing pur­pose of human inter­ac­tion. Copy­right makes no dif­fer­ence to this. Observe how dis­tracted this post is. Observe how I return to the topic of copy­right harshly, how it does not link to the impor­tant defin­ing qual­i­ties of human inter­ac­tion (which, it must be said, the web in part facil­i­tates). This was both inten­tional and unavoid­able: there is no bet­ter link. Copy­right doesn’t mat­ter, and pre­vi­ously cre­ated con­tent under copy­right does not mat­ter. Even­tu­ally, copy­right will dis­solve, and a har­mon­i­sa­tion between for­mally detached pub­lish­ing mech­a­nisms (I have decided that is all the dif­fer­ence is) will come about. Peo­ple will con­tinue to express them­selves, draw­ing on the con­tent of their time — ideas are aside from copy­right — whilst, per­haps, drift­ing apart from this new media and back into the village…

# by Josh on January 29th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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An essay on the digital divide

What is the dig­i­tal divide, and what impli­ca­tions for soci­ety and the indi­vid­ual are seen to arise from this?

A rather broad topic, per­haps, but use­ful, nonethe­less. Warn­ing — it’s fairly long.

Update: Now in pretty PDF form! Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh on April 25th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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