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Email Marketing has become a large part of my workload lately. I felt a refresher course in HTML email was needed in order to sort out all the confounding aspects of producing an effective HTML email message. Before setting out on the design phase of a couple recent HTML email campaigns I needed up-to-date answers to these two questions: What email clients are people using? and What is the current state of email clients regarding standard support for HTML email?
Sometimes technology is its own worst enemy. That is made evident every year when Gartner releases its “hype cycles” like the Gartner 2008 Emerging Technology Hype Cycle shown above (click to enlarge). Many of the technologies listed here will no doubt be immensely important to businesses in the future. Unfortunately, hype cycles often illustrate that there is almost always a substantial time lag between something that seems so immediately important to a small group of early adopters until it actually does enter the economic or business toolkit mainstream.
One of the benefits of working in a company that embraces the cutting edge of technology is the opportunity to work with the very latest in programming languages. While this drastically improves the cool factor of my job, it also means that I get to deal with some of the normal community problems that one encounters when developing in a new or immature language. Most recently, I have been working in Apex, the proprietary on-demand development language for building software as a service (SaaS) applications for the relatively new (and very cool) SalesForce.com. I commented to one of my fellow developers that I was surprised by the amount of code I was seeing that didn’t follow naming conventions. Her response was even more surprising… “What’s the big deal with naming conventions?”
I recently completed Allen Adamson’s new book, Brand Digital. Like his earlier book, Brand Simple, it helps articulate the importance of brands in the digital age. One of the key takeaways from the book is that the brand/media relationship has done a 180 degree flip. A little more than a decade ago marketers were concerned with how mainstream media was going to steer their brands. Big media was just about the only game in town and communication between a company and the public depended on that connection. However, today, astute marketers are more concerned with how the brand concept should determine what media is to be used, and how best to use that media.
In a meeting earlier this month with magazine executives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt helped illustrate the importance of brands in the Internet age. Schmidt said the Web is fast becoming a “cesspool” with a lot of false and misleading information. One way the consumer can count on the information they find online is to associate it with a brand they trust. “Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Schmidt offered. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”