By David Gewirtz
It's food-for-thought week here at The Power Magazine for Microsoft Outlook & Exchange Users. This week, we look at two rather different, but interesting resources: one that might help your business communications and one that, well, might help your business communications.
The Email Marketing FAQ
First up is an interesting eBook called "The Email Marketing FAQ: 100% Spam-Free Email Marketing Strategies that Work!" Honestly, when I was asked to read this thing, my first reaction was "Why me?" Based on the name and the $29.70 price, I was dreading doing the review. Ugh.
Thankfully, I was wrong. This is a really useful little book. The author, John Vorwerk, sells some email automation software and he does reference the software throughout the book. But he also describes useful techniques for managing your outgoing email (including some great Outlook tips), explains the different kind of email marketing options, shows how you can use email for marketing without being a spammer, and gives loads of examples.
The key benefit to John's book, in my opinion, is that he shows you how, through opt-in lists, your own Web site, and careful communication, you can create a legitimate and professional marketing communications effort using email. And he also shows you what to avoid to make sure you're not one of those horrid spammers.
Since every email from your company is marketing of some sort or another, this might prove a useful read. It's aimed a bit more at the entry-level reader, but still provides some useful resources to more advanced marketing folks.
You can find the book at http://www.emailmarketingfaq.com/. Do be aware that the Web page itself is really, REALLY overblown, but the document itself is rather low-key and a good read.
Instant messaging and content management
Moving from marketing to hard-core development, we want to report on an interesting development in the integration of instant messaging and content management. For those of you who haven't heard the term, content management is a type of software that's used to automate the production of Web pages and other forms of communications.
We use content management software, a program called ZENPRESS, here at ZATZ, to produce our publications. Without it, we'd never get our publications out on time. The software takes care of all of the formatting and content collection, leaving our team to do the writing and true editorial work.
In any case, a company by the name of UserLand has started to experiment with connecting instant messaging (right now, AIM or Jabber, eventually Windows Messenger) with the Frontier and Radio UserLand content management systems. In effect, Frontier and Radio become "users" on the IM display and you can "talk" to them. Messages sent through IM can generate responses, or control the content management systems, depending on the design decisions of the developers.
