Gene Carr's Patron Technology Blog

Lightening Up Your Inbox

Today, let's turn the tables and examine ourselves, rather than our patrons. Most of the time I write about how to send e-mail most effectively to make sure it gets read, and achieves a marketing objective. But today, let's talk about whether the e-mail in your own inbox is literally burying you, and how to manage it better.

Think of this post as something of a public service, motivated by a terrific article I was recommended, published on David Allen's Web site. If you don't know David Allen, he's a pretty well known author in the area of personal productivity. I've read his books over and over, and I give them as gifts to friends and business colleagues who are struggling with how to manage an overflowing "to-do" list.

I urge you to read this post in its entirety. It will challenge you (as it did me) to clean out my inbox of anything and everything that's been read at least once. If you have hundreds of e-mails sitting in your inbox, it feels awful, right?

These days I end the day with only a few e-mails, because I've been convinced there's another way. I've got my own system that works for me. Julie Allen, a productivity coach for David Allen does too. Take a look at hers; I think it might just change your life.

http://davidco.com/coaches_corner/Julie_Daniel/article9.html

A "News" Kind of Convergence

Back in the 1990's at the dawn of the Web, the word "convergence" was on everyone's lips. It meant that people were looking forward to a time when all content could be digitized and available all the time on any electronic device -- a computer, a phone etc. That halcyon notion is appearing before our eyes today, and it's fascinating to watch.

AmericaThere's another kind of convergence going on which I find equally interesting. It's the one happening in the newspaper industry. I was spurred to write this post today after reading an eMarketer study which said "92% of America's top 100 newspapers now have online video." That number is up from 61% in 2006. 

So where does this leave television news? If newspapers are providing content that is more like television news, what will make television news different? And, goodness knows newspapers (for all their faults) often command more respect than local TV stations. So will news in general converge and both newspapers and television deliver equal amounts of video news content online? And, if so, which one will win out?

And what about reporters? Will all reporters need to be video savvy? How about reviews for arts events? Will the age of print reviews give way to video reviews? What does that mean for the role of press and PR in the arts? 

Of course there are no answers to these questions, but I think it's interesting to start thinking along these lines, and preparing our organizations for a future in which not only will they produce their own video, but others will want to produce video material about them.

Spam Gets Literary Notice

As a public service for all you Spam-a-holics, I am calling your attention here to a terrific article in The New Yorker about Spam. And, I'm not talking about the food.

True to the style and quality of that publication, the article is smart, well-written and beautifully documented. If you want to know the whole story about Spam, I recommend it highly. You can read it here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/06/070806fa_fact_specter

If you're not that interested, permit me to quote a few facts from the article - which may surprise you.

* Spammers send 1 million e-mail messages to get 15 positive responses.

* Hotmail processes 4 billion pieces of e-mail every day, and delivers just 600 million. The rest are filtered out as Spam.

* Microsoft maintains 130,000 special Hotmail accounts specifically for the purpose of trapping and examining suspicious e-mail.

These numbers are staggering by any standard. This article makes the case better than I could ever hope to, as to why e-mail marketing has now become an area of technology that is best managed by people who really know what they are doing.

The Dark Side of the Web

I realize that a lot of the time, I write on this blog about the positive sides of the Internet, and how it's changing arts marketing. I admittedly consistently extoll the benefits of the medium, and have looked away at most of the problems (except for spam).

Today, one of my staff members alerted me to this article, which is so raw in its description of the negative effects of the web that it stopped me in my tracks. I won't reiterate what the article says, but suffice it to say, that it's possible that if drugs and cigarette addictions were the addictive scourge of the 1950's and 1960's, and coffee in the 1990's, the web itself may indeed turn out to be the next big addiction to worry about.

Read here about what's going on in China, and how some teens are so addicted to playing games online they lose touch with reality.

Sound familiar? Scary.

Voicing My Own Opinion: New Arts & Entertainment Podcast

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Keith Monaghan, who invited me to do a podcast interview. He has just started a Web site covering issues relating to how the arts and entertainment industries are marketed - with particular focus on live arts venues -- and the box office.

 

His site is called In the Box and you can view it here: http://www.intheboxpodcast.com. You can also download his podcasts on iTunes.

 

If you're new to e-mail marketing, I hope you'll take a listen to the interview -- it's a good review of the basics of why e-mail marketing matters so much.

 

More importantly, bookmark his site. Looks like he's got a very interesting concept going.