E-mail, which is well into its teens, is still viewed as a cheap, yet effective marketing channel. But as the medium starts to mature, sales and marketing teams may have to ramp up spending on their e-mail programs in order to separate their brands from the pack, reach new prospects and cultivate existing clients.

However, devoting more of your budget to e-mail campaigns is just half the battle to garnering decent returns. Many companies tend to create one-size-fits-all e-mail programs that get blasted regardless of who the end-user may be (like a howitzer being deployed to shoot an army of gnats).

“You need to segment and target appropriately and often it takes more time and resources to make that happen,” said Nicholas Einstein, director of strategic and analytic services for Datran Media, a marketing services and technology company whose clients include Entrepreneur.com, Lycos and ValueClick. E-mail programs need “to be a) automated, b) segmented and c) perfectly integrated with [your] Web site to ensure you’re getting people right when they’re signing up.”

Overall, 58% of marketers said they planned to increase their e-mail budgets in 2009, according to a survey  released in April by Datran Media. The company took the pulse of more than 3,000 industry executives from Fortune 1,000 companies and interactive agencies.

Einstein, who blogs at “the other einstein” (hats off), said that e-mail programs should feature relevant content, such as white papers, links (and invitations) to Webinars, information about upcoming virtual events “or any drivers of leads.” But smart packaging of content is a nonstarter unless it is properly segmented.

Indeed, segmentation is key. Open rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are as much as 20% higher on average for the first 30 days, according to MarketingSherpa’s “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008.”

Click rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are doubly high for the first 30 days, with a slight increase for 60-90 days, while click rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are five times higher the last 90 days of the year, the study said.

Because they are on the front line, sales execs can be the innovators of new e-mail programs depending on the audiences’ needs. But executing and managing the execution of email campaigns is a job that’s increasingly being left to marketing.

Einstein said he is seeing more and more e-mail campaigns that are centralized. Clients “are taking away some autonomy  sales teams have had in the e-mail space, because, quite honestly, you get into situations about compliance and CAN-SPAM issues, and it can get hairy having sales teams sending out promotional messaging” to people who have potentially unsubscribed to the material.

The happy medium is when IT can integrate sales and marketing and provide a bridge between inbound and outbound efforts. “We have seen a lot of success launching  triggered and serialized messaging programs based on behavioral targeting,” Einstein said. “When prospects are taking action on a Web site, it’s important to leverage this behavior to target relevant messaging that nurture the lead and help foster sales.”

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In recent news, the country of Sweden crashed: Apparently it is possible to cause every single address in a domain to go down (in this case, .se), by making a simple script error during routine maintenance…whodathunk? I shudder to think what may happen when routine maintenance on the .com domain takes place…

In another bit of “wish I’d never done that” news, Tim Berners-Lee just admitted that the forward slashes in the Web’s URL design protocol were both unnecessary and – in his words – a mistake. With this in mind, I thought it might be fun to wander around the Web, and the Internet as a whole, just to see what we could find, by way of unfortunate stories we may have forgotten, or never even known about…things that “seemed like a good idea at the time”. We’re getting closer to the end of the year, when all those retrospectives come out, and I thought this would be as good a time as any to think back, only not just over the past year, but further. After all, it’s the history we forget that we so often tend to repeat…

Do you remember GeoCities? If you thought they died a long time ago, you might be surprised to hear that Yahoo, who acquired them back when people thought dot-coms would never bomb, recently (as in October 26th, 2009) announced GeoCities was closing its doors. Talk about limping along…

Then there are the ISPs. I was a Mindspringer for the longest time, one of the first evangelists for the brand (until Earthlink purchased them). Along with the likes of Prodigy (still shuffling along, believe it or not, as owner AT&T tries to find someone stupid enough to buy something worth nothing), AOL (reinventing itself every day, yet still deriving the largest measure of its revenue from good old (and I mean old!) dial-up subscriptions), and Netzero (reduced to net zero, as they try to find new ways to also rejigger the fact that they are still a dial-up ISP), Mindspring was a pioneer doomed to be eclipsed by telcos who learned from their mistakes.

When we think back to the search engines, the list is long: Webcrawler, AltaVista (technically still around), Lycos…heck, I’m just scraping the tip of the iceberg, and have already lost interest. Did you know that AltaVista had a chance to buy Google’s search technology way back when, and passed? Whoops. Google, contrary to its current well-deserved reputation, was not innovative at all when it first opened for business. It was efficient and analytical. Its algorithms reinvented web search, based on the ideas of its predecessors, good and bad alike. Some people call that reinventing the wheel, but they at least have not rested on their laurels.

Many websites that burned brightly for only a short while were decried as unsustainable business models (remember Pets.com, Webvan, eToys, Kibu, and Kozmo?), and yet their model has since been adapted and proven successful (Petedge, Upco, Fosters &Smith, Amazon, Barbie.com, Tesco, to name but a few comparable online ventures that seem to have “made it”). Timing is all, it would indeed seem, or at least kinda crucial.

For some, it was all about effective marketing and brand awareness…or the lack thereof: Akimbo.com failed because they could not manage to communicate their value proposition to their target market, among other “challenges”; Hulu succeeded (where Joost, Veoh, Vimeo, and others have not – to varying degrees) because they realized their brand strength was tied to the apron strings of their partners. OK, it certainly didn’t hurt that the networks who own the content it distributes also own Hulu!..

In other cases, interactive success came as a result of reinvention: the transition (or should I say ‘desertion”?) from Microsoft Live Search to today’s “Bing” *might* finally establish MSFT as a competitor to Google, in much the same way as Firefox is to the Redmond giant’s own browser…well, without the Open Source stuff!

Now,who uses RSS? I’m sure it some value, but not yet for me. I subscribe to several feeds, and all I do is trash the avalanche of junk in my inbox each morning. Until people learn to self police their content (be it RSS feeds, Tweets, or Facebook Mafia War activities), the internet is going to continue to burn through ideas like flames across the Verdugo mountains.  There is too much information online, and we want tools that will filter and control the flood of data, not simply fractionalize it. After all, half of infinity is still infinity.

Some companies have good ideas, easily replicable by larger or later-in-the-game interests. Kiko developed a web based calendar, which seems like a great idea, unless you factor that it was not sufficiently proprietary of a business model to prevent Google from developing its own Google Calendar app.; and  HotorNot.com and Friendster were arguably ripped off by what is known today as Facebook (originally Facemash). Several companies are in the process of trying to beat TVguide.com at its own game (something that seems – at first glance – to be a good idea, given that the TVGuide.com site is not so great). However, couchville.com was there first, and since departed. Branding is worth a lot these days, in a very cluttered marketplace and, unless you are a captive subscriber (using ATT/Yahoo TV portal, for instance), or an early adopter (of which there are far fewer than those of us on the East and West Coasts might believe).

Some ideas are not so much failures as temporary successes, taking advantage of loopholes in the law or in best practices. P2P is one prime example, with different offerings coming and going (or continuing to exist despite obviously supporting illegal practices), but there are others, such as Yak4ever, the site that allows you to make free international calls, albeit through a slightly cumbersome process. Google Voice is another offering that seems destined to either succumb to the counterattacks of the powerful telco lobbies, or force a reinvention of telco laws.

Where such ongoing “could go either way” projects as MySpace.com,  Friendster (it’s still trying to make a go of it, my friends, and doing quite well in the Asia Pacific regions!), Kiva (currently under attack by folks who’d like to see it go the way of govWorks.com. Did you read the recent NYT article?), Project Natal, and James Cameron’s “Avatar” (had to throw that one in there!) end up is anybody’s guess. That’s where you come in: What failures and unforeseen successes do you recall? What is coming down the pike that you feel may completely reinvent interactive content production, storage, distribution, and/or consumption? Are you working on something that will make the Internet an even more robust tool and platform for communications, community and content? What does the Internet mean to you, beyond the conventional Web and email? What internet ventures do you feel will still be with us by the end of 2010?

History shows that much of what we praise today will be gone tomorrow.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias, by Percy Shelley (1818)

Seit Mitte Oktober läuft unser Lycos IQ unter dem Namen CosmiQ.
Jetzt hier mal meine etwas verspätete Rückschau auf den Oktober mit seinen Fragen und dem User.

Die Fragen aus dem Oktober 09

Das stell ich mir nicht gerade lecker vor
http://www.iq.lycos.de/qa/show/2162104/Wann-kommt-die-Cola-mit-Doener-Geschmack-auch-nach-Deutschland/

Da fühlt sich wohl ein Mann diskriminiert
http://www.cosmiq.de/qa/show/2162863/?&dismidSeen=28901348

Wieviel IQ? Naja viel scheints ja nicht zu sein bei ihm
http://www.cosmiq.de/qa/show/2203184/Bloede-Frage-wieviel-iQ-benoetigt-man-zum-Stellen-einer-Frage/

Schön doof wer es sich anbringt. Man steht aber auch nicht als Streber da
http://iq.lycos.de/qa/show/2187710/Darf-man-als-normaler-Verkehrsteilnhemer-einen-Fahrschule-Aufkleber-angebracht-haben/

Geschenisse der User im Oktober 09

Persönlich glaub weiß ich jetzt was mir immer fehlte der Humor.
Unser ShamHarga ist wieder da und bringt den Humor wieder mit!
http://www.cosmiq.de/exp/show/ShamHarga

Um nochmal einen heraus zu heben den ich jetzt nicht aus persönlicher Freundschaft gewählt habe.

Incubus75 Albert Einstein Rang^4 mit keiner einzigen Frage!
http://www.cosmiq.de/exp/show/Incubus75

Sehr beeindruckend.

Einmal werde ich auch nochmal die Blüten von Lycos IQ raussuchen sofern ich sie finde.
Gibt aber einen Extraartikel um nochmal auf die gute alte Zeit zu gucken.

LG

dickkopf528

We are certainly familiar about what search engines are rolling on the web for the past decade. This is just a review, a refresher that is. For those who can’t figure it out, here are your best search engines on the web.

In the early days of search engine’s timeline, most of them started out extremely terrible. Luckily, that condition has transformed and developed as years gone by. The search engine was a self-effacing beast on the World Wide Web in its formative years. For the most part, engines were clueless about how to return appropriate rankings. As a result, this led to user disappointment and inconvenience and numerous of the search engines vanished. Worse part is, some of them turned out into minor groups – Alta Vista, Lycos and Northern Lights to name a few. A lot of this took place when Google came rushing on the web’s picture.

The “who’s the best” talk and deliberation can sometimes be very difficult and somewhat dangerous. However, defining the word “best” is easier when we’re talking about Google. Technically, this search engine is the closest to the word best when it comes to a lot of fields on internet marketing. This was the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. These two were responsible for establishing the company in 1988. Google was originally known as BackRub. The name was pulled out from the original idea of gazing at links as an evaluation of relevancy when returning results. Google has re-accentuated back links, but takes control of massive traffic at a halt. It is without a doubt the finest advertising platform for commerce and trade and the most used search engine by online users looking for a variety of stuff on the net. Google provides advertising and search results to AOL along with other search engines as well.

Yahoo is among the pioneer search engines that have coped up to stay in the right path. Actually, Yahoo has certainly not had a lot to holler about as a search engine. Results are frequently not mostly relevant to the search. Fortunately, it got better extensively by more or less trying with a lot of effort to do what Google does when ranking sites.

MSN can be described as the little search engine. This is absolutely the scenario on the web while it may appear weird to recommend a search engine provided by Microsoft is a second best. Microsoft failed to notice the mark when it first launched MSN.com, to put it straightforwardly. The results were terrible and not a soul used it. Microsoft at long last pulled it together and launched an entirely new MSN search engine in 2005. Astonishingly, MSN deserves a place on the top list for best search engines.

Thomas Haugen
Internet Marketer
Tek Media

]]> http://bc1102009.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/lycos-y-excite/ Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:30:33 +0000 bc1102009 http://bc1102009.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/lycos-y-excite/

Campos de búsqueda

                            Contabilidad

 Uso de los operadores lógicos (cuántos y cuáles)

 Cantidad de documentos obtenidos

Calidad de los documentos obtenidos.

Campos de búsqueda

                            Contabilidad

 Uso de los operadores lógicos (cuántos y cuáles)

ninguno no suelo usar  operadores logicos debido a que alteran mucho los resultados y  muchas veces  el resultado no llega a ser confiables

 Cantidad de documentos obtenidos

Lycos 1,692,026

Excite 89

Calidad de los documentos obtenidos.

Lycos: Un buscador ya viejo entre los buscadores no  muy efectivo pero util es amistoso con el usuario y  es de los pocos buscadores que siguen sus propios algoritmos  me agradan mucho los resultados,  y que nos da  pues se ve que la calidad de los documentos es muy buena

Excite : este buscador basa  sus resultados en google y los refina mediante un algoritmo nos puede llegar a dar buenos resultados solo que   no me confiaria mucho de el

Eine gewisse Moderatorin hat, wie wir es von ihr ja kennen, nach Abschalten der wichtigsten Hirnfunktionen eine Frage deaktiviert.
Da sie höchstwahrscheinlich anonym bleiben möchte, nennen wir sie mal shitronen-znitte.
Die Frage lautete: “Wieviel kostet eine Atombombe?”
Ein paar sehr hilfreiche Antworten kamen uuuuund …

Diese Frage wurde deaktiviert, weil es sich um Chat oder eine rein persönliche Meinungsfrage handelt.
Chatfragen bitte in einem Unterhaltungsforum stellen / shitronen-znitte

Ich kann zwar nachvollziehen, dass der Preis von Kernwaffen sehr viel mit Chat zu tun hat und ich verstehe auch, dass die Kosten zur Herstellung einer Atombombe meine persönliche Meinung darstellt, und es ist mir selbstverständlich bekannt, was eine “Chatfrage” ist und wie man in Lycos iQ chattet (Anmerkung an s-z: Den Lycos-Chat gibt es nicht mehr!!!), aber eine Sache, die begreife ich nicht!

WAS ZUR HÖLLE HABEN MASSENVERNICHTUNGSWAFFEN MIT UNTERHALTUNG ZU TUN???

So etwas ist einfach nur gestört, pervers und desozialisiert!
Wenn shitronen-znitte soviel Gefallen an Atombomben findet, dann sollte sie zur M.o.D. (Ministry of Defence) gehen, um sich gleich mal ein Beispiel an Mayor Kong nehmen zu können:

Longhorn555

In this Huffington Post story, Henry Blodget examines the future of the social networking site MySpace.

A few years back, MySpace was the king of the social networking world. Everyone in high school had one and if you were in a band, you needed it to survive. The words Twitter and Facebook were part of a different language. Then something happened. We graduated high school and Facebook became the college myspace. Along with any other trend MySpace started to flame out. Other than MySpace music, it didn’t have any staying power. Facebook now dominates the social networking world and now people of all ages flock to it.

There are many reasons why Facebook and Twitter won the war, but one of the reasons is that they managed to stay relevant in the news world. A huge majority of news outlets today have both Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages. No one is afraid to use these social networking sites as professional tools. More and more people are using these sites to get their news and to give it. Individual journalists often use them to communicate with readers and to market themselves and their work. Check for yourself, the New York Times does not have a MySpace page.

Blodget describes how Rupert Murdoch was seen as a genius for purchasing MySpace for only $580 million. He had supposed huge plans for the site but was really looking to dump it before its value completely collapsed. He might be too late. A source suggests that MySpace did only $500-$600 million of revenue last year and actually lost money in the process. There’s a small chance it can be saved but that window is closing. Blodget compares it to former internet juggernauts, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite. I can’t even remember these names or what they did. Like Myspace and Murdoch, they were purchased at their peak of internet existence.

Luckily for Murdoch he didn’t spend as much as these companies did. I believe Myspace will soon be a distant memory, if it isn’t already.

Email is one of the most basic services, yet it is also one of the hardest to manage. There are the old stand-byes, the new up starts, the social media centric services, and then of course there are the services that are suddenly gone. Of course you could pay for a “premium account” with a provider….but if your going to do that why not just self-host?  The choices are endless really and it is a minefield full of hazards.

In the next few posts I am going to look at the main options for email. The hope is to provide you with a knowledge base to make an informed decision about choosing providers. Along the way I will share my own trial and error…well mostly error in this department.

However I would love to hear your stories, so do please be sure to comment about your own experience with Email. Whether its a horror story or a glowing review I look forward to hearing it.

Heute die neuen Einsteine vom 27.09. bis zum 04.10.

Einsteinrang ab 12740 Punkten

Clarence

http://iq.lycos.de/qa/show/2122734/Clarence-ist-EINSTEIN.-Wer-gratuliert-mit/

Einsteinrang ab 25480 Punkten

morgenrotermond

http://iq.lycos.de/qa/show/2140176/Happy-Einstein!-morgenrotermond-ist-vor-wenigen-Minuten-zum-2.Mal-versteinert!/

Mibi-

http://iq.lycos.de/qa/show/2132777/Unser-Freund-Mibi–ist-ZWEISTEIN!!!!!!-Herzlichen-glueckwunsch/

Einsteinrang ab 38220 Punkten

eckerle

http://iq.lycos.de/qa/show/2136054/Eckerle-ist-Kubik-Einstein–wer-gratuliert-mit/

Gigabernie

http://iq.lycos.de/qa/show/2129643/Gigabernie-ist-ALBERT-EINSTEIN3-!!!/

Einstein^4^5^6 existieren dieser Tage nicht.

Einsteinrang ab 89180 Punkten

hondaxxbiker

http://iq.lycos.de/qa/show/2133593/Jetzt-kann-gefeiert-werden!!-hondaxxbiker-ist-EINSTEIN-HOCH-7-!!!/

Meine Gratulation
Eine kleine Information es könnte sein das der Blog die nächsten Tage wieder ins schleifen kommt.
Der Grund ist einfach das ich wieder an einer Integrationsmaßnahme teilnehme und Nachmittags erschöpf nachhause komme und mich erstmal nicht an den PC setze
Wieso die Erschöpfung? Naja ganz einfach 3 Monate einfach ausschlafen hinterlässt doch seine Spuren.
Übrigens es ist die gleiche Integrationsmaßnahme wie 2007 die aufmerksamen werden bemerkt haben das ich mich in 2007 bei Lycos IQ  registrieren lies während einer Freistunde geschah es einfach als ich im Internet auf lycos.de was suchte.
Vielleicht gibt es mir neuen Saft um noch mehr Einsteinränge zu erklimmen.

LG

dickkopf528

eco Kongress 2008
BEYOND THE BORDERS
11. September 2008, Köln
Der Fachkongress zu Trends und Themen in der Internetwirtschaft

Thomas Servatius, Head of Hosting & Domains Europe und Shopping bei Lycos Europe GmbH, hält die zweite Keynote-Präsentation auf dem Kongress.

Ich lade mir die Präsentation als Adobe PDF-Datei herunter und gehe auf die fünfte Seite aus 26.
Zentriert steht in riesigen Buchstaben der Schriftgröße 32 die Frage geschrieben:

“In welchem Umfeld würden Sie werben wollen?”

Anbei finde ich eine kleine Sammlung an Beispielen von Fragen die Lycos iQ repräsentieren sollen.

Da sie schlecht lesbar sind, schreib ich sie mal hier exakt, wie im Original, hin:

• kann ein junge sich selbst entjungfern?
• was bedeutet auf denis
• wie und wo kann ich das hand meiner freundin orten lassen
• saints row online
• wer von euch hat geweint bei kahns letztem Spiel
• Sicherheitscode für nokia 6230i

An so etwas haben die Lycos-Chefs gedacht, als sie Entscheidungen bezüglich Lycos iQ getroffen haben.
Das Business von Lycos war schon immer die Suche.
Das Business von Burda war schon immer der Zeitschriftenmarkt.
Und daran wird sich nichts ändern.
Da helfen keine Briefe und keine Emails.
Was Burda da betreibt ist einfach nur Holding.
Lycos iQ ist höchstens Dekoration.

Quellen:

http://www.eco.de/veranstaltungen/kongress2008.htm
http://www.eco.de/veranstaltungen/5111.htm
http://www.eco.de/dokumente/080911_Keynote2_Servatius_Lycos.pdf

Longhorn555

Vor ein paar Wochen hatte ich schon mal einen Artikel zur Zensur von Suchmaschinenergebnissen geschrieben. Und ich meine nicht umgangssprachliche Zensur, sondern echte – also solche, die vom Staate ausgeht. Damals konnte ich nur durch Tests ein paar gefilterte Suchergebnisse ermitteln. Das geht jetzt besser. Wikileaks hat eine Liste angeblich von Lycos Europe gefilterter Webseiten veröffentlicht, welche bis November 2008 in Verwendung war.

Das ermöglicht einen systematischen Überblick über die gefilterten Seiten:

Auf der Liste sind 318 Einträge. Davon sind 236 Domain-Namen und 82 spezifische Webseiten. Auffällig sind einige Sperrungen von Seiten, die sicher auch problemlos gelöscht werden könnten, wenn sie denn unrechtens sind. Beispielsweise auf politik.de oder – noch unsinniger – Lycos selber.

Bei viele Einträge konnte ich den Sperrgrund nicht nachvollziehen. So scheinen einige Artikel zu der Firma Fast Lane (www.flane.de) gesperrt zu werden, ohne das klar wird warum. Irgendwie soll die Information unterdrückt werden, dass diese Firma Cisco-Zertifizierungen anböte. Ob dies geschieht, weil es faktisch falsch ist oder weil ein Wettbewerber sich einen Vorteil verspricht ist nicht erkennbar. Ich habe versucht die Einträge nach dem aus meiner Sicht wahrscheinlichsten Sperrgrund zu systematisieren. Bei Fast Lane nehme ich beispielsweise an, dass die vielleicht keine Genehmigung hatten von Cisco hatten Seminare für die Prüfungen anzubieten und habe sie in den Bereich “Copyright”-Verstoß einsortiert. Das ist natürlich im Einzelfall nur “best guess” und nicht unbedingt korrekt. Es ergibt sich folgendes Gesamtbild:

Die Liste scheint im übrigen chronologisch nach Aufnahmedatum sortiert zu sein. Die vielen vielen Seiten über das “Fast Lane”-Angebot stehen alle untereinander.

Highlights:

• www.stadtwerke-hameln.de (WTF?)
• http://www.vg.no/bilder/edrum/1155634068916_109.jpg (Ein Bild eines SUN-Covers mit Prinz Harry, der einer Frau an den Busen fasst)
• http://www.sf.tv/sendungen/kassensturz/index.php (Homepage der Sendung “Kassensturz” des Schweizer Staatsfernsehns)
• www.stiftung-warentest.de/online/geldanlage_banken/meldung/20821/20821.html (Artikel in dem die Stiftung Warentest vor Finanzbetrügern warnt.)

Interessant wäre noch zu wissen, wer oder was Lycos zu der Aufnahme der einzelnen Positionen gedrängt hat. Ist es wie bei anderen Suchmaschinen ein Staat?