Shea Beck

Now up on the not-so-hot email platform is Victoria’s Secret. I get these emails at least three times a week, usually Monday, Wednesday, Friday – WTF? I don’t wear that much underwear and especially not thongs.

Anyhow, because Victoria’s Secret uses a web ready font in their creative, there is no reason this email can’t be entirely text rather than one big image. They even take it one step farther in actually making the disclaimer text. The disclaimer in many emails should be the part of the email that is an image. I say this because most disclaimers are loaded with Spam trap text.

This email is very simple to create using Times New Roman text, Black backgrounds and a few white borders. the only items that need to be an image would be the Pink logo and Victoria’s Secret logo.

In conclusion, text it up brotha, sometimes I don’t want to enable my images.

Peace,

Shea

So it was actually a slow weak in Email for my Inbox this week. So I will pick a local internet marketing firm to pick on. I get FireDrum emails pitching their services every so often, props to them for actually practicing what they preach (not all email marketing companies even send emails on their own). So the email came from an email marketing company, should be perfect right?

Wrong, I will point out three mistakes to help you from making the same ones:

Error #1
From the start the subject line wasn’t to appealing: “Happy New Business Year from FireDrum!” Also, everyone knows you should NOT include special characters in the subject line for Spam reasons and some email clients don’t recognize special characters.

Error #2
They have plenty of opportunity to use text rather than graphics. Using text whenever possible is very important because it allows the subscriber the opportunity to READ the email without having to enable graphics as you know the default is not to have graphics turned off.

Error #3
The lack of using the img display block trick has allowed the email clients to place an unwelcome bottom margin on the images. This is confusing to explain, but I’ll give it a shot. Some email clients (in this case I am using hotmail) use a Strict Doctype to display the HTML. The Strict Doctype gives the bottom margin because it is trying to allow room for characters like g,j and q. This can be overcome by adding the above mentioned display block to the header.

Okay enough talking, just add this piece of code to your emails and you won’t have unwelcome bottom margins. I understand that CSS gets stripped in some email clients but the ones that give you the bottom margins will accept this cheat.

Copy and paste this code directly below the </head> tag:

<style media=”all” type=”text/css”>
table img {
display:block;
}
</style>

Well that concludes this issue of Fallible Friday’s, where I tell you your email sucks. I hope you are a better emailer after reading this.

With all of these free social monitoring tools out there, wouldn’t it be nice to have a free dashboard too? Of course Radian6, Trackur, Buzzlogic and similar companies do this for you (and do it prettier), but if you are bootstrapped (like a freelance social marketer) and need to see what the social world thinks of your brand, I have your solution! There are several more tools available other than what I will discuss below, but you only need to monitor so much media. To start, I will give you a brief synopsis of what tools I am using and why I am using them. Then I will run you through steps of creating your own dashboard.

The tools I am using:

1. Firefox - Allows you to create RSS feeds of everything.
2. iGoogle - It’s free and you can create your OWN dashboard.
3. Google Trends - Monitors your search traffic, and if it spikes, then something is happening.
4. Google News Search - Monitors the media mentions of your brand.
5. Google Blog Search - Gauges the gossip taking place behind mainstream media.
6. FriendFeed.com - Monitors microblogs like Tumblr and Twitter.
7. BoardReader.com - Monitors coupon sites and forums for your brand mentions.
8. BackType.com - Monitors blog comments of people responding to your brand as well as bookmark sites like reddit and digg.
9. BeTwittered – Everyone needs twitter.
10. TwitterGadget (not mentioned below) - I happen to need to monitor two accounts.

The tools I am not using:

1. Facebook Lexicon - My brand doesn’t have enough buzz to populate on this search.
2. Social Mention – It does what the other tools do.
3. I’m sure there are plenty more - I have enough info right now.

Now we are ready to build your social monitoring dashboard in 5 Easy Steps.
Take a sneak peak at the final product:

Step 1

Now it’s your turn to build your own dashboard, you will need two things to start:

1. Firefox
2. iGoogle

Step 2

Now that you have that, open up Firefox and go to the following sites:

1. BackType.com
2. FriendFeed.com/search
3. BoardReader.com
4. blogsearch.google.com
5. news.google.com

Step 3

Once there, search for the terms you want to track. I track SkyMall and “Sky Mall.” You will notice up in the URL bar, there will be the site + “your query” and in Firefox you can make any page an RSS. Look at the example from backtype.

Step 4

Now click on the Click on the RSS icon and you will have the option to add that query to your Google homepage. Do that for all the sites above. How easy is that?

Step 5

You’re not done yet. Now go to your iGoogle page (www.google.com/ig). Click on “Add Stuff” in the top right hand side. Search for the following items (or just click on them below) and add them to your page:

1. Google Trends
2. BeTwittered

Bonus Step

Now go to your iGoogle page and start monitoring all of your social buzz. Be prepared to take action because there is likely a fire lurking in the bushes.

Have fun and follow me on twitter @sheabeck