When I first started creating web sites the term for people who did this type of work were called “Webmasters.” I will say this: not many of us were masters at anything related to the web at that point. Remember, Alta Vista and Geocities were the big names back then and most people were using dial-up connections. After some time the term “Webmaster” lost its luster and we were deemed “Web Producers.” A much more fitting (and cool) name. No longer did we sound like we were cast-offs from Dungeon’s and Dragon’s, we were now “producers!” And wouldn’t you know it, some years later the name was changed yet again. Now we are Front End Developers.

In today’s tech world there are two types of developers: front end and back end. Do the two ever intertwine? Absolutely. Is it encouraged? Why not? The more you know the better your skills are. So what exactly is the difference between what a front end and back end developer might do? I am glad you asked. I won’t get too technical on you here, I try to explain things like this as if I were talking to my grandmother. How about a basic analogy:

A Front End Developer is the person in the auto shop that builds the chassis of your car. Everything you actually SEE with your eyes: the doors, the hood, the bumpers, the paint job, the wheels, etc. A Back End Developer is the mechanic that builds the engine that runs the car. In other words, the stuff you don’t usually see. When you visit a web page and see the pretty graphics on top, the navigation to the left, and the content in the middle, it is the front end developer that writes the code that presents that layout to you. If you do a search, submit an inquiry through a form, try to book a hotel room, or make an online payment, more than likely it was a back end developer that built the code that enables that to work.

As we move forward there seems to be a trend leading towards creating the all-in-one developer, a Jack-of-All-Trades: Someone who can design and build a web site while also being able to make all the fancy bells and whistles work. There are designers who now write basic CSS/HTML code, just as there are front end developers who are learning how to use jQuery and Javascript in new and fascinating ways. If there is one thing the wondering worldwide web has taught us it is that what is hot today might not be tomorrow. The internet goes through quicker fads than a teenager. If you don’t believe me then shoot me an email in about five years so we can discuss what ever happened to Facebook.

Along comes TechCrunch today with a long analysis of the most popular cameras posting pix to Flickr. Apple’s iPhone4 is about to overtake the Nikon D90.

And where are the point and shoots? They are doing a nose dive to oblivion. Couldn’t keep up.

Just saying …

Cisco initiated the Flip shutdown “to save money in its lagging consumer products division,” according to NPR. However, several news organizations speculated that the real reason why we’re saying goodbye is because the simple-to-use camera is no match to today’s faster, smarter and more-efficient smartphones.

It didn’t have to be that way. In many minds, the introduction of Apple’s iPad doomed Amazon’s Kindle book reader. Kindle didn’t give up. It went color. It lowered the price. It lowered the price again this week with the help of advertising. Long story short: It watched the market change and it reacted.

Having said that, I stopped reading my Kindle after I bought an iPad. I may have to go back to it, however, since I can’t get it out of my seven-year-old’s hands. My point is, Amazon could have tossed in the towel, and Cisco could have added wifi downloads to the Flip.

Lesson Learned. If you can’t adapt, get out of the workshop. Whether you’re a technology company, marketing firm, traditional business, online retailer or brick-and-mortar shop, you’ve got to be able to keep by adjusting your strategies, tactics, goals and expectations.

Since the DC office moved a few blocks closer to the river in Old Town, there was a bit of a delay in receiving our 2010 Reed Awards from Campaign and Elections magazine. Thankfully, the statuettes arrived safely and are on display in the reception area.

IWS won First Place for Best Web site for a Statewide Race and Best GOTV Plan and Execution.

The site is called OneMinuteNews, and it’s a new news site for Gen-Xers. It’s got a clean design with clearly labeled content buckets – trending news, technology, entertainment, etc. Content appears in text and video. Social media features are being added.

The news is aimed at a young market and has a youthful feel and spin to it. Who knows whether it will make it? Disclaimer: It’s not a client, and IWS has no connection with it. We just believe in highlighting good work whether it’s ours or not.

OneMinuteNews is a good example of what online communication should be. It knows its audience. It gives the audience content that it would find useful and in a language and format that the audience gets.

That’s what we try to do, too. End of story.

That’s what the Wall Street Journal was asking on Tuesday, February 15, 2011.

Here’s the gist from Geoffrey A. Fowler:

“Facebook, which has more than 600 million users and was valued at $50 billion in a recent funding round, is grabbing online-advertising from Yahoo, Myspace and others. The social network is a potential rival in electronic payments to eBay Inc.’s PayPal, while partnerships Facebook is cementing with smartphone makers set the stage for competition with Apple Inc. and Google in mobile services.

“Meanwhile, Facebook is tussling with Google and Microsoft Corp. for top engineers.”

It seems inevitable to me that as Facebook tries to keep growing, it’s going to step on toes. Big time. The friendliness will go away. Max, our CEO, says Yahoo will go away, too.

For those of us playing in the social media world, we will have to keep playing in multiple sandboxes until Facebook takes over another and another and another service. Assuming, of course, that it can.

Max takes it another step. (Can it EVER be wrong to quote your boss twice in one post?) He says the Journal piece shows how the new world works. It’s no longer TV, but your media platform. It’s no longer Facebook, but your personal brand to the world.

I think competition is always healthy, so I’m rooting for Facebook – and all its ‘frenemies’.

Finally, thanks to the Wall Street Journal for a good piece on our slice of the world

Reed Award Recognizes Top Political and Public Affairs Talent in The World

On Friday, IWS continued its winning tradition by securing the Reed Award on behalf of the United States Chamber of Commerce and Governor Jan Brewer.

IWS congratulates our clients for their success and would like to say ‘thank you’ for the opportunity to work with them during this past year. We work with great teams at both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Governor Jan Brewer’s campaign, and are proud that everyone’s hard work paid off.

The United States Chamber of Commerce won a Reed Award for “Special Categories – Best GOTV Plan and Execution.”

Governor Jan Brewer’s campaign won a Reed Award for “Technology – Website: Statewide Races.”

“Winning a Reed Award is considered to be one of the most prestigious honors in the business of politics and Campaigns & Elections congratulates the finalists and winners,” said Publisher of Campaigns & Elections, Paul Plawin.

IWS has spent the past 11 years moving with ease between politics and commercial marketing. In either venue, IWS’ strength remains the same: The ability to use the full spectrum of digital marketing strategies and applications to change users’ behavior.

Avoiding Rate-Limit Schedules
Nobody ‘really knows’ what formula actually triggers an ISP to put a rate-limit on your bulk delivery. Sure you can put down a mix of a few variables that include volume, along with complaints, and of course sending attempts per instance or even per hour. But nobody really knows the formula, or for that matter, the time schedule in which those rate-limits are imposed. And anybody claiming that they do know, or that claims a perfect reputation will remedy this, is selling a tall tale of fantasy. I can’t imagine how a perfect sender reputation would hurt you in this situation; however, I can tell you that it has little to do with how and when you might be rate-limited. This is tricky because sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do. You might have all of your elements of deliverability in order, the stars are aligned perfect for your email and then – BANG!, you still get nailed by an ISP with rate-limits. I think that sometimes an ISP will impose rate-limit schedules simply because its cloudy outside.

There are a couple ways, among others, to try and remedy a problem with untimely and over the top rate-limit schedules that you may be incurring. First, you can call the ISP and ask about their schedules – LOL! I’ve actually tried that one, granted you are lucky enough to get a human on the phone that holds any power at the ISP. Information like this is highly sensitive and closely guarded by the engineers. A more realistic way would be to add or repurpose more IPs to your delivery structure in order to spread around your bulk delivery. It’s costly, and for those who have done it, can tell you that it helps immensely. Lastly, and above all else, better node management can also play a huge factor. You can try reducing the amount of sending attempts per minute/hour from your server. In time you can find what is a better fit, given the resources you have available.

More Inbox Placement
Sure your sender reputation is perfect, but are all of those messages you send actually hitting the inbox because of it? Having a perfect reputation score never hurts, but the answer is a resounding – NO! I have a couple years of delivery management under my belt.. not as much as some other experts in the industry, but certainly enough to tell you that inbox placement is bent around user engagement, more so than anything else. Their is no bible or industry certified manual that illustrates this as a fact(that I can find), you have to base these facts off of months and years of analyzing delivery results. In time, you will come up with this same conclusion.

What does user engagement mean? Well as an ESP, we aren’t necessarily the only ones counting opens and click traffic; ISPs do this as well. They use their own formulas that plug in their subscriber’s activity with messages coming from your domain(e.g. Opens, Clicks, Complaints, etc..). If someone opens your email for the first time, then participates by clicking on a link in your content(other then the unsubscribe), then I would bet the farm that their is a really good chance your next email correspondence, given a successful delivery, will land in that person’s inbox.

Emails are obviously content driven. And although the quality and integrity of your content is a main ingredient to getting your message past those filters, your email’s life cycle is still dependent
on — the actual delivery of that content. So aside from how clean your content is or the quality of recipients on your targeted list, the goal is one in the same; which is to obtain the highest amount of success possible!

For instance, internal success like recipients delivered and better inbox placement or maybe a client’s success, such as advocacy turnout. Whatever metric you wish to improve, basic Deliverability Resource Management (DRM) has to be applied before, during and after all email campaigns.  Proper steps need to be taken in order to ensure that the bulk of your list recipients actually receive the message, regardless if it goes into their Bulk file folder or not. Certain practices can better position your available resources so that proper deliverability is present for your email blasts. Practices that would include setting up Feedback Loops (FBLs), monitoring and maintaining sender reputation scores, and consolidating a reliable set of black list filter detection and removal tools. Here are three things that anyone sending, or who is looking to send bulk email should know:

FBLs

Managing user complaints is a pivotal part to sending bulk email. There’s many reasons why an email recipient might hit that dreadful ‘Report Spam’ button at the top of their inbox. Maybe you’re sending them too many messages, maybe they’ve had a change of heart and no longer wish to receive your message, or maybe just by accident. Any number of reasons can exist why a user might be complaining about your content. This is why we require an inter-organizational system known as FBLs. After you set up your IP’s DomainKeys and publish your SPF records, you can then start registering with popular ISP’s and effectively manage user complaints through FBLs. This enables you to form a queue internally and start analyzing complaints and perhaps compare them with your business’s preferred expectations. How often you decide to remove those users who complain is totally up to you. However, please remember that washing your list of recipients who complain will enable you to avoid the probability of those same people sending additional complaints in the future. FBLs allow you to practice good list hygiene, and keep those complaints to a minimal. All of this formulates into a more organized and stable reputation for your IP’s. Keeping your complaint ratios low will enable your resources to successfully send more messages to the inbox, and avoid those pressing rate-limit schedules.

SenderScore

Your IP’s have a reputation to maintain! So be sure you keep them in the good graces of the ISP’s. Your sender reputation is just another way for you to develop and grow positive rapport with ISP’s and those filters that are looking for any reason to hinder your delivery. Your IP’s reputation is effected by conditions and factors in an equation that involves CANN-SPAM compliance, FBLs and white listing, complaint ratios, management of unsubs, mail frequency, and the quality average of recipients being delivered. Return Path is the industry baseline for identifying an IP’s reputation. It scores on a sliding scale, 1-100. And just like when you aced that 5^th grade spelling test, a score of 100 is the best!

I happen to believe that deliverability weighs heavily on sender reputation, more so than the actual content in the message itself. And that reputation will effect your delivery success in general, and not necessarily whether or not your message will be placed in the Inbox or Spam folder. Return Path is a good place to register at, as it provides simple reporting features and a free black list look up tool. However, the blacklist feature is nothing I would recommend for the ‘say all/be all’ in detecting blocked IPs, but it’s something else to throw in your toolbox. — So pay attention to your reputations! Doing so will result in better overall delivery to your lists!

Avoid the Black list

New filters are being installed as you read this. So format, test, and always review your results. Nearly 90% of emails today are considered spam(1), and in order to ‘attempt’ not to fall victim to this classification you will need to avoid the black list! Being the internet, there are many different resources available to check the status of your IPs. Among others, one of the lookup tools I like is MX Toolbox. It allows you to scan your IP’s over a vast array of filters being used by most of the prominent ISP’s today and also helps point you in the right direction for removing any triggered blocks that are detected.

You should consolidate any reliable sources for blacklist removal and tailor your bookmark manager accordingly for easy reference when the time is right. I would  also recommend at a minimal, doing an across the board sweep of your IP’s; checking each of them on more of a weekly basis, rather than every now and again or whenever you get around to it. I like to do this towards the end of the week, or sometimes more often if I know we are sending a heavier than normal volume of email. Simple methods like this need to be applied in order to help intercept messages lost in translation with ISP’s and perhaps combat those bounce back messages with those wacky codes denying your attempts at delivery due to being blacklisted.

Citation:

(1)    Barracuda Central Networks, “Spam Data”, 21 December 2010.

http://www.barracudacentral.org

Everyone has probably asked at one point why is the voting process so complicated? Only four percent of voters cast ballots at the polls in the last City of Phoenix Election. If any other business had metrics that showed these results you can bet changes would come rapidly.

Well, the good news is the city of Phoenix has done something about it and at perfect time considering the next major city election will ask voters to choose a new Mayor.

The new plan will give residents of Phoenix a new way to vote in the City Election. This plan will make it easier for voters to get to the polls.

The plan is to open voting centers at high traffic areas across the city and allow voters to take their pick of the most convenient, whether it is close to home, work, or other activities. Voting Centers will also be open for open for multiple hours and multiple days surrounding the election.

I like the vision the City of Phoenix has taken here. Next year I’ll enjoy electing the next Mayor while hopping on the light rail, or maybe right before I get my morning coffee and check my email coffee at the local free wifi spot.