I am a relatively new Twitterer. I picked it up last August and after having trouble with the Twitter update via IM shelved my account. It wasn’t until @RealtorLefebvre told me about Twhirl in February did I get back into Twitter.

At first I re-engaged into the Twitter universe because it gave me a quick way to tell my friends what I was up to. And as an added bonus, with the Twtter Facebook application, I could auto-update my Facebook status at the same time.

But after only a few months of heavy tweeting I noticed a trend. My heavy involvement in Twitter helped me blog more. (See diagram) This blog, directINFECTIONS has seen a spike in posts since I joined Twitter. I was only averaging around 6 or 7 posts a month and that has spiked to over 20. @SchneiderMike suggests it is because Twitter gives an opportunity to play out topics in a microblogging way first before writing fuller blog posts.

To some degree, that is true. But what I think is the biggest reason is that following people who are deeply embedded in the social media, marketing, and tech fields has created a situation where my mind is engaged all day on the topics of my blog.

Another interesting side effect of my Twitter activity, is the slight decline in my IM activity. I have found that some conversations that I would ordinarily have with @ponchdeleon over IM, I choose to broadcast to all my followers on Twitter. So now instead of sharing a funny link and keeping it between ourselves, we share it with all our followers.

My conversations have stayed the same, they have simply sorted themselves out to an appropriate channel. Fully baked ideas become blog posts, interesting microblogging linking become tweets, and IM is reserved for private conversations.

Jeff Chausse, a former colleague of mine, has an interesting post on his blog about the 0-1-N fallacy and how the wants of an engineer may not apply to the wants of the user interface designer.

It may seem heresy to most engineers to claim that anything less than infinite scalability is good enough, but in UI design that is definitely the case. The iPhone, for example can only have 9 web pages open at once. It probably has the memory to hold dozens more, but if it held dozens, it would have to abandon the extremely elegant UI of “flicking” thumbnails to move between pages, and use a clunky list instead.

This “fallacy” applies to marketing as it pertains to call to action messaging. Typically within an organization, the product groups and the marketing groups do not agree. Product groups want to promote, advertise, and inevitably sell product. That alone, is not the problem. The problem lies in the fact where the marketing group has to accommodate the needs of all the product groups on one single budget. And depending on what the acceptable contact frequency is for the target audience, this can create a logjam of competing messages. Read more…

The 80/20 Rule is something that every direct marketer knows (or at least should know). The basic principle is this: 20% of your customers represent 80% of your sales.

According to Wikipedia:

“The principle was suggested by management thinker Joseph M. Juran. It was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population. The assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes.”

Ok. So what? Why do we need to know this? In my experience over 10 years of creating direct marketing programs I have never come across a budget that I thought was enough. It is no big surprise. Marketers know what captures attention, drives action, and produces results. It tends to be a scenario like: a dimensional piece to break the clutter with an offer that is too amazing to pass up with a response device that is incredibly personalized all sent to a list made up of perfect leads. That may be every marketers hope for a perfect campaign but they all add up to moolah and let’s face it, not gonna happen. Read more…

Chalk this up to an idea that I just don’t have the time to pursue on my own. So I decided to post this up here so hopefully Apple or another enterprising company can jump on. The idea is this: Using your iPhone as a Wish List barcode Scanner.

Imagine going to any store in the world, seeing something you like and then telling everyone who matters to you that you want it. Now imagine that instead of having to write down the store, the product name, or color choice, you simply use the camera function in your iPhone, scan the barcode on the item, and it auto-populates to your .mac wish list. Read more…

So you have decided to drive people online to respond to your offer. Great. As I discussed previously, an online destination can provide you valuable information about your prospects and customers not to mention key indicators to the success of your program.

But all of that means nothing if you can’t accomplish two things: differentiate traffic by lots and get them there in the first place. That’s where vanity URLs come into play. Vanity URLs are memorable URLs that customers key in to respond to their offer. It could be a splash page off of your main corporate site, off of a programatic microsite, it’s own unique site, or a personalized URL (PURL). All executions can bring great response and eliminate unneeded barriers to success. Read more…