Another week is over, so here are just a couple of links along with some commentary.

• You might as well just subscribe to CostPerNews.com since I seem to share something from Sam Harrelson’s blog every week. This week, his great post on 10 steps to tracking your social reputation. Personally I love Trackur for the easy way out, but this is a good backup plan to have.
• Internet Superstar Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.tv is movin’ the show to Revision3 Internet Television. Personally, I’ve never heard of Revision3, but rock on Gary! He’s been sticking with Viddler for the longest time, but he’s moving on up! He should be starting there sometime next week.
• Linkshare has appointed co-presidents Jonathan Levin (their former CTO) and Yasuhisa Iida (“Yaz”) (Executive Officer of Rakuten). More on the story at RevenueToday.com
• Forgot one, so this has been edited: Yahoo! and Google struck up a devilish partnership that I’m sure everyone and their mom has heard of by now.
  

That’s all, no homework since it’s Father’s Day weekend.

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Checking my email last night I noticed some ingenious, personalized email marketing campaigns that I think more businesses should consider (including my own). I felt the need to share these as case studies. There’s a lot to cover, so I’ll split them up. Hopefully I can continue to do these case studies to give props to what works in marketing and why.

The Company: Expedia.com: I’ve always had great service and luck with Expedia, so they’re my go-to travel site when referencing flight prices, hotels, etc.

The User History: a few days ago I booked a cruise vacation with some friends out of Port Canaveral, 60 minutes or so outside of Orlando. The trip isn’t for almost a full year, so I wanted to just get an idea of flight prices from Oakland to Orlando. I headed over to Expedia to just check out the price ranges and get a feel for how much I’ll have to put aside for a flight. Since the trip is next February, I don’t plan on actually making this purchase until sometime this summer or next fall.

The Subject Line: Find your flight to Orlando backed by our Best Price Guarantee.

The E-Mail:

The Effectiveness: It’s directing a sale that they’re already running to me, a person who has already shown that they are interested in this particular destination. The email contains just enough text to show that it’s paid attention to my user habits and is offering it’s help without trying to make a super hard sale. The links are targeted and there’s not much in the email that’s off topic (see the Seattle to San Francisco rates in the yellow box – unrelated but I don’t blame them for throwing it out there). I do acknowledge that this may be a total coincidence that I happened to be in the market for a flight to Orlando and this routine email may just be perfectly timed, but at least it shows that they do know their audience.

The Result: I honestly think that I may be a bit more likely to make this purchase sooner than I had anticipated because of this email. I am a little bummed that the sale advertised doestn’t lower the price any more than I’d already found on the website (which was probably a sale price in the first place). I will definitely keep an eye out in regards to their Best Price Guarantee, a service that I never realized they offered until receiving the email.

So in conclusion, email marketing can be effective, even when sending to other marketers. It’s always a great learning experience to pay attention to the emails you get and think to yourself, “What can I learn from this?” and apply what you’ve learned to your own job. It’ll improve your performance and you’ll be better off.

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I have no clue why this excites me, but overnight I received my first spam comment. I’m going to leave it up just because it’s the first! I guess it could mean that the content is getting indexed faster, which is always good.

What’s not good is Feed Burner. I know I’ve been critical of them in the past for a small jump in subscriber count, but last night my subscriber count was 54 and this morning it’s 32. Mark from 45n5.com responded to my outraged tweet that FB is just as good as guessing, so I assume it’s not really reliable. Which bums me out because I’d really rather have no reporting than inaccurate reporting. Oh well, just another thing to learn along the way.

I’m mostly worried that the switch from blogger to wordpress and the domain change has affected the subscribers, but I followed all the steps outlined by Feed Burner. And I subscribe to the feed myself and it looks fine.

As long as I’m pseudo-rambling here and you’re pacifying me by continuing to read, I’ll also mention that I believe I fixed the issue with my video not playing. I switched over to an embedded video from Viddler.com instead of Blip.tv and it seemed to work fine when I tested it. Unfortunately that does mean that the opening screen grab of me with my air quote fingers isn’t there.

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