Spam. A Lot.

Wasting the time of the audience is damaging the medium itself.

― Derek Harding

Email marketers, take comfort: 7 in 10 customers prefer to receive your content by email, rather than through social media channels, according to EveryCloud.

But that doesn't mean customers won't report you as a spammer.

Nearly half of all emails are spam, EveryCloud says; and because they are, your customers are steeled for a fight.

On any given day, 45% might report your email as spam, because they think you send too often; 36%, because they don't remember subscribing; and 31%, because your content seems irrelevant.

Spam isn't customers' only source of frustration, says EveryCloud.

Customers in general think marketers put them on too many lists, and have no patience for their fine-print advisories about name-use.

What can you do to avoid annoying customers? The answers are self-evident:

• Send great content
• Send it infrequently
• Be clear about your name-use

Stories are Elementary

IBM's supercomputer Watson is named after the company's first CEO.

But the Watson we remember and love was the storyteller.

It's elementary.

Stories stick.

Content's just content.

Now that IBM's Watson can publish content better than any human, the marketer who can't tell an arresting story is dead meat.

Sadly, that's the majority.

If you're publishing content without telling stories, it’s time to reboot and retool.

The silicon Watson can now publish content better than you can.

But how do you tell a story?

You don't patchwork data, as this tale does:

Acme will save 40% of its IT infrastructure costs over the next four years by migrating to a cloud solution. Acme is a small company without IT staff. Before our team migrated its users to the cloud, Acme used a single Domino server, which served up mail and one application, as well as a Traveler server for six mobile devices. Our team migrated all of the users from the on-premise Domino solution to a standalone cloud solution. This also included moving the six Traveler devices. Each user was reconfigured to connect to the cloud servers and provisioned with a clean mail file, as well as given a local copy of his or her old mail file to use as an archive. In addition, the one application (a vacation calendar) was moved to the cloud. In order to do this, we set up a user called vacations@acme.net and had all vacation requests sent to this account. Administrators were then able to go in and approve or deny them. In addition, all users can now view the vacation calendar to see who is in or out on a given day. With a small operation and no in-house IT support, Acme wanted to get back to “doing business” instead of “supporting business.” The cloud solution lowered its costs by eliminating the yearly licensing of Domino and decreasing the onsite footprint of servers.

What should you do, instead?

• Give us a character we can care about
• Give us a drama with a narrative arc
• Give us details that help us imagine what happened
• Spare us unnecessary facts
• Give us insights, new perspective, and a call to action

In short, give us a story:

One of America's most known and respected anvil makers, Acme is a small business whose profits were at risk due to recurring IT costs and poor vacation planning. Ironically, the company's IT needs were simple―email and a sharable vacation calendar―so simple, in fact, the company had no IT staff. But it did have two servers that needed babysitting, and which occupied an office that a key salesperson coveted; plus a $10,000 a year software license―and no sharable vacation calendar. Our team helped Acme move to the cloud. In doing so, we equipped every employee with email and gave everyone access to the vacation calendar, so employees can now plan their work around others' absences. As a result, Acme's two servers are history; the $10,000 annual license is history; a top salesperson now has the office she so desperately wanted, instead of a cubicle on the plant floor; and the company is running a lot smoother. Acme will cut IT costs by 40% in the next four years! Would you like to do that? Give us a call today.

See the difference?

It's elementary.

Carpe Diem

At no time has man so loved life as he did at the end of the Middle Ages.

― Philippe Ariès

Meandering the UK and gaping at the ubiquitous twelfth-century churches and town halls has nudged me to take carpe diem off the backburner.

Death was in your face in medieval times, when dysentery, ergotism, gonorrhea, influenza, leprosy, malaria, measles, bubonic plague, smallpox, childbed fever, and typhoid fever killed people every day in their own beds.

Today, in contrast, the dying simply vanish, retreating at old age into retirement homes, hospitals or hospices, while ads, films, songs, magazines, and social media posts paint a picture of perpetual youth and wellness that divert us from ever thinking about death.

"Much of social life can be interpreted as an elaborate means of shielding us from our inherent anxiety about death," says Roman Krznaric in his new book Carpe Diem Regained.

"The way so many of us desperately seek career success or lasting fame, our tendency to accumulate possessions that give us a sense of permanence, our wish to pass on a trace of ourselves to the future by having children, or the way we simply fill our time with so many diversions, from collecting stamps to foreign travel―these are all, at least in part, strategies for dealing with the stark reality that one day, sooner or later, we will cease to be and the worms will claim us."

Krznaric thinks the medieval spirit of carpe diem has been "hijacked by consumer culture," which teaches us to live happy lives through shopping, web surfing, fingering our mobiles, and―the latest craze―practicing mindfulness.

The better way to live, he believes, can be discovered in the past, when people seized opportunities to exist spontaneously, not by denying death, but by remembering it.

United Breaks Guitars. But Priceline Breaks Contracts.

You've probably heard Dave Carroll's story.

He's the musician whose $1,200 guitar was broken by United Airlines baggage handlers.

Dave tried for nine months to move the company to honor his claim. But United said "No," because he'd failed to submit the claim within 24 hours of the incident.

So he wrote and recorded a song, "United Breaks Guitars," and uploaded it to YouTube.

After only 150,000 views, United contacted Dave and offered to pay the claim if he'd delete the video.

Dave instead produced and uploaded two more, related songs, at which point the media picked up his story. He did over 200 interviews.

Then, the song parodies and knockoffs started, and millions of people learned to sing "United Breaks Guitars." On one flight from Newark, New Jersey, the passengers sang it in chorus as the plane taxied to the terminal.

Within three weeks, the company's stock plummeted by 10%, a decrease in value of $180 million.

A week ago, my wife and I tried to board a flight from Washington, DC, to London, using tickets we'd purchased for $1,200 six months earlier through Priceline, only to learn the company had cancelled the tickets.

When I called Priceline from the airport, I was told it had indeed cancelled the tickets in September and would not issue a refund. Ever. "We do not issue refunds," I was told.

My wife and I made other travel arrangements, at six times the cost of the cancelled Priceline tickets.

Next week, I'll send a brief protest letter to Priceline's executive chair, Jeff Boyd.

I'll remind Mr. Boyd of Dave Carroll's story and close the letter with the words, "Song to follow."

A Finger in Every Pie

While roaming about the yard of St. Kentigern’s, a 12th century church in Britain's Lake District, my wife and I ran into the docent, who was locking the church doors for the night.

He was a wizened Hobbit of a man, dressed incongruously in a leather biker's jacket and a matching Los Angeles Rams cap.

He took it upon himself to give us a guided tour of the churchyard.

He pointed out a large Celtic cross over one grave and said that the man below "had his fingers in both pies," meaning the man was hedging his bet on Christianity by having an ancient pagan symbol erected above him.

The docent's statement was a corruption of an old expression, "to have a finger in every pie," which means to be a busy body.

It probably first referred to nosey visitors to the kitchen, who couldn't resist tasting the cook's dishes by sticking their fingers into them and taking a lick.

Shakespeare alluded to the expression in Henry VIII, when the Duke of Buckingham says of the meddlesome Cardinal Wolsey:

"No man's pie is freed
From his ambitious finger."

The docent of St. Kentigern’s meant less that the dead man was intrusive, but that he hoped, in the afterlife, to have his cake and eat it too.