Today we talk about: List hygiene, email error codes, appending email addresses, red saber email stuff, LinkedIn for prospecting, Google and Sprint Merger, Open Socket connects Google’s Open Social to Facebook, Amazon’s Kindle gets a thumbs down, how long until Kindle is hacked, jailbreaking the iphone with graphics errors in Safari, John the Engineer, Economics podcasts like Bloomberg and stormclouds for 2008 ($2-3 Trillion next year), next year is Marketing’s chance to sign, make money in China now, Black Friday, retailmenot.com.

John is happy to say he has no business travel left for 2008.

Chris is wrapping up the last of his business travel.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

Unknown Speaker 0:19
Morning Welcome to marketing over coffee.

Christopher Penn 0:20
I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn

Unknown Speaker 0:22
and we’re here in a cold morning but back in the lovely Dunkin Donuts Framingham

Christopher Penn 0:27
it’s like home.

Unknown Speaker 0:28
It is. Well, you know, I had to laugh this morning too, because for the first time after only what maybe 37 some odd weeks she remembered your order right out of the gate, but then you change your

Christopher Penn 0:41
Well, thank you. I’m on the test.

Unknown Speaker 0:42
So yeah, exactly. Keep things rolling here. So it short week here Thanksgiving in the States, so we’ll be bailing out of work. Even most jaded and hardcore will probably be checking out around three o’clock on Wednesday and celebrating the holiday of Thanksgiving. So I’m not gonna lie I was totally itching for topics I was like this morning like what the hell are we going to talk about? No idea. So list hygiene though this is a good time of year to get to big things usually strategic planning and you know house clean are great stuff especially back after December when, you know, nobody’s around but the sales guy struggling to close q4 stuff. And if you’re smart, you’ve shifted your fiscal calendar so that your fourth quarter closes in January, right? So basically, you close up shop and forget about the last half of December. And of course I’m not in that position so and Sampras scramble, but, okay, so, keeping your list clean is just critical for a bunch of reasons. You know, one is email lists. If you’re not mailing a lot of dead email addresses, you’re less likely to get targeted as a spammer. You know, when you fire off to thousands of emails that don’t exist, that hits other servers causes problems. And then a bunch of the services you’ve got you’re going to be paying by the address, sometimes

Christopher Penn 1:55
SMS if you’re doing any email or SMS, you’re paying you know pennies per message. So he better have them. Right?

Unknown Speaker 2:01
Right. So that’s gonna, that’s going to go through. The problem is, it’s it is difficult to, you know, you have to set up a whole procedure for how you want to handle this stuff, because a lot of it is going to be manual labor. And that gets expensive too. And there is cost benefit analysis to be done, there’s a certain amount of data addresses that it just makes financial sense to leave lying around, it’s not worth the trouble to dig them up. But then once you reach a point where Okay, it’s becoming a sizable portion of your list, then you do have to go back through and scrub stuff out. Yeah,

Christopher Penn 2:31
and it also depends on what kind of bed address because you know, the SMTP the SMTP protocol gives over I think over 100 different error conditions and stuff like that. So a lot of them this time of year, you’ll get a lot of mailbox full, the address is still good. It’s just the person is probably you know, taking the rest of the week off or whatever. And they if they like me, they get 1000 messages a day. So in five days, their mailbox is toast right? address could not be found that’s a different story or Yeah, Yahoo account canceled, that’s, you know, those are clearly not going to ever return anything good to you.

Unknown Speaker 3:03
Another thing that we do is over in your CRM system, you know, we have salesforce.com. And I’ve got fields set up there so that the sales guys can just check boxes when things aren’t working, you know, phone number dead email bouncing, you know, because the great parts with your email service, if you’ve got a decent service, you’ll get reports back up, here’s all the ones that had x code, and you can handle appropriately. But for the one offs, people are mailing on the side and things like that, you have to try and keep track of all that. But that’s a great way to do it. If you have fields to check, then you just run reports and when the temp comes in one day a week or you pay somebody in another country, you know, $3 an hour.

Unknown Speaker 3:39
an hour is more like $3 a day.

Unknown Speaker 3:41
Yeah, yeah. Well, this is for somebody with a PhD and talking about three an hour. You know, and you just say, Okay, here’s your list, you know, clean this up. And, and then of course, there’s services for all this stuff, too. There’s, you know, you can pay people to just take your list and they’ll send you back a clean one, and email appending it’s another thing that you know, you may not have moral issue with but you know if you know that XYZ Corporation, you know, the five of the, the five emails you have for the 30 contacts, you see those five are all first initial and eight letters of the last name@xyz.com. You know, you could reasonably assume that those other eight are that address and you know, go through that now another thing I thought too, if you have any purchase rented least traded lists, you know, kind of Great. Well, I say they’re great lists like that, like my, my gray lists, though you really do. Oh, well, actually, most of the time they’re black lists. Yeah, you know, services or like, you will not mail these you will not, you know, you spotless, but they’re great. You know, if you get any great list, obviously do the smart thing. You know that if it’s XYZ Corp calm, okay, all the XYZ Corp. COMM ones are good. If you see aol.com gmail.com you know, the folks that originally generate these lists usually seed them so they know when they’re being abused, right. So make sure you take out everything. That’s not XYZ Corp calm right? Because then you’re basically just sending a signal that hey, I’m knocking alerts that you know, this I should probably stay off this topic this is like completely red saber stuff I’m totally like, I’m like and then when you get the Viagra from Mexico in your truck you have to make sure you get over the border and into Texas yeah at night when

Christopher Penn 5:23
there’s also you know, if you’ve played around with it at all, but building very large networks on you know, a very large network on LinkedIn right then doing your validation that way saying, Hey, I know that so I know the Boeing corporations gotta be in my network somewhere because I have 7 million people you know, third degree, so it’s like, you know, start hunting for them. I ended up doing that with US Airways. My point to them about their their missing reservation system found in the I found the VP of operations and I’m not going to deal with some customer service, you know, person from India or to email the vv directly, because that’s easier. What I found works really well in one off situations like that, you wouldn’t want to do that, you know, try and build a house list that way you your die of boredom. But find somebody who’s well off, you know, do a build yourself a really strong network to start with, you know, try and get a couple thousand people rolling into your, your seed network. And then you can reach anyone 30 degrees, ask for introductions in your network, say, hey, I want to connect with so and so. And just make it a generic business opportunity or whatever generic, hey, I want to build my business network. When you get connected to the person directly. You get all the contact information and you email them or call them. Hey,

Unknown Speaker 6:38
hey, right, right. It’s my

Christopher Penn 6:40
friggin reservation. Where’s my money? Exactly. But I mean, LinkedIn is LinkedIn is is an okay business networking tool. It is a huge research tool. And is it is I think the research tool choice for for trying to hunt someone down.

Unknown Speaker 6:56
Yeah, we’ve, we’ve had some luck with that too, just in the past couple weeks who are doing Some webinars stuff and we were able to, we kind of had a list and we wanted to beef it up more. And yeah, I’ve got a webinar today and a couple of more the LinkedIn leads, you know, they converted and we’ve got them rolling. So yeah.

Christopher Penn 7:10
Can’t can’t argue about the cost.

Unknown Speaker 7:12
That’s Yeah, exactly. No, it’s just the cost of digging. That’s it. All right. So we this will be week three of Google in the news between their social networking plug in and then cell phone platform last week, and I did hear weird rumor about Google looking at sprint this week. Yeah,

Christopher Penn 7:30
I heard that too. I would say that’s probably an invalid rumor. Although they may be hedging their bets that it can’t buy the dark fiber and they can’t buy the spectrum. Right. AUC they’re they’re bidding for the FCC is auctioning off of some parts of the wireless spectrum. If they don’t win that, then maybe they’ll pull the trigger on sprint, but I I would not put a lot of money on that bet. Right, right. The big thing is open socket, which is a third party API to open social so open social and when we talked about a couple weeks ago, is that The Google’s API for all the different social networks. Well, it didn’t take very long someone else’s Empire open socket, which connects it to the Facebook API. So the connection has been made. And even if not, officially, if you are developing for open social, you now have all 15 major social networks. So that’s, that’s the news this week,

Unknown Speaker 8:18
connects to everything. So that’s it. You can again, you’re writing apps for everything.

Christopher Penn 8:23
Yeah. So it looks like with open socket, those open socials, the place to write for as long as the API is sufficiently robust enough cuz I do it more than once.

Unknown Speaker 8:34
Now, what do you How about for, you know, platforms? What are people writing? You know, would you assume people should write to open socket with

Christopher Penn 8:41
the choice seems to be PHP.

Unknown Speaker 8:43
That’s the the platform to run with. Very cool. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years with everything. Going more and more dynamic. Yep.

Christopher Penn 8:54
You know, what I thought was a very interesting comment. I know a lot of people were buzzing yesterday about kindle amazon New ebooks are useless. Well, I’m sorry that any device that has ever only and requires you to pay for everything is fine. I’m gonna go very, very far. someone pointed out that the largest store of ebooks, text ebooks is not Amazon. It’s Google. They own you know, they’ve had a huge database of texts, they’ve index, including your lots and lots of scholarly volumes, the Google library project, well Guess whose mobile platform is probably going to have hooks into their database. And for all the free texts you could possibly want,

Unknown Speaker 9:33
right? Sure. It’s not gonna be right. Right. Right. You know,

Christopher Penn 9:37
so you if you put Android on on a Kindle style piece of hardware, right, right, then you’ve got a different game.

Unknown Speaker 9:45
Yeah. See, that’s interesting, because that I mean, first of all, they have the unique hardware. I mean, Sony had pretty much that ebook reader that for some reason, just never or it has come to the states and nobody cared or I’m not too sure what exactly what the deal with that is. But so now you have Kindle. I’m just surprised. They didn’t take more of a You know, everybody talks about the Gillette razor approach, right? You know, just almost give the hardware away, and then you’ll get people to buy it because it is a cool device. But there’s just no way I’m going to pay 400 bucks. 400 Yeah, At first, I thought it was 299, which was like, the 399. I’m just like,

Christopher Penn 10:15
forget it. And then 999 for the you have no connection, because there’s no Wi Fi on it.

Unknown Speaker 10:19
Right, right. You’re using cell phone network? Is that 95 a month? on that?

Christopher Penn 10:24
Yeah. That’s ridiculous. That’s why it said it’s pretty much dead.

Unknown Speaker 10:28
Yeah, it’s just just people aren’t gonna pay that now. I mean, you’re gonna have a couple hardcore

Christopher Penn 10:32
people that will. Now again, if, if the hardware works well, there’s no reason that you someone wouldn’t write an Android for it. And use as Google does match to buy up that wireless spectrum, then yeah, that you might have open wireless spectrum and an Android system that can have Google’s text on it.

Unknown Speaker 10:51
Right. But this thing is, Kindle is, I mean, it’s platform independent, right does even have any ports on it. I didn’t think it did. I think so.

Christopher Penn 11:00
It’s got to be at least a maintenance port there somewhere.

Unknown Speaker 11:04
Unless that updates via the app though,

Christopher Penn 11:06
maybe it’s got a SIM card in there somewhere it’s connected now

Unknown Speaker 11:08
there’s a SIM card Yeah, that’s true too. Yeah, cuz you can’t up the memory I think I’d read that. So you could do so when people are jailbreaking their iPods using you know, graphic errors in this file browser to

Unknown Speaker 11:19
the

Christopher Penn 11:22
SIM card you know that things toasts The moment I went to Bre Pettis is probably working on a something he missile guidance system using the Kindle right now

Unknown Speaker 11:31
right right but the problem is you know it’s like you know, you have to like go buy a special piece of metal the crack the case open and you know, wrap a toothpick in aluminum foil I touch this lead over here, you know, and of course, like if you touch the wrong pin you bracket destroyed. Yeah, well, fun, fun games. If you’ve got 400 beans and they animate Chris. Yeah, that’s true. Once you get what and it’s kind of cell phone connection on it. So you could do some interesting

Christopher Penn 12:00
Good I mean that apparently the screen is viewable in broad daylight. So theoretically you if you were so inclined to have an awful lot of money and nothing better to do if you could make a kiosk out of it that updated over Abdo

Unknown Speaker 12:12
Right, right. Or the if it had Bluetooth you could just use your headset and now you’d have a combo book phone.

Christopher Penn 12:19
Yeah, I don’t think it has any onboard communications other than the other than the

Unknown Speaker 12:23
Yep, I mean if you have the F doe on the battery right Isn’t that like 80% of the engineering headache? The obviously the keypad and the software is there but it’s like it’s the power and the yeah the antenna that are the pain in the ass from my you know, engineering experience which consists of fixing my rain gutters this weekend

Unknown Speaker 12:44
you know

Unknown Speaker 12:46
all hit up my friend Ron over at synopsis a lot to talk to him about that. He’s got the inside story, engineering stuff. Alright, so end of year again talking about looking towards the future. also a good time to review your financial plants. And so you’d posted earlier this week about impending economic implosion, implosion. Well, I mean, it’s not a secret to anybody. You know, we’re not gonna transcend economics podcasts. I would actually recommend if you are interested in economics podcasts, Bloomberg has a fantastic set of podcasts on the economy and on all the various things from Bloomberg radio, they just repurpose, but it’s it’s good stuff.

Christopher Penn 13:24
The short version is that what’s happening on the markets and credit stuff between the housing bubble and things is is you’re looking at wiping out between 200 and $500 billion just in just some loans and stuff over the next year. subprime is going to accelerate in March of next year. And then on top of that, you have the the falling housing bubble, the housing prices, which will wipe out another two to $3 trillion out of the net worth of the economy. So the housing ATM slows down. And then consumer spending slows down already has such slowdown for big ticket items. So there’s not a great rosy picture 2008 It looks like it’s going to be a very, very difficult year for the consumer very difficult year for anyone who’s even remotely connected to the real estate industry and or the securitization industry on the street. So what it means for everyone in marketing is that marketing is going to be probably the most important function of companies next year, because I will look at the example of Xerox back in the 70s when Xerox had patents on the photocopier so that they base their sales and marketing job consists of picking up the phone saying how many would you like right? And that was they had they didn’t have to work when the patents ran out, and cannons start eating their lunch. You know, Xerox really found itself on on the very wrong end of the business and we got a we got to forget improving our game. We got to find our game. Before we get going. For we get toasts, so well. I think what’s going to happen next year for a lot of industries, anyone connected to the lending industry, anyone can do banking or even Uh, you know, if you’re on the consumer side of things, selling stuff to consumers who frankly will not have, you know, a lot of disposable income next year, you got to bring your marketing a game to the table, you got to be better, faster and more engaging to customers next year, because next year is going to be when there’s a lot of competition for very, very few dollars. So it’s, it’s so important that if you if you are, have some time between now and the end of the year, and start picking up books, set aside a hour or so a day and start training now, so that you’re ready to hit the ground running when the New Year rolls around.

Unknown Speaker 15:34
Right when stuff gets up. Well, the other thing too, is going to be more and more interesting. Now the rest of the world, you know, accelerating their economies and the weakness of the dollar you do have a real buyers market for the rest of the world. You know, so if you’re selling globally, people, you know, products from the US will actually become a bargain. The tables may even turn Yeah, and some economies so definitely, you know, trend global game up and running too. So there’s plenty things to do up there. And yeah, Don’t give up on the dollar last year. I was already like, farm it out. I’ve got you know, China has done wonderful things in the past year and they’re what? There’s no available cranes anywhere on the China area from what I understand there’s no available planes in Asia. Yeah, thanks for just just fire and rolling.

Christopher Penn 16:17
Yeah, I mean from a personal finance perspective, if you’re looking for investment overseas clearly is going to be the the action for the next year. So China and India are pretty much you know, unless one of the two of them implodes or the Three Gorges Dam collapses. You’re basically looking at a baked in wind for each of those economies

Unknown Speaker 16:36
right to run with. And then of course I do have to mention for everybody on the retail side this Friday, Black Friday, so everybody after Thanksgiving was going to go run out and spend lots of cash and that’s wonderful for everybody in retail. You will retail hopes may not it may be a tighter year than normal. We’ll see how things go but I have been hanging out on retail me not

Unknown Speaker 16:59
been on there. Yes. Oh my god all the codes. They’re there everything. Yes.

Unknown Speaker 17:04
You know there’s a code up there now for overnight prints calm free business cards, you can get about 30 bucks worth of cards. So if you need cards for your podcast, blog, whatever, check that out. But yeah retailmenot has great shopping codes. Always check there first before you buy.

Christopher Penn 17:18
Yep. And if you happen to be participating in a discount code program, some kind like MAE podshow podcasters with the GoDaddy codes, that’s a good place to put them.

Unknown Speaker 17:27
Yeah, yeah, exactly. To some farming, get that stuff out there so it will run for you. All right, that’s good. Well, I think with that here, we’ll go a little bit shorter for the holiday edition. But enjoy the time off. Enjoy the coffee. Enjoy the coffee, enjoy the turkey.

Unknown Speaker 17:44
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. You can hear Mr. Penn daily at the financial aid podcast and read more at Christopher s pen.com. Mr. Wolf logs daily at Ronan marketeer.com and podcast the M show Green Monday.

Unknown Speaker 18:03
The marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at the pod safe music network pod safe music network.com or follow the link in our show notes.