One of my favourite direct response marketing companies to watch and learn from is Agora, Inc.

Agora, Inc. publishes a bunch of financial, travel, wellness and all sorts of other newsletters and publications. One you might recognize is Early To Rise. It’s also renowned for its command of direct response marketing.

But did you know that its flagship business is “Gazeta Wyborcza”, the largest and most profitable Polish daily newspaper, and that Agora is also a public company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange?

Confused? Well, if we’re supposed to believe the profile of Agora, Inc. given on ZoomInfo.com, Agora, Inc. has annual revenues of $143.9 million, employs 500 staff, is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, has a website at http://www.agorafinancial.com… and is also known as ‘Agora SA’. Agora SA is:

“one of the biggest and most recognized media companies in Poland and in Central and Eastern Europe. Since 1999 its shares are listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and the GDRs are traded on the London Stock Exchange.”

Either there’s more to Agora, Inc. than we’ve been led to believe… or ZoomInfo has totally lost the plot! It appears to have combined information about two entirely different companies – Agora, Inc. and Agora SA into one profile. Which leads me to ask: can we really trust ZoomInfo to deliver accurate information about companies and people?

Now, ZoomInfo allows companies to ‘claim’ their profiles and update these with accurate information. So, presumably, Agora, Inc. can simply claim its profile and make sure it’s accurate. But, why is it up to Agora, Inc. - or any other company - to create an account in order to correct blatantly wrong information that has been made public?

Of course, that’s not to say ZoomInfo is the only - or even major -culprit. I mean, how many companies and people have inaccurate profiles floating around on the Interne… and how much of this is assumed to be true? I think we all know the answer…

Source: ZoomInfo.com, Do a company search on ‘Agora, Inc.’

Introducing TwittAd - a service designed to match Twitter account holders with potential advertisers. In other words, it allows you to sell space on your Twitter profile page to advertisers.

TwittAd provides the layouts and advertisers, you provide details about how many followers you have, how much you wish to charge for ad space, and other such details. Depending on how appealing your offer is, advertisers will or will not place advertising on your page.

Just one problem. As Erick Schonfeld points out in TechCrunch, all those advertisers may soon find that the only person seeing their ads is… you. After all, most people follow others via their OWN Twitter account, rather than hang out on other people’s Twitter pages.

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “Ads For Twits On Twitter (TwittAd Launches)”, TechCrunch, September 2, 2008, TwittAd

Based on its report on Australian email marketing metrics, here are three (3) tips from email service provider Vision 6 to help you improve the success of your email campaigns:

1. Clean, segment and continually profile your list to maximize email delivery, opens and click-throughs.
2. Ensure relevancy and sender recognition - ensure emails, subject lines, content and calls to action are relevant to recipients and clearly convey who is sending the emails.
3. Target and segment lists - target, profile and modify email campaigns. It’s better to send more targeted messages to different segments, than to send one general message to your entire database.

Source: Vision 6, “Email Marketing Metrics Report Australia Jan-Jun 2008″