The other day a valued client asked me what I thought of safelists. Funnily enough, the question came at a time when I’d just come to the uneasy conclusion that I must be on someone’s safelist.

Why else would I be constantly be bombarded with promotions from Internet marketers I don’t recognize… and certainly haven’t opted in with or bought from. (Actually there are other explanations, but let’s go with the safelist…)

Now, to some extent, being on a safelist is my problem as an email recipient. But it’s also a problem for the Internet marketers sending out all these emails. Put it this way, if someone has added me to a safelist… and I don’t read any of the emails being sent to me… how many other subscribers are in the same situation? How many other people have been added to a safelist without any interest whatsoever in receiving the various promotional emails being sent to them?

And how many marketers are sending emails to these lists - perhaps having paid for the privilege expecting a decent response, and getting negligible results?

I think we all know the answer.

Perhaps safelists are cost-effective for some marketers. If you’ve had good results from them, please click on the ‘Click here to comment’ link below and let us know why and how they’ve work for you.

Otherwise, I recommend you think carefully before using a safelist. Don’t forget – you’re also risking being added to blacklists by people who have no clue they’re on a safelist. To them, you’re a spammer.

And if do want to try out a safelists… expect little or nothing by way of results.

Jason Calacanis - serial Internet entrepreneur and the guy who co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey - announced on Friday that he was retiring from blogging. He subsequently sent an email to a list of about 750 subscribers explaining that blogging was dead.

Well, “blogging” as Jason understood it to be.

In his email, Jason wrote that bloggers now spend more time and effort trying to broadcast their blogs, than actually blogging:

“Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts than they do on the posts themselves. In the early days of blogging Peter Rojas, who was my blog professor, told me what was required to win at blogging: “show up every day.” In 2003 and 2004 that was the case. Today? What’s required is a team of social marketers to get your message out there, and a second one to manage the fall-out from whatever you’ve said.”

Jason went on to say:

“Excelling in blogging today is about link-baiting, the act of writing something inflammatory in order to get a link.”

Ironically (i.e. for anyone who remembers ardent bloggers announcing that EMAIL is dead), Jason heralded email as his communication tool of choice, owing to its “intimacy” and “immediacy”.

He pointed out that email facilitates a “level playing field” between sender and recipient, where there is commitment on both sides - the commitment of the sender to send, and the commitment of the recipient to subscribe to the email list in the first place. I should also add that Jason aims to limit his list to a 1,000 or so subscribers, in order to achieve a “deeper” relationship with his subscribers.

Hats off to Jason for making a choice about the communication medium right for him, based on his individual goals and circumstances.

But this is just a CHOICE - it’s not right or wrong.

Blogging HAS changed over the past 3-4 years. It has evolved from being an “open diary” kind of medium to being a medium used by a range of individuals, journalists, businesses, interest groups and others, for a range of purposes. And the term “blog” is coming to be synonymous with “website content management system”, rather than a style of communicating on the web.

Can blogging no longer facilitate intimate and immediate communications? Do bloggers really spend more time trying to get attention FOR their blogs, than writing interesting, compelling content ON their blogs?

Maybe the majority of bloggers ARE more interested in gaining attention for their blogs than writing worthwhile blogs in the first place. Heck, we all know of Internet marketers who specifically advise people to set up blogs purely for marketing purposes, regardless of their content.

And perhaps this is not what blogging used to be about. And on that basis, perhaps blogging is, to some extent, dead. But the same could be said about email: once it was used for personal messages between individuals, now it is used for personal messages between individuals… AND for business communication purposes… AND for promotional purposes… AND for all kinds of other purposes.

So, just like email is a MEDIUM, so too is a blog. If blogging is dead… long live blogging!

Furthermore, I can’t see why a blog - as a medium - can’t still facilitate an intimate, immediate and deep relationship between a writer and his or her readers. What’s stopping Jason from setting up a private blog that is only available to 1,000 of his closest friends? What’s stopping him from keeping comments private? Surely such a blog would have an advantage over email in the sense that it won’t suffer from deliverability challenges.

That said, I do agree that email has the edge when it comes to intimacy and relationship building. An email IS a bit more personal and “special than a web-based blog post. This is basically because an email - assuming it’s not spam - is an invited guest to YOUR PLACE i.e. your email inbox, and, as such, is likely to grab more of your attention and interest than a blog post appearing on someone ELSE’s website. So if I had to choose, I would rather send emails than post messages on a blog.

But, of course, you and I do NOT have to choose. We can do both. As marketers, we can enjoy the best of both worlds - the ability to have our blog posts spread or shared across the web in order to generate traffic and interest in our offerings - AND the ability to develop a deeper relationship with our subscribers via email.

Sources: Nik Cubrilovic, “Jason Calacanis’ First New Email Post”, TechCrunch, July 13, 2008, Wikipedia, “Jason Calacanis”, Wikipedia, Last Updated July 14, 2008

Today, July 7, 2008 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) changes to the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) take effect.

There are two new rules, in particular, for Internet marketers to take note of – yes, they may require you to make some changes to how you market:

1. Unsubscribing needs to be easier

You cannot require an email recipient to do any of the following in order to unsubscribe from your list:

– Pay a fee;
– Provide information other than their email address and opt-out preferences; or
– Do anything more than send a reply email message OR visit ONE web page.

2. Clarification over “forwarding to a friend”

Under the revamped law, any email sent via a web-based referral form is considered to be sent by the person or company that owns the website. In other words, if you encourage people to fill in a form in order to send a referral message to others, YOU - not the referrer - are considered to be the sender.

Now for some good news and bad news.

First, the bad news. Well, it’s not exactly “bad”… but if you provide a reward, incentive or inducement to someone in return for forwarding a message to someone else, then you must comply with the CAN-SPAM Act as if the email was directly sent by you.

So, for example, you must provide a physical address to those who receive such messages and provide them with the ability to opt-out. Presumably, however, if the recipient of the referral email is not actually added to a list, there is no need to provide an opt-out mechanism.

The good news is that if you simply give people the ability to forward a message or send a link to others - and neither are they added to a list nor provided with a reward, incentive or inducement for forwarding such a message, you are not held to such CAN-SPAM requirements.

Of course, this is our understanding of the new laws; this ain’t legal advice and you should consult a qualified attorney!

Source: MarketingSherpa, “CAN-SPAM Update: Have You Complied With the New Rules Yet?”, MarketingSherpa, June 25, 2008