Great Links!

Welcome to another edition of the Friday Blog Log! Here are our favorite links of the week. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did!

To start off, we loved this post from the Email Marketing Feed blog. This is a blog that collects all things e-mail marketing and reports it to the world. imediaconnection.com is the author of this particular post and they do a good job of discussing how to create e-mail messages that take into account the user experience when receiving the message. Oftentimes, as we create our e-mail messages, we focus primarily on the content, the offer and the target market. This is all very important, too. However, this post talks to the importance of conducting some simple usability studies that take mere hours to increase the open and response rates of your message. This post gives some examples of how to integrate this into every campaign. It's jam-packed with great information!

Our second link comes from e-consultancy's News and Blog post on Forrester's recent research on how spending lots of money on social media can sustain companies in these tough economic times. e-consultancy's author rips this research apart and provides some great (and pretty humorous) examples of why this isn't such a great idea. Here's a snippet from the article: "Given the fact that it’s increasingly becoming clear that marketing on social networks for the vast majority of marketers who have tried it, and is losing money for even the Googles of this world, Forrester Research’s 'research' seems to be quite contrarian to say the least." Read the full article for some thought-provoking ideas around this important subject -- and what this author's ideas are on what's really important. Good stuff!

Finally, we loved this post from Ron Shevlin's Marketing Whims Blog. In this post, Ron dispels the myth that you can advertise your way to greatness. With his tell-tale humor, he discusses the real elements that create iconic companies. Ron points out that Nike and Apple have accomplished this because they have done things in addition to advertising that helped them achieve their iconic status. "In Apple’s case it’s customers who are really into computer-aided graphics and design, and in Nike’s case it’s athletes and aspiring athletes." This is a wonderful and humorous read on what makes great companies just that -- great companies. And, under no circumstances can you become great simply by building a great advertising campaign. We know you'll enjoy this one!

TGIF!