Small scale email marketing works a treat

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

A long time ago, in a place far from here, on a dark and stormy night, I sent out my first mailshot to 100 names plucked from Thomson’s Directory. It read ‘Mark and Mac for hire’. The response was amazing, creating a customer base which lasted for a decade and more. My wife and I were some of the first designers in Brighton with Mac set-ups, including a PostScript laser printer and a full range of design software. It all cost a gazillion to buy, the typefaces alone were worth thousands of pounds.

Over the years, clients moved on, to be replaced with others. As new facilities became affordable we bought them: ISDN, ADSL, high-res scanning, image manipulation, large format colour prints and web page design.

Gradually I specialised into book production, with clients in London, France and America, while my wife worked for a national charity. But the bankers screwed the world, people stopped buying books, publishing moved to ebooks and for the first time in 25 years I had to get a proper job. Ironically back to my old career where there is a huge lack of staff and I’m working less for the same money I earned from design. But I still keep a toehold in the creative world, hoping for the return of the good old days.

Zany, attractive and to the point

Which is how one email caught my eye and instead of marking it as junk, I read each new one with interest. They were zany, attractive and to the point, obviously from someone who knew what they were doing, or at least appeared to do so. The email was from Keith Scott, another jobbing freelancer who was trying to create a new client base via email.

Pre-recession Keith had been the man behind British Airport Authority’s annual report. As any designer will tell you, a glossy annual report pays the mortgage for a year. When BAA were taken over, Keith found he didn’t have enough work after a career in typesetting and design for print, dating from the days of hot metal.

Keith explained: “Once BAA’s 2006 annual report had gone to print I was back in the normal run of things with no financial umbrella and wondering what to do about the monetary vacuum. I had been sending postcards then followed up with a phone call but it became too expensive and time-consuming. I decided to try email.

“I had built up a small database of about 120 contacts whom I telephoned to get an email address before starting a monthly mail-out. It was a slow, manual process but it did keep the work coming in. Eventually I set FileMaker Pro to send the emails for me.

“At the start of 2009 I had 300 friendly contacts and about 1200 who had never replied. Each month I carried on emailing both and slowly increased the friendly list, which kept the work coming in. Unfortunately, as the recession hit, work started drying up, I had to put my time to good use.

“With the help of Yell.com, Yellow Pages on line, I searched for graphic design companies in London and the southern home counties. I telephoned them and said I was an artworker. I gave them my details and asked for the email address of the creative director or studio manager. The vast majority of people were very obliging.

Life threatening

“One day, searching Yell, an odd message appeared in a new browser window. It said that I was deemed to be using their site for the purpose of making a database which was strictly illegal and if I did not desist I would be prosecuted. It frightened the life out of me.

“Now I buy low cost lists from other companies. Not all of them have been particularly useful and one even instigated a contact from another database company threatening to prosecute me for using their data without permission. A list I had bought was clearly not legal and I had used a hidden trojan.

“I now have 570 friendly contacts and over 3000 who have never replied. The irony is that I have less work than ever, although it does seem to be improving slightly. Producing an html email for a client gave me the knowledge to create my own. I tried Dreamweaver which wasn’t very successful before I settled on TextWrangler which is free and very good. I use MacMassMailer to send my html emails.”

As with all jobbing designers, Keith has had to learn new skills and software to keep up with the industry. He is keen to learn from others’ experience. In the last couple of years, MacUser articles have made him re-evaluate his approach and present himself more forcefully. For example: a recent article showed that skilled freelancers should present themselves as specialists rather than just run-of-the-mill artworkers.

Like Keith, MacUser’s Steve Caplin convinced me to switch to a graphics tablet and adopt a different method to do ‘hairy cut-outs.’ This was immediately before I created a book for the Imperial War Museum called The Animals’ War. Page after page had cut-outs of hirsute animals which even the best Photoshop filters were a major head-ache. Steve’s advice was to paint quick masks, convert them to cut-outs before generating ‘hairiness‘ with brushes and fitters. This helped when I went on to do The Children’s War.

Keith Scott concludes: “The obvious thing for me was to promote my traditional typesetting and artworking background. This is why I try hard to distinguish the fact that design and artwork are two very different disciplines.

“But I feel that I’m barking up the wrong tree much of the time – some might say I’m simply barking.”

Far be it for me to contradict him.

Grandmother convicted for illegal filesharing? Really?

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

You’d have thought copyright enforcers couldn’t upset their enemies much more, but this week saw a nurse and grandmother from Ayr become the first person living in Scotland to be convicted for illegal music sharing.

Anne Muir, a 58-year-old and grandmother to eight, is due to be sentenced later this month after admitting to distributing £54,000 worth of copyrighted music files over a P2P app.

Not only is Muir an elderly woman, it appears she has serious mental health problems too. Muir’s lawyer Lorenzo Alonzi told the BBC his client had used the P2P network to help with self-esteem issues after suffering from depression.

“She has, for many years, suffered from bouts of depression, which causes her to have extremely low self-esteem,” Alonzi said. “Learning this new technology and picking up new skills gave her self-esteem a boost.”

If what Alonzi says is true, it’s a sad day for the UK legal system. It seems clear Muir broke the law, but do we as a nation not make allowances when it comes to vulnerable people? What if the activity they are doing makes their lives that little bit better, dragging them out of the mire they live in day in, day out?

How significantly the copyright holders were actually harmed by Muir’s actions is not totally clear, but no doubt these proceedings will have had an irrevocably damaging impact on Muir’s wellbeing. So I ask you, what is more important, the life of a person with mental health issues, or respecting copyright law?

Peter Bradwell, campaigner at Open Rights Group, was unsurprisingly unsettled by Muir’s conviction and its hard not to agree with his sentiments.

“Anne Muir is a grandmother and a nurse who has stolen nothing and has made no money from her activity,” Bradwell said. “It is not clear the music industry has lost any money as a consequence. She is now facing a fine of thousands of pounds and is being labelled a criminal. What she has done is no worse than a teenager hoarding cassettes. This case is a waste of public resources, arbitrary and disproportionate.”

As for the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) and IFPI (International Federation for the Phonographic Industry) who pursued the case in the first place, they may want to watch out for a response from hacktivist groups. It would come as no surprise if both come into Anonymous’ crosshairs thanks to the Muir case.

Now – and this goes for any company – do not invite trouble to your doorstep, especially when there may be no need. Just look at what happened to HBGary.

Fun with LaTeX

Monday, March 28th, 2011

All right, calm down, not that kind of fun or indeed that kind of latex, “LaTeX” is no typo, it’s a typesetting / document layout language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

If you have need to layout tricky documents or, as in the case of a friend I was helping at the weekend, write a document full of special symbols it’s just what you need. Of course it is from UNIX and was used with TeX. Which is good because it is open source and you can use free software like
http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/
to produce PDF documents with weird and wonderful symbols – for all elements members of curly C mapped to gamma to the power theta anyone?

It was quite nostalgic to work with non-WYSIWYG text editing but also frustrating. There doesn’t seem a way to map the PDF back to the source – when you spot an error in the final product it’s a case of searching the source for the relevant text. Fortunately Texmaker does take you to the problem line if the “compiler” throws an error. We got there in the end though!

MadBid – pay £27 for £600?

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Sorry, I know I’m supposed to be all cutting edge and that but I have only just come across http://uk.madbid.com/ although it has been up and running for a few years.

As far as making money off the web it is very clever. As a “pay to bid” site you have to register and pay 30p for every bid and each bid is only 1p more than the current value. The auction only closes when no one bids for a set time (eg 20 seconds).

For a auction to reach 26.76 the site receives 2676 * 30p or about £800. If there are only 2 bidders that’s about £400 each, more bidders, less each. I’d be happy to pay £426.76 to win £600 cash! Or better still, just make the one winning bid and pay £26.97!!

BUT, if you don’t win then you’ve paid your £400 for nothing… Which is why some people would rate this type of site as gambling.

The site owners point out that it takes skill and determination and some people consistently win more than others so it isn’t a game of chance. You could say the same about poker and even blackjack if you card count…

Anonymity: Cowardice or authenticity?

Monday, March 14th, 2011

Histrionics are fairly rife in the upper echelons of the tech industry, as highlighted this week when a dogmatic statement on anonymity from Mark Zuckerberg was slammed by 4chan founder Christopher Poole.

Back in 2009, the Zuck (or el Zuckerino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) said that having two identities was “an example of a lack of integrity.”

Poole came out at the South By Southwest conference and said the Facebook founder was completely in the wrong to make such a statement. Anonymity actually offers “authenticity,” allowing users to “share in a completely unvarnished, raw way,” according to Poole.

So who was right? Well, both of them… and neither of them. It’s fairly obvious to anyone that anonymity can be used for heinous acts over the web, from straight-up bullying to slandering a company or individual that doesn’t really deserve it.

Then again, anonymity allows people to say things that need to be said, without placing themselves at excessive risk. It’s not the most revolutionary point of view, but it’s clearly the most sensible.

And let’s be clear here as well: both Zuckerberg and Poole share a similar agenda – they both want to make it known that their respective company’s way of operating is right. Even though these guys are big shots in the tech industry, they’re not exactly impartial and not really the perfect people to get a measured opinion from.

To get a real idea of the conflicting aspects of anonymity, you might want to get in contact with someone at Anonymous (well, duh!). As was highlighted by the recent spat with Westboro Baptist Church, anyone can pretend to be part of the hacktivist group and potentially make a mockery of the Anonymous campaign.

Conversely, anonymity brings greater uniformity and therefore strength to the operation, with no individuals shining out. No doubt it helps them avoid the cops as well, despite a number of arrests being made as part of investigations into Anonymous.

But then again, in lieu of a leader, there is no focus point or single voice for the organisation. It must be a confusing movement to be part of at times.

It’s clear the subject of anonymity will only grow in prominence if heavyweights like Zuckerberg and Poole come out with such blunderbuss comments.

Of course, trying to bring an end to anonymity on the web would be like attempting to get everyone to leave Facebook and join some open source social network with a name resembling some kind of disease (what was that called again? Diarrhoea? Diana? Diasp… ah forget it). Facebook might be trying to push the so-called “real-name culture,” but there will always be fake accounts on the service and anonymous identities across the internet.

As one final point, don’t take all Zuckerberg’s comments seriously – remember the time he said the iPad wasn’t mobile? Yeah, exactly.

Pure DAB Con

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

I wanted a nice little dab radio I could carry round and I was bought the Pure One Compact as a present. Hopefully the giver isn’t reading this as it is a bit pants.

Not only does it have a bit of a naff UI requiring manipulation of buttons on the top and the side just to change channels (and pressing the button on the side really needs two hands or it falls over!) it also loses its presets with sickening frequency. Requiring more clicking and scrolling and pressing and holding to put them back.

My old Tesco value one was easier to use in general but setting the presets was horribly complicated. In fact the only time that lost its presets was when I deleted them all trying to save a new one! Hopefully this will last a good deal longer than the Tesco which just died one day (and is no longer made) and it does sound a lot better.

The other problem with the Tesco one was it ate batteries at an alarming rate (as DABs do – back to my frequent complaint that turning off analogue broadcasting is an environmental disaster!). The Pure One has rechargables, oh wait it has a recharging circuit and takes a battery pack “sold separately”.

As this is marketed as a “portable” radio can I sue because it isn’t portable unless you buy another bit of kit at £25 to go with it?

Could anyone get away with selling a laptop without the batteries???

What a plonker

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Something is beeping at me. That long, languorous beeping which sounds almost half-hearted. I can’t determine if means my large file has downloaded, maybe it’s to tell me to put the dirty clothes in the oven at 180°C, or is it the whole heads of garlic into the washing machine at 30°C fast spin. Then again, the dishwasher might need rinse-aid or salt. Get it wrong and our clothes will stink of garlic all week or our glasses will look is if they are made of limestone.

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Presenting the iPad2… for me…?

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

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Help

Sunday, February 20th, 2011

There were three of them, we were young and they looked oh-so sexy in their silvery grey jackets. We became intimate immediately, slept together every night and I devoted all my attention to them equally. It was exhausting and especially when my wife joined in and made it a ménage à trios.

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Hasta la Vista, or maybe not

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

A new member joined our retirement home for ageing laptops. We now have an Acer Aspire complete with Vista.

This is our first time using Vista with it being so badly received by Windows users who preferred to stay with XP. We can see why they didn’t bother to upgrade because on the surface there seems little changed from a user’s point of view.

Ours is Vista Home edition without the translucent layers copied from MacOS X of some years before. Also unseen in our initial poke-arounds, are the many security features and the new shell, moving many commands to the toolbar and so on. What we did note is the enormous amount of updates needed to bring the laptop on from mid-2007 to the present day.

This all had to be done over a wired network because Vista 2007 wouldn’t connect to our Virgin Netgear hub. Rather than placed on the coffee table as we sat watching telly, or more likely, snoozing through the dire new series Outcasts. For some reason 22 people voted it as 9.3 at IMDB and they all had similar names to members of the crew and cast (probably).

In total there were over 100 updates. An initial 89 took an evening to download and install over our 50MBps line. Followed the next day by further updates to updates, installing a new anti-virus and most important of all, new drivers for the wireless card. It all resulted in a reasonable laptop which is no slouch either, considering it is 4 years old.

However, our MacBook from the same year is just as fast and could run Vista as well as Mac OSX if we wanted it to. We checked to see how many updates it had undergone over the same time period and from the total of less than 20, a handful had been for iTunes adding new features and a few security updates but by far they were for Microsoft programs.

Compared with MacOSX Leopard, also released in 2007, is Vista any better? After all, it is now installed on just under 20% of Windows PCs, less than Windows 7 or both combined are less than Windows XP (Wikipedia 2010). Given the choice we wouldn’t run any version and not just because we are Mac fans.

The problem we have with every Microsoft operating system is they are a mess of multi-tabbed dialogue boxes, helpful wizards that just aren’t and leave you high and dry plus Microsoft’s arse-about-face ways to do things. It is like wearing boxing gloves and trying to use chopsticks, you feel you are kept away from the good stuff. For example: the Internet connection wizard could see the network but not get out onto the Internet. Its solution was to suggest keep rebooting the router, which every other Mac, Hackintosh and iPhone could use without a hitch.

Then there is the famed ’user choice’ Windows is supposed to give. In our experience this is just a way to make life more difficult and most of the time the average Windows users we work with haven’t got the faintest idea about changing anything. They still haven’t grasped the concepts of drag and drop or having multiple windows open and visible. If their PC is ‘broke’, IT, 100 miles away, has to fix it, even if it simply just a case of user error.

This article ‘User Choice, Customization and Confusion’ explores whether user customisation is a good thing or not. It might have been written by a Mac programmer.

The author, Mike Gunderloy, is a US-based lead developer and author of 20 or more books on the subject. He comes down firmly in the camp of the default choice which is to offer no choice within an application. Or maybe just a little, à la Apple. Enhancements and customisations can be done via special and often third-party applications. Apple has always maintained this stance, tweaks can be made via the Terminal or by little apps such as Tinkertool and Onyx.

As Mike Gunderloy says: ‘Many applications today expose dozens or even hundreds of customisation options in this way, Microsoft Office applications are prime offenders in this regard.’ We would add their operating systems, too.