A new year provides a chance for a fresh prospective and a fresh start. Like your putting your full effort into your gym routine – I’ll be running twice a week, I swear. Or maybe setting your mind to learning a new language – not French, but Objective C right Mike?

However, this year is also bringing another type of fresh start for me. I’m going to be heading out from my current postion as Product Manager at Bronto. Bronto has been great to me, providing a place for me learn and grow, and to guide their product into position of a solid player in the email marketing field. But knowing that Bronto is in capable, caring hands I am looking elsewhere.

Starting in February I’ll be working on a new product offering with my friend and new business partner Eric Boggs. We’ll be combining our expertise, knowledge, and experience to launch a social media analytics application. Interested in learning more? So am I, so in the mean time you can check out Argyle Social to get a taste.

The next few months are bound to be exciting; full of lessons and surprises. I’m looking forward to it with a fresh prospective on things. Happy New Year everyone.

I recently had another article of mine posted in an industry pub. This time it was an article about standards for html email rendering published in Marketing Profs. Ooooh Exciting! Right? Ok, I get it, it’s not really that exciting. But it is important.

Here’s an analogy, because I’m a big fan of those, imagine if every type of car ran on different gas. I’m not talking about different octane, like 87, 89, 93, I’m talking about different types of gas. It would make the cost of gas so much higher because each gas company would have to make so many different types of gas. That would be silly, so much wasted time and effort. If there were just one type of gas then the companies could optimize their process to create one better grade of gas at a cheaper cost.

Well, right now email marketer have to do something similar. They have to try tailor their messages to work in all sorts of different email clients: Yahoo!, Outlook2003, Hotmail, AOL, and two of the worse Outlook2007 and Gmail. If emails rendered the same in more of these clients it would make things a lot more simple.
The impetus for this article was the email standards site, email-standards.org. A great site and a great movement. BTW, I love their project to get GMail to notice them, project grimace, which I contributed to!

I just got back from a great conference, Email Evolution, out in San Diego. Ever since joining Bronto Software, myself and DJ Waldow have really been getting involved with the email marketing community out on the internet. DJ especially has been ferocious in his efforts to add something to the already amazing resources that are out there.

We’ve really worked to push Bronto to commit to providing a valuable resource for marketers in general, not just our customers – and it is something that Bronto has now achieved through the combined efforts of our team.
Well this week we finally got to meet up with a number of the other bloggers and industry experts that we have been trading links and blog posts with for the last year or so. (Such as Chad White, Tamara Gielen, and Dylan Boyd just to name a few)
It was fantastic.

This is a really enthusiastic community, after having spent just a few days with everyone it is easy to see that we aren’t driven by competition with each other, but rather cooperation and a genuine love of email marketing.

I just got a little more PR for myself and Bronto yesterday. An article I had written this summer finally got some airtime. This time over at DMNews, the article was on the main page yesterday, along with a shot of my mug. This one is a fun review of bounce messages, likening them to ice cream flavors. I think it’s worth a read, if only just to see mention of Moose Tracks and Ben & Jerry’s in an article about the technical aspects of managing rejected email messages. Check out the article – 31 Flavors of Bounce Messages – the article isn’t up anymore, but you can check out the original blog post at Bronto.

I was pretty psyched (and I still am a bit) when this got picked up. I hadn’t been blogging here long when I wrote this article, but I thought I would go out on a limb and write something different, just to see if it would get noticed. I guess it worked.

As the title states, it’s nothing more than that, but I’ll take what I can get.

So here’s the deal, a blog post I wrote got picked up (and then re-written by me) to be featured in imediaconnection, an interactive media and marketing site. The article is titled The best way to expand your email list, which was their choice, not mine. This article is about using the forward to a friend functionality to grow your list.

I’m not sure I’d endorse it as the best way to grow your list. I do think it is a great way to add like-minded people to your list, but it’s effectiveness does limit it’s overall usefulness.

As I said in my last post, this is all part of the continued up tick in PR for Bronto, and I’m happy to ride that wave and contribute to the growth.

Update: More plugs (just cause I can) – my article got mentions from a few of the people that I admire most in the email blogosphere – Tamara Gielen (at the top) and Mark Brownlow (down at the bottom).

At bronto we’re pretty hip to the interwebs and all that happens there. We’ve been using youtube to host videos on our site as well as flickr for pictures. But this is the first time that we’ve used a youtube video as the subject of our blog. Or at least the first time it’s been filmed specifically to speak to the audience (a youtube video of us celebrating may have made it to the blog before). This is a great video of DJ and Kimberly debating the pros and cons of recent subject lines of major online retailers, good stuff.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWIIPoOOynk [/video]
This is really part of the push that we’ve made at Bronto to make the blog more engaging. It’s something that I saw needed to happen when I came to Bronto. DJ was definitely of like mind, and was just waiting for some one else to support him. We’ve been pushing hard, and with the addition of Kimberly we’ve definitely got the momentum that has moved Bronto’s blog into the limelight as a top notch source of email marketing advice.

To prove that, we’ve been cited on several industry blogs recently, including Chad White’s Retail Email blog over at the EEC and Mark Brownlow’s No man is an iland blog. Now we just need to keep rolling with the inertia we’ve gathered, I think we can hold it together.