As I was skimming through technology articles this week, I noticed a company that has put what seems to be a new twist on email. But unlike a subject I am typically familiar with, email marketing, this product hits a different topic regarding business email. For those of us who have struggled with Outlook to manage our email correspondence, a new software plugin called Xobni has created an interesting approach on good old business or even personal email. Xobni, which is “inbox” spelled backwards, provides a robust analytics tool for your Outlook inbox.

While I haven’t tried Xobni myself, as an analytics aficionado, I am interested in anything that attempts to bring a story to numbers. The plugin extracts contact information (telephone numbers, addresses, etc.) automatically and provides an enhanced inbox search feature. Xobni uses a social network approach by giving Outlook a nice dashboard showing who is connected to whom. Some of the coolest features promise to display patterns regarding the time of correspondence, frequency of contact, and also social/business groupings of related contacts turning your regular inbox into an intelligent inbox.

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Can we look forward to East-West battles fought in cyberspace?

Never mind MySpace and Facebook. Some major mainstream acts are creating their own social networks—in what is actually a savvy way to better control their digital marketing.

At first, I kind of rolled my eyes when Billboard and Reuters reported that folks as diverse as 50 Cent and the (used-to-be-cool-cabaret-act) Pussycat Dolls were creating their own social networks. Remember when mainstream entertainers (or at least their handlers) finally heard about blogging back in, like, 2005? The result for the most part was lame PR fluff that very few believed was written by the actual actor or singer in question—going against the whole point of blogging, which is to engage the audience on a personal basis. (The big exception to that was Wil Wheaton, the actor who’s become a respected geek culture writer and blogger.)

Of course, all this eventually changed and now many celebrity bloggers do seem to be writing their own posts—straight from the heart rather than the PR desk. Grammatical errors and overly-emotional rants are what give these posts that sense of personal honesty, even if they’re an old-school marketer’s nightmare.

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aka “F.U.D. in N.Y.C.”

The saying is “you learn something new every day.” This week I can happily report that my rate of informational ingestion was significantly higher than that. But the gem for me wasn’t in the factoids, marketing claims, “breakthrough technologies” or other information bits getting past my screen. It was an impression of the state of the online marketing industry I got from 4 days in New York City as an exhibitor at the Search Engine Strategies ‘08 conference.

The conference attendees were online marketing professionals seeking to improve their skills with search techniques and products. The exhibitors were generally somehow involved in optimizing websites to drive more traffic, or showing off their lead generation and PPC networks. I had the pleasure of personally speaking with a couple hundred entrepreneurs, business professionals, consultants, media representatives – as well as several people who appeared to just want a free pen and a piece of chocolate.

Before I tell you what I learned, a little about the conference: There were some really solid presenters that gave high-impact advice on what / how / when / who / where in the online marketing world. Worth the price of a ticket to hear some of the better ones. There were also the prognosticators with detailed descriptions of what will happen next in the industry. The ones who got something right over the last 4 years were designated visionaries; the ones who missed on everything beyond horoscope-like generalities were also there with brand new and exciting generalities. Go to http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/newyork/ for a list of presenters as it’s not my intent in this blog to critique each or any.

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Government folly—especially when committed with the best of intentions—has long been fodder for British comedy troupes and socio-political writers alike. They’ll probably have a field day with a proposed federal anti-phishing bill—one that simply parrots other laws that make phishing illegal and commands marketers engaged in best practices to do what they already do.

Last week a group of U.S. senators—led by Ted “An Internet Was Sent By My Staff” Stevens of Alaska—introduced the Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act, a nationwide law that will make it illegal to steal account information by pretending to be a bank, credit card company, or other financial institution.

It may be news to not-so-Web-savvy senators, but phishing is one of the more nefarious uses of spam email. Fear of it has long made consumers wary of unsolicited email messages. Marketing best practices developed long ago as a result with the aim of gaining consumer trust.

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