How to Keep Your Emails Short and Effective

In AirSafe Media's online marketing business, customers and vendors are located around the world, and email is the most effective way for everyone to communicate. Since a particular advertising deal may be active for months or even years, it helps everyone if emails have a similar and predictable style and format. By following a few basic rules, AirSafe Media staff and affiliates can ensure that their emails provide clear and concise information. Even if you are not involved with AirSafe Media, you can use these basic guidelines to make your own emails more effective.

Use a AirSafe Media email account
This is one of the easiest rule to follow. By using an AirSafe Media email account (ending in airsafemedia.com), it makes it much easier to go back and reconstruct a conversation. If for some reason this account is not working, it is likely that the problem is only temporary. Send a copy of any email to that address so that it can be recovered once the account is working again.

Use a consistent subject format
Because many email programs display only the subject line of an email, make sure that the subject includes the following key pieces of information:

• A web site URL (if the email deals with a particular web site)
  
  
• The date the email was sent (using the format DD MM YYY, for example 16 May 2010)
  
  
• One or two keywords that describe what the email is about
  
  
• The words "AirSafe Media" to indicate the source of the email

An example subject line might be "New advertising offer for mortgage311.org - AirSafe Media 16 May 2010"

Include only key parts of previous emails
Often, there could be several emails going back and forth on a particular subject. For example, negotiating the placement of a particular ad, or dealing with a technical problem with a web site. When replying to an email, most programs attach the body of the previous email. After a few exchanges, you could have a two page email where only about four or five lines have all the information that you need. Take a little bit of time to cut out what you don't need. Leave in enough to say what needs to be said, and leave out the rest.

Ten Free Social Media Resources You Can Use That Can Benefit You, Your Family, or Your Business

Two of the biggest excuses organizations and individuals have when it comes to using social media applications is that it takes too much time to figure out how to use them and takes too many resources once your start using them. True, some social media applications may take a bit of time to learn, but if you have figured out how to use email and do basic things on the web like find things with a search engine. If you can do that,figuring out most social media applications should be easy.

Cost is not an issue because once you can get online much of the really good stuff is free. At most you need only a personal computer and access to the Internet, and often all you need is online access.

The following ten social media resources are not only free, but should be useful to you in some way, especially if you are trying to make yourself or your organization more visible online. Also listed are the services used to support the AirSafe Media associated site, AirSafe.com.

1. Blogging
Think of a blog as a web site where just about all the work is done for you. You sign in, write something, hit a button, and it is online. If you've thought about starting a web site but have no idea what it takes to do it, a blog is the easiest way to get that experience. Also, if you already have a web site, a blog is an easy way to try quickly try new ideas that may later put on the site. Two of the biggest blog services are Blogger and WordPress. Both of them can get you from login to published blog in less time than a lunch break.
AirSafe.com's Choice: Blogger

2. Micoblogging
This is a stripped down version of a blog, basically little more than a couple of sentences and maybe a link to something online. Examples include Yammer and the much more widely known Twitter. This blogging method that may work best for sending short messages to portable devices like an iPhone or Blackberry, or in conjunction with other resources such as a web site, mailing list, or full sized blog.
AirSafe.com's Choice: Twitter

3. Online File Storage
If you need to share files with one or more colleagues, or you need to access key files from several different computers, and don't want the hassle carrying around a laptop or thumb drive, or emailing files, you can use one of these services to manage your files in a password protected environment.
AirSafe.com's Choice: Airset

4. Photo Sharing and Storage
If you are interested in sharing photos, services like Flickr and Picasa allow you to store photos online, and even giving you the option of allowing others to access them or download them.
AirSafe.com's Choice: Flickr

5. Intelligence Gathering
If you need to find or track some information online, for example monitoring a developing news story or keeping current on a competitor or industry, Google has a service called Google Alerts that will keep track of them for you and send regular email updates when it finds something.
AirSafe.com's Choice: Google Alerts

6. Video Sharing
Some of the millions of user generated videos are published every day may actually be of interest to you. While you may be able to find them using general search engines like Google or Bing, you may have better luck by searching within video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe, and LiveLeak. YouTube is by far the biggest, with the greatest variety of content. Also, if have videos that you want to share, you can follow the AirSafe.com example and create a home page withing the site to showcase your videos.
AirSafe.com's Choice: YouTube

7. Social Networking
Facebook and Myspace may be the most well known social networking sites, but a site like LinkedIn is more relevant to working professionals, providing a kind of online resume and biography, and allowing others to see you out and contact you.
AirSafe.com's Choice: LinkedIn

8. Subscribing to Podcasts
There are millions of audio and video podcasts out there that cover a huge range of topics, including a few that would be of interest to you. Both Apple (iTunes) and Microsoft (Zune) distribute free software that allows you to easily manage subscriptons to audio of and video podcasts of every description. The iTunes software also has extensive links to online audio stream of radio stations from around the world.
AirSafe.com's Choice: iTunes

9. Free Phone Calls
Wouldn't it be great if you could use the Internet to call someone long distance, even internationally, without spending any extra money? You can download a program like Skype or Googletalk and talk for free with anyone else who has both a connection to the Internet and who has downloaded the same software.
AirSafe.com's Choice: Skype

10. Social Bookmarking
All web browsers allow you to bookmark favorite pages, but if you use several computers, or even several browsers on the same computer, keeping track of your bookmarkes can be next to impossible. Bookmark sharing resources like Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon allow you to create an online account where you can store and manage your bookmarks, and then either make them private and password protected, or make them public and available to anyone.
AirSafe.com's Choice: Delicious

Selected Social Media Applications Used by AirSafe.com
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
Flickr
Delicious
Podcast (main page)
Podcast (subscription)
Mailing List
Prlog.org (online press releases)
Bird Strike Blog
Crash Video Blog

Next Steps
If you are using none of these services, go ahead and try one of them to see if it can help you out in some way. If you are using one or more of them, leave a comment on this blog post and share your experiences, positive or negative, with using these services.

Using Gmail to Find Mailing Lists That Sell or Give Your Email Address to Spammers

I was listening to the marketingovercoffee.com podcast the other day, and it mentioned a very interesting way to use Gmail to find mailing lists that sell or give away your email address to spammers. In short, if you add a '+' and additional characters after the user name (before the '@' sign), Gmail ignores that and will deliver the email to the normal address.

Why would this be useful to you? Let's say you need to sign up for many mailing lists using the same email address, and you want to be able to figure out which mailing list may have allowed your email address to fall into the hands of spammers. The solution is simple, sign into each mailing list with a unique identifier. For example, if you were to subscribe to the Speedbrake Publishing mailing list and you had the Gmail address your_name@gmail.com, join the list using your_name+speedbrake@gmail.com. Email to that address will still come to your_name@gmail.com address even though it was addressed to your_name+speedbrake@gmail.com.

Try it yourself. If you have a Gmail account (if not, get one set up for free at Gmail.com), and then join the Speedbrake Publishing mailing list at http://subscribe.speedbrake.com with '+speedbrake' inserted before the '@' sign. After you finish the signup process, you will get a confirmation email. By the way, this confirmation email gives you a link to a free copy of my book Parenting and the Internet, which is a useful guide for managing the online affairs of your child.

Do this for all of your new mailing lists, using of course a different identifier for each, and if you start getting unsolicited emails, you can easily identify who did you wrong and take appropriate action.

Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, and Your Blog

How long should a blog entry be? Like an email, a blog entry can be as long or as short as you want it to be. Usually, problems arise with blog posts that are too long rather than those that are too short. While there are no hard and fast rules about the maximum length of a post, there is one rule inspired by a 19th century writer that that provides a useful guide for today’s writers.

President Abraham Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, PA, on November 19, 1863 was a speech of only 266 words that was both a powerful message on the principles of democratic government and a shining example of how a short message can speak volumes. This speech also provides the inspiration for the Gettysburg Criterion for email that I wrote about in my book Parenting and the Internet. This is a rule that the text in the body of an email should be shorter than the Gettysburg Address. If the rule makes sense for email, it should probably make sense for blog entries.

To use the Gettysburg Criterion, get a copy of the Gettysburg Address and keep it nearby when you are writing. When you get though with your rough draft, compare the length to that of the Gettysburg Address. If the draft is longer than Lincoln’s speech, then consider making it shorter. If making it shorter is not an option, then your consider options such as breaking up the posts into two or more posts, or just post a synopsis of your writing in the blog and make the full version available elsewhere such as in a downloadable file.

For your convenience, I’ve included below the text of the version of the Gettysburg Address that is inscribed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC (punctuation added for clarity):

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Criterion is only one way to evaluate your writing. If you can write a post that is much longer or much shorter but that is also effective, then do so. If using the Gettysburg Criterion encourages you to take time and energy to become a better writer then, it will probably help you in ways that go far beyond your next blog entry.

You can download a free copy of Parenting and the Internet, including the Gettysburg Criterion, at http://www.airsafe.com/downloads/pati.pdf.