The items Constant Contact lacks that are present in most competitive packages are:

• Multiple levels of list views and segmentation.  Constant Contact provides for a simple set of email lists without any segmentation or cross list management capabilities.  This is the largest issue in that this requires numerous lists instead of one list with multiple parameters in a recipient profile.
• A varying range of metrics beyond the simple sent, open, click thru and bounce rates.
• A set of comparative trend charts and other metrics for presenting performance comparatively across campaigns.  No such metrics are available from Constant Contact.
• Easy removal of the vendor brand.  The Constant Contact logo must be requested to be removed from each email and is discouraged.
• Automated click thru tracking of links in email.  (Constant Contact requires manual coding to track links in custom HTML emails).
• Ability to create your own email templates.  Constant Contact charges a fee and must create such templates themselves.
• Integrated A/B testing of email subject lines and bodies.
• Built-in preview of email layout in email clients. A simple HTML preview is all that is available in Constant Contact.
• Unified billing.  Constant Contact charges come to a credit card with little if any detail. 
• Cobranded interface.  We do not take advantage of the Constant Contact co-branding opportunity because it is cumbersome to setup and manage this brand.
• Google Analytics integration.  Constant Contact offers no integration into Google analytics or other statistical packages,
• Free archive and image hosting.  Constant Contact charges for the live archive of images and emails.  Other packages do not.
• Unlimited custom fields.  Constant Contact has a limit of four custom fields.
• Forms integration. Constant Contact offers no form builder or any service to easily create payment gateways for items such as donations.
• Spam filter testing.  Constant Contact does not offer an easy test system to check if the emails will violate spam filters.
• CMS integration is unavailable or limited.  Constant Contact does not offer or manage plug-ins to common CMS.  The few that are available come from third parties.
• API restricted to list management.  The Constant Contact API is solely for list import and export.
• Integration with third party tools such as WuFoo for forms, payment gateways, CRM and other technologies without API involvement on the user side.

 For a replacement I reviewed numerous packages and selected the following for side-by-side comparisons.  (HTML | PDF)

• Constant Contact
• mailChimp
• Campaign Monitor
• Benchmark Email
• Fusemail
• Mad Mimi
• Bronto
• Vertical Response
• Stream Send
• Myemma
• Campaigner
• iContact
• sendloop

Click on the links (HTML | PDF) to see a product comparison table that includes the following vendors.  Right now, I am favoring mailChimp and Campaign Monitor. Let me know what you think of these or other vendors. And Constant Contact folks, when you find this, I am by all means open to your suggestions as well.

Making money with a SPLOG

Most folks find content in splogs via search engines.  In fact, some splogs come up higher in search than the originating site.  People then think they are legitimate sites and click around the content and see ads.  Folks then click through these ads and the site owner makes some money.

These ads are automated displays from things such as Google Adwords.  These are easily setup in bulk with no effort.  I do wish that Google and other ad networks could shut down this loophole that provides this opportunity.  However, it would simply be too large an effort to police the millions of people who sign up to display the ads.

Monitoring Implications

Splogs are most evident when monitoring the blogosphere.  Splogs show up in Google Reader and other tools.  Many services try to block these sites but can never keep up with the volume. The result is that splogs add many hours to monitoring efforts as someone has to manually delete the bad content from the monitoring feed and block the sites from inclusion in the future.

How easy is it to setup a splog?

It can take less than 10 minutes to setup the initial splog and then adding new splogs can take just a minute or two.  Here is how they do it.

Note: I am writing this post to show people how easy it is for folks to create spam blogs (SPLOGS).  I do not advocate the practice and think it is a shady and disruptive practice. I am also not providing any secrets or making this easier for anyone to setup a splog.  This information is readily available to those idiots out there who want to spam all of us.

1. Find a cheap host – There are thousands that offer hosting at less than ten dollars a month.
2. Install WordPress MU- This is technology to allow you to host an unlimited set of blogs and setup new ones in under a minute each.
3. Install an Autoblog plug-in – This enables you to enter one or more RSS feeds for automated posts to a blog.
4. Install an Ad Network plug-in – This activates the display of ads to make the owner money.
5. Create blogs with RSS feeds using the installed items.

Let me know what you think and if you want to know more.

What Gary Bivings notes in his post matches to what I have frequently experienced.  Clients need to take a bit more ownership and responsibiltiy for the details behind campaign projects.  By all means I relish in being a trusted advisor.  However, clients must always think ahead as to the ownership of their materials. 

Here are some additional items to the Bivings post to consider:

Always keep it work for hire.  Be sure that you own 100% of the content, design, code and other materials.  Not just the end result.  If I am paying for materials, I believe the materials along the way have been paid for as well.  This means that the design files that make up the Web site should be delivered to me as well as the final Web site.

Example, I recommend any design contract call for the delivery of all Adobe Flash and Adobe Photoshop source files be delivered as part o the site launch.

Know the permitted uses of image and media files.  We almost always purchase royalty free or restricted rights images for design efforts.  These are purchased for use in the Web site and then are usually not permitted for reuse in other projects.  Be sure that if you plan to adapt your Web imagery to other online or offline projects that you obtain the details on the permitted uses of these images.  And, that you obtain the images themselves and the details of where they were purchased.  By obtaining these details you can edit the image if needed and purchase the additional rights as well.

Have hosting under your control.  Almost every agency provides some sort of level of hosting.  I recommend against this as a packaged service.  Instead I feel clients should contract with the hosting vendor (via the agency is fine) or provide the hosting.  The agency can then be provided the appropriate access and contracted for support as needed.  The key is that you retain administrative access to and control over the home for your materials. You then will never have to migrate the materials should you sever your relationship with the agency.

Own the domain names.  Be sure that when your agency registers domain names that your company is listed as the administrator.  The agency can be the technical and even billing contact.  However, if you are not the administrator then you are tied to the agency to turn the domain over to you.  Eliminate future transfer hassles by owning the domain and the agency acting as your technical contact.  

Manage your content.  When working with agencies it is still best if you take the lead to manage the content.  It is almost never cost-effective for your agency to enter, adjust and tweak content.  You are best off in the long run to learn at least the basics of the CMS and perform content entry and edits yourself.  It is also advisable that you learn how to perform general maintenance tasks such as user management.

I have on my personal side gone in and updated points of fact.  I have also attempted to enter details (again pints of fact) for clients.  They are always erased within minutes by rather militant individuals who through their aggressive editing actions have taken ownership of a set of content.  We have found this to be the case throughout Wikipedia.

Example, we updated the mission statement for an environmental non-profit.  The old mission statement was there quoted from the Web site.  We simply updated it to the current mission that had one line adjusted.  This was rejected by an editor because this was “self promotion” by an organization.  The old mission now remains on the site.

Slate now has an article about how only a limited few can edit pages of popular people.  This is no surprise to many people who already know that editing within Wikipedia is actually tightly controlled.  So, what make someone popular? Isn’t just being in Wikipedia mean that you are noted somehow above the rest of us mere mortals? I imagine that if someone who is mentioned on Wikipedia tried to correct their own birthday or something similar it would be rejected as being “self-promotion.”

Now let the fun comments telling me I do not know what I am talking about begin!

I started to put together a list of questions that never seem to be answered up front on sites, in demos or in the first round of sales discussions. or demos. I put this list together and then just today I found another helpful list from Scout Labs. The Scout Labs list is longer than mine and very good.  But, I have some others as well.

• What are the content sources? Are they RSS feeds or paid content sources such as Factiva, Boardreader or others?
• How often and when is content imported? Basically, how quickly will it appear from when it is published?
• Is there a method to create “watchlists” for monitoring a set of sites?
• Can we place in a list of sites/feeds to be searched to be sure the content is included in the monitoring?
• Is there a way to check to be sure a desired source is monitored?
• Is the cost we see simply based on monitored items? Is there a limit on the number of profiles, user accounts, searches, or other aspects?
• If we end or pause a search, can we retain the content/monitoring from where this halted. If so, for how long?
• Are the monitoring volume fees based on new content per month? Or, is historical content billed.

• 6 Promising And Open Source Social Networking Softwares To Create Your Own – A good list of solutions to set up social networks.  I would add SocialText and MediaWiki as well.
• Beautiful Drupal-Based Intranet: Open Atrium – A framework for intranets that can get a well-functioning site together in 1/3 the time you would need for development from scratch. Little if any programming needed.
• Attractive Sitemaps With SlickMap CSS – A nice utility to make site maps that seems easy to use.  I have been working on my CSS skills and this has been a good sample to practice.
• Backup And E-Mail MySQL Databases Automatically: Backup2Mail – I hate the chore of backing up my databases.  This script has made it easy.  Then again my web hosting provider also has a similar utility and for WordPress I prefer the Backup plug-in.
• Instant iPhone Compatible Websites: iWebKit – This is a nice set of scripts and CSS styling to make iPhone Web sites.  It saves a certain amount of time if you want to design under their frameworks. 
• Web Elements Kit (PSD) For Designing Faster – A collection of buttons, sliders and other elements in PSD format for jump starting designs.  Probably not useful for designers.  Very useful for hacks like me.
• Free HTML Form Builder: pForm – There are tons of free form builders.  This is a nice one to add to sites that do not have a CMS for site admins or users to add their own forms.  A good example of a free version that has a commercial version available with more features.  Then again, rather than using this tool I would probably continue with WuFoo that is so easy to use.
• I think the JNJ BTW blog is a model of corporate blogging.  Here are a couple of articles that I have found useful.
  • BlogHer 2008: 1,000 Women Bloggers and Me – Support for the use of BlogHer to reach women.
  • A Medical Wiki – Discussion of Medpedia as a healthcare industry blog.  I do a bunch of work across healthcare and also this is a good example of how industries are establishing their own Wiki’s.
• Newspapers Swap Content Via Widgets with the Help of Newsgator and NewsGator’s Widget Publishing Tool – The Newsgator widget is a great way to distribute your feeds.  Take advantage of the same tool major publishers use.
• Scott Rafer: Facebook Platform is Dead – This article reinforces my personal findings that people on Facebook are no longer installation and using applications, widgets, etc.
• Sprout Announces Fankits, Partnership with Sony – Sproutbuilder is an amazing tool to create widgets.  I like to start here for widget creation and distribution because it is so easy.  This article announced a commercial release and lists some competitors.
• Disqus Updates – Disqus is a great third party tool to add comments to any site.  Some blogs use Disqus instead of the commenting tools in the blogs because this tool has some very rich features. Definitely better than what TypePad had to offer before Movable Type came out with their own similar commenting tool.
• Bootstrapped PollDaddy Kicking Ass and Taking Names – Need a poll. Try PollDaddy.
• Corporate Blogging 2.0: Southwest Airlines’ Blog Re-launches and Case Study: Southwest Airlines’ Corporate Blog and Crisis Communications – Great corporate blogging analysis.
• Over three quarters of reporters get story ideas from blogs – yes, blogging is important.
• Social media for social good (24 days left for Parade Magazine / Case Foundation Giving Challenge) – A set of examples of how a social media campaign was run.
• Don’t use a (dry) press release to promote your CEO blog – Boring press releases do not work in social media.
• The New York Times’ David Pogue says corporate blogs will become "a treasured tool in your tool chest" – Blogs are a corporate tool.

Overall very interesting and I am trying it out on my blog.  It will be interesting to see how well this really works.

Easy to use and requiring nothing more than a PowerPoint deck, SlideShare is easy to test out for marketing and communications campaigns.

What makes this really easy is a nice Microsoft PowerPoint plug-in. This allows you to work with the SlideShare features and post to the site right from within PowerPoint. Get it here.