Oddball Update

I don’t recall exactly when it was that my job description broadened to include “marketing,” but it did, at some point in the early 2000s. Back then, I worked for a small tech company in my local town whose staff had just been decimated in a round of layoffs following the 9/11 attack on New York City, where most of our client base was located. I was still the new hire, the protege of our senior graphic designer — but when she was let go, I became the graphic designer.

Shortly after that, our New York office folded altogether, after it was revealed that the marketing staff blew through millions of venture capital on tchotchkes. Since this malfeasance was my first exposure to marketing, I was immediately disgusted by our own marketers and by the very concept. So you can imagine how I hung my head in ironic shame when I was made the acolyte of our newly-hired in-house marketing director.

To her credit, she was quite talented and devoid of most of the typical stink of self-serving corruption you often smell around self-proclaimed marketing gurus. (The only time I seriously shook my head and said “WTF, lady?” was when she asked me to embed a Flash animation in an email campaign. That’s notgonnahappen.com.) I learned a lot about marketing from her, and when she moved on in 2005, the company approached me and said they’d be willing to pay for me to get a bachelor’s degree in business administration if I would agree to be placed on a course to become the new marketing director.

In response, I resigned.

Now, to be fair, I didn’t quit for being offered a BBA. I quit because, at the same time, I was offered an exciting new opportunity by some former coworkers who had started their own little company, and who were creating a much more compelling product that I could really get behind. Additionally, I’d get to hang out with some seriously cool dudes, spend most days working from home, and make more money. That — and the fact that I really did not want to become a full-time marketer — led me to make my choice.

Of course, I still wear the “marketer” hat these days. That small little company I joined in 2005 got bigger, then smaller again, but throughout it all has constantly been on a path to greatness in our market. It’s the kind of company where nobody really has a title — you can make up whatever sounds good at the moment you’re asked — because we’re all multitaskers who have our hands in a million things at once. Ironically, I’ve done more marketing since I’ve been with these guys than ever before — Google AdWords, email marketing, print advertising, banner campaigns, Flash videos, yada yada. It’s tough keeping all of those balls in the air, and keep up with my product development, tech writing and webmaster responsibilities, but somehow it happens.

But the trials of the marketer are still many…and great. I was reminded of that today, when one of our houses of marketing cards collapsed.

Today was a red-letter date, and I knew it was going to be the instant I dragged myself reluctantly out of bed after a particularly lousy night’s sleep. Today the initial public beta of our greatest new product was getting released, and I had to do all of the post-release PR grunt work. Update the website, put up the new discussion forum, add a new slide to the Flash applet, edit and publish the user guide, add new items to the online store, make the free trial available for download, write the press release for the newswires, do a blog post, and on and on and on. I thought it was going to take all day, but I finally had it all wrapped up around 5:00, a couple hours short of what I expected.

Unfortunately, while the release was going off without a hitch, one of my marketing initiatives was busy self-destructing. We send a monthly email newsletter (as well as sporadic webinar invitations) through one of those Web-based email marketing services, and today I received an email from them stating that they had suspended our account for sending our last newsletter to a “spam trap” address.

A “spam trap” is a special email address that’s set up for the sole purpose of reporting anyone who sends mail to it as a spammer who should be blacklisted. It’s never intended to receive regular email, and no human being ever checks it. Often, these addresses are posted on live webpages just so spam bots will harvest them, send email to them and then be insta-banned. Hence the term “spam trap.”

Since we only send our email newsletter to people who have registered themselves on our website, that means one of our thousands of subscribers could be a “list poisoner” — someone who signed up with a spam trap email address on purpose. It’s also possible that one of our old subscribers no longer uses the email address they signed up with, and that address has since been converted to a spam trap — email hosts sometimes do this, as their way of contributing to the anti-spam cause. There’s just no way to know, because spam traps, by definition, are secret.

And the sad part? I think we only fucked ourselves on this one by not following best practices on how we collect email addresses from our subscribers. We don’t buy lists or harvest emails from people who don’t sign themselves up, but we should be doing signup validation and “list hygiene” measures like periodic re-confirmation. As the guy executing this stuff, I should have pushed for it. The boss, obviously, wants our emails to go to as many people as humanly possible, so he’s always balked at any measures like this. Now we’re gonna have to deal with the repercussions.

This sucks big-time because we were just about to send out the monthly newsletter for April, informing all of our subscribers that this grand new product is available for them to try now — plus we’ve scheduled a webinar for later in the month, which is basically just a couple weeks away. Even if we get our account suspension lifted relatively soon, we still have to clean up our list and get rid of the spam trap (wherever it is) before sending anything else out, otherwise we’ll just fall into the same trap again and get blown out the airlock by the email marketing service. The boss ain’t gonna like this.

It was kind of an unfortunate way to cap off the workday, after juggling so many post-release tasks and achieving a successful launch that pleased our chief software developer very much. I still have a press release to distribute to a whole list of wires tomorrow — a manual, by-hand process that’s always like trying to run a marathon in six-inch deep mud — then create the marketing for the webinar, finish revising a 700-page user manual before a client gets pissed off, and then get started on 25 new Flash videos showcasing the features of one of our products. And I’ve been moving at a similar pace for going on four weeks now. Yep…it’s going to be a busy April.

Which is good, actually — because it just means time will fly by, and we’ll be back in the U.S. before we know it. That’s a whole separate post…one which I’ll probably make pretty soon.

Assuming I can find the time.

Topics: marketing, work