EightBlack.

I was talking to some Franchise Association Members this morning at an industry sponsored breakfast. Actually, my good friends at Australia Post picked up the tab.

Anyway, I’m glad for once that about half the audience were older than me. Guaranteed, all were better looking.

We were at the Marriott Hotel. I’ve learnt long ago that when you have to present and it involves a laptop, a projector and the internet, then you better get to the venue well ahead because when the wheels fall off the proverbial chariot, you had better be prepared. Which I was.

Bloody Mary in hand, I picked up the phone in the conference room and dialed the front desk. It was 7.36am.

“Hello, I’m in the conference room and I need a working internet connection and a projector..”

“A what…”

Speaking slowly now, I repeated “An internet connection and a projector you silly man..”

“Oh, the internet doesnt work in that room. You’ll have to move…” “We tried the internet once and we didn’t like it, so we shut it off”. Or something like that.

For the life of me, I just cant figure out why in gods name, hotels cant get on top of the internet. I’ve stayed in 6 separate Hiltons in the past month and some had wireless, some didnt, some charged for it, some didnt and some didnt even have it at all and pretended it was the work of the devil.

The Marriott finally got it worked out, but it took several phone calls, a lot of arm waving, and 3 guys, 2 of whom didnt speak a word of english, all hanging onto to a blue lan cable arguing whose wife was better in bed. Or something like this.

Right then. Lets move on.

So, this room full of franchise folks. All nice people. A chasm of difference between their combined online knowledge.

Most of them were looking for the next best thing. Indeed, whenever I talk at these gigs, some people come up to me afterwards and say, “yeah, yeah, I got all that stuff about SEO, email, Google and the rest of it but what I really want to know is that I expect my parents to die soon and I want to know what to do with the money…”

Ok, maybe not that bad but you get the idea.

It was clear to me that a lot of people knew about SEO and there were a few SEO companies who wont be inviting me to their Xmas party this year because of the comments I might have made about their work. But thats another story.

In all cases though, this crowd were a little “over” email. Most thought it was passe.

I beg to differ. Here’s why.

We have a client. Lets pretend that they’re in the online travel space. Lets also pretend that they email their customer base. A lot.

In the last 6 weeks, we’ve added 165,000 net new email addresses to their list. From 3 separate viral campaigns. And dare I say it, (and I hate using the word), but probably triple this number have been exposed to a “branding” message.

If your message is on target, if you have developed a “relationship” with your email base, they like you and trust the brand, then you owe it to yourself to commit to email marketing.

When we started with this client, their email database was around the 140,000 mark. Now, its just cracked the big million. The biggest shot in the arm has clearly been the viral work we’ve been doing. It wont win us any BAFTA awards from a creativity perspective, but we have the evidence to not give a rats toss. It works. And works like gang busters.

Trust me on this. Email, used properly, is hands down, the most effective direct response mechanism you can get. When you combine it with solid offline solutions (like personalised direct response mail), results can soar.

If you have a good (or bad) email marketing story, I’d love to hear it.

This article courtesy the Financial Times, London.

Companies are failing to take advantage of the unique opportunities the internet offers for communicating with shareholders, in spite of lobbying long and hard for the privilege, according to a survey of FTSE 100 companies.

The survey found it was often difficult to search the information provided online by large companies.

Most FTSE 100 companies put their annual reports online in large PDF files that were slow to open or download. Only a minority used the interactivity of the internet to help users find information and to attract the interest of investors.

Jonathan Hynes of Smith Partnership, the business communications consultancy that carried out the survey, said companies had campaigned to be allowed to take advantage of the savings in paper and money.

“You’d think the long-awaited revisions to the Companies Act that allow them to supply their annual reports to shareholders via their websites would be embraced with enthusiasm and vigour. Not so, however.”

I actually stumbled across this story in a clients reception area last week. It refers to Aviva as leading the Smiths Online Reporting Index and it was in fact, a subsidiary of Aviva I was seeing.

My observation with companies and the net is not that the key stakeholders don’t understand it, they just don’t want to take the risks associated with marketing online and are still clinging to the belief that they can influence what their customers and market think of them.

They can’t. Period.