The other day, some one in the office recommended I try Rapportive. Being a gizmo geek, I love installing plugins (yes, I am one of those people) and so I jumped at the opportunity to play with a new toy.

Rapportive's goal is to create "rapport" between individuals by giving them both more information about each other.  And it provides a host of information, including social networks, activity, and more. Take, for example, John:

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This is not your normal problems with permission post. In fact, I almost didn't write this because it seemed too nitpicky. However, in the end I decided that Groupon.com is the perfect example of some one who gets it 99.99% right, and just needs that extra touch to push them over the edge.

And what is that extra touch? Just two lines of text.

Today my coworker BrianT decided to click an ad that he'd seen around the net for a website called Groupon. Groupon is a coupon website that uses mass coupon buys to get discounts for its members. It's a smart idea.

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ExactTarget - setting up a submission form

I recently redid our email submission form and was blown away to find that directions on how to do so are not widely available online. ExactTarget has some directions on their wiki, but if you don't know that their subscription system is called web collect, well, good luck finding it on Google.

So tosay I'm going to walk you through the fairly simple process I took to add a very basic Exact Target signup form to our Drupal based website.

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Noticed this while trying to download Starcraft 2 from Blizzard this morning:

Yes, even Blizzard auto-checks their subscribe boxes.

Permission my a…

Back in May I posted about how Facebook's treatment of users amounted to spam. In response to Zuckerberg's opt-ed on Facebook's commitment to privacy I noted that their attitude towards their users is that they know best, and that users can opt-out of information sharing instead of having users opt-in. I stated that Facebook's users had had enough.

Facebook supporters online have stated that despite this you're not seeing mass migration away from Facebook, though I wonder how much of that is due to the difficulty of deleting your Facebook account.

Well today I was vindicated.

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We are irresistibly drawn to FREE offers. To an extent, this makes sense: if you get something FREE, there's no risk. So why not accept it?

But as Dan Ariely points out in his fascinating book, Predictably Irrational, our obsession with FREE goes beyond the logical. We'll take FREE options over better, non-free options.

Dan Ariely gives many examples of the power of FREE. I'll outline just three in this post.

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Back in May Michael Straker wrote about cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is one of the most common psychological effects you're likely to face. It happens to us all the time, when buying lunch or reading an ingredient label (This Boathouse fruit mix has how many calories per bottle?) or watching politics…especially watching politics.

Today I want to take a slightly longer look into cognitive dissonance, and discuss how it can be used to better your email campaigns.

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Today we look at an unusual member of the Problems with Permission club. A site that attains permission, appears to send no "commercial" content, and breaks no laws. But that doesn't mean that they don't send spam.

A few months back a coworker turned to me and said "You should sign up for Plenty of Fish."

Noticing my baffled expression he explained:

"I know you do those blog posts about people who do bad email marketing, and these guys are the worst. They don't give any unsubscribe options, and they keep sending me email!" 

And he was right, Plenty of Fish stinks. 

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We frequently mention the CAN-SPAM act when talking about email marketing, largely because our client base tends to be American, even though we're located in Canada - home of maple syrup, moose, and lax spam laws. In fact, Canada is the only G-8 country without anti-spam legislation. For a while this was going to change, thanks to the Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA), introduced through Bill C-27.

C-27 was born out of the recommendations of The Taskforce on Spam, (how's that for a name?) which gathered in 2004 to examine the issue of unsolicited commercial email. Its goal is to provide a "regulatory scheme" for spam prevention, including "administrative monetary penalties, with respect to both spam and related threats from unsolicited electronic contact, including identity theft,(9) phishing,(10) spyware,(11) viruses,(12) and botnets.(13)" (link) Further, it would provide avenues for individuals and companies who have been harmed by spam to make their own punitive claims against spammers.

Unfortunately in December of 2009 parliament ended and this bill vanished along with it.

The history of this bill does, however, provide some interesting insights into the way that the Canadian government, and more specifically Canadian industry, looks upon the topic of spam.

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We're much more likely to comply with a request if we're told why we're being asked. And the good part is... the reason needn't always be particularly good! Often, we just like to hear "because."

In a classic set of studies*, experimenters approached students in a photocopier lineup and asked permission to cut in line. They gave either:

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