It’s Monday morning, I am with a client and they urgently need to merge two PDF documents together and I don’t have my PC with me - HELP!

But never fear, PDF Hammer is here.

PDF Hammer is a website that allows you to edit, merge and reorder your PDF files online for free. You don’t need to install any additional software, you simply edit PDF documents right now inside your browser. Once you start, you will be able to upload one or more PDF files into your project, arrange the pages in any order you wish, and delete any pages you don’t want. For example, you can create a PDF document that has the cover page of one PDF file, followed by all of the pages of another PDF file, and finally followed by the back-cover page of the first file.

This system works incredibly well. Within a couple of minutes I had uploaded the two seperate PDF documents and then exported the final, single PDF, back to my clients PC.This service is still in Beta format. The site gives very little details about the team behind the solution but I hope they get the backing they want to take it from Beta to a full version. Because for me the end result was one happy client and a great looking PDF document. And that’s exactly what you want from your software.

Are you sending to the correct list?

This might seem pretty obvious but there are actually a lot of ways you can go wrong with this, even if you have only one mailing list that you never segment in any way. The most common problem is when you send a test or targeted message to your entire list.

Check twice before you click the send button. When you send duplicate or irrelevant messages, you increase the chance that you’ll annoy your audience and that they will report you as spam or simply click on the Unsubscribe option.

If you have taken the trouble to segment your lists, then the risk of getting it wrong increases in line with the degree of segmentation.

So, why is segmentation important? If you can identify groups within your data, then you can start to tailor the messages that they receive, making your offer or story appear more relevant to them.

If you regularly email your audiences, then you will want to ensure that your email gets to as many people as possible, there are some basic things that you need to avoid.

The first challenge is to get past the spam filters. Nearly everyone is using some type of filter, many of these are using a set of parameters based around the content of the email. So, you need to make sure that you write your message with the filters in mind. Two words to avoid like the plague are:

1. free - as in ‘register for your free place’
2. click - as in ‘click on this link….’

You should also avoid the following:

WORDS IN CAPITAL LETTERS

You might want to check out this resource for more words to avoid: spam alternatives

Have you tried any alternative methods of driving sales leads online?

I’m sure your all familiar with Pay Per Click advertising from the likes of Google. But have you tried Cost Per Action advertising? Normally you would have to consider running an Afiliate advertising programme of some sort. This might prove extremely effective, but they can expensive to set-up and time consuming.

Well, there are some alternatives. There are number of online lead generation companies who promote their own business directories and will then try and sell you sales leads. These leads will vary in quality, but at around £10 | €13 | $19 per lead, they could be an effective way to quickly test some messaging with real buyers.

One such service is the UK Business Directory – Business directory covering all areas of commerce

Don’t forget, these businesses all run online directories. So you could simply submit your business to their site, thus gaining another link back to your site.

The US based email list management vendor, MailerMailer has recently published the results of their annual email marketing survey. This survey is based on data collected from over 300 million email messages sent from a network of over 3,200 email marketing users.

Having read the full report, here is my take on the key findings.

1. 74% of all opens occur within the first 24 hours
Whilst this is great for measuring an instant response, don’t fall into the trap of removing relevant links, images and landing pages from your site, some recipients will still save your email for reading at a later date.

2. Best days to send are Mondays and Tuesdays
Try and plan your communications activity around these solid facts. Rather than force out a mailing on a Friday afternoon, it’s better to hold off until the following Monday. We are also seeing from our own stats that emails sent out in the afternoon have a better response rate than those sent in the morning. Therefore, try and plan your campaigns to run in the early afternoon and ideally at the beginning of the week.

3. Subject lines less than 35 characters long significantly outperform emails with longer subject lines
Previous best practice advice was to put the company name at the beginning of the subject line. This latest research shows that there is a marked difference in the response rates of emails with shorter subject lines (see below) so, try putting your company name in the From box. This will leave you with 35 characters to play with for the compelling, benefit laced, subject line.

4. Personalised emails receive higher click and open rates.
Personalising the email is good, and we have the ability to do this qucikly and easily, but avoid personalisation in the subject line as this is seen by many as a sign of a spammer, and subsequently will affect your open and click rates.

5. Emails sent to fewer people are clicked on and opened more.
Size doesn’t always matter. A mailing to a smaller list is more likely to be better targetted, contain more relevant content and use a more focussed call to action. So think about your data segmentation and how you can use this to your benefit.

Email statistics

Unique Open Rates = 15.045%

Click Rates = 3.04%

Opens by subject line length

less than 35 characters = 20.10%
more than 35 characters = 15.28%

Clicks by subject line length

less than 35 characters = 3.28%
more than 35 characters = 2.05%

If you need a little bit of bedtime reading, the full report can read online here:

MailerMailer report available here>>

I hope this helps you in planning your future email activities.

The web, the politician and the prostitute
By Alfred Hermida
Assistant professor of journalism, University of British Columbia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7302968.stm

This article is an excellent argument as to why MySpace, Facebook et al are not private spaces.

If you want a private space on the web, get an FTP site and don’t tell anyone. Don’t be surprised when someone Googles you, so beat them at their own game and take control of your digital profile.

There are a number of ways to measure success in social network marketing.

Some methods are relatively straightforward - such as using analytics to look at the traffic flow into your site. You can also look at the volume of social bookmarks your brand / blog / website scores. If you use video virals then you can measure the volume of views and the scores that your videos achieve.

But in my view the true value, and therefore one of the key measures of social network marketing is where you measure and monitor the ‘chatter’ about your brand in order to influence your future marketing efforts.

Perhaps the best example of this in the UK is for Cadbury Wispa. Early last year Cadbury commissioned research into their brand perception online. They discovered that a number of groups (totalling more than 10,000 ‘fans’) had been set-up online campaigning to bring back the Wispa bar. This became an offline campaign when some of these ‘fans’ then used the Glastonury festival to spread the message - someone made up a banner and stormed one of the mainstages. Cadbury deny that it was them behind this stunt - but who knows?

This all culminated in Cadbury producing a limited edition of the Wispa, with a virtually guaranteed sales campaign.

British Airways should have been monitoring the forums and blogs with the sole purpose of discovering the real extent of feeling from the British, and overseas travelling public, towards the T5 debacle. This research could then in turn feed back into the corporate messaging and tone of voice that Willie Walsh and his colleagues will adopt.

You can’t always control what other people say about your brand, but you can use those same communications tools to monitor and develop appropriate reactions.

This is where social network marketing becomes truly powerful.

Twhirl is a desktop client for Twitter. But what does that mean? Well, once you get into using Twitter, the chances are that you will not want to just update it from your mobile phone.

Twhirl is designed to enable you to get Tweets automatically fed through to your desktop, a bit like using a typical Instant Messaging service. You can also post Tweets using Twhirl as well. Most of the features available on the Twitter website are accessible through twhirl, too.

Here is the blurb from their own website:

• runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
• connects to multiple Twitter and Friendfeed accounts
• notifications on new tweets
• shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
• cross-post updates to Pownce and Jaiku
• post images to TwitPic
• search tweets using TweetScan
• timeline filtering
• localized to English, German, Italian and Spanish
• color schemes
• automatically check for new versions

There are a lot more things twhirl can do to improve your twitter experience, and it offers various configuration options to adapt to your personal needs.

First there was Google Analytics, the definitive stats application for your website. And now we have TweetStats, the stats application for your Twitter account.

This is a nice and simple tool to use, just enter your Twitter account details and press enter. But to be honest, I’m not really sure what value it adds to your Twitter experience. Unlike Google Analytics, TweetStats can’t tell you what phrases other users used to find your Twitter account and it can’t tell you how many people have read your Tweets.

But, it’s free, and it does present you with some interesting (if not that useful) information, such as when you post Tweets, what method you use to upload your Tweets and how many Tweets you have written.

But for me the best feature is the Tweet Cloud which shows you how often you use certain keywords. This is really useful for you to quickly and easily see the underlying themes of your Tweets and the phrases that you focussing on.

This is a great video from Lee LeFever at Commoncraft.com. I would recommend anyone new to Twitter to watch this video to understand what it’s all about.