First let me say I’m a huge fan of Barack Obama, so much so that he’s the first candidate that I’ve actually donated to. Lately however I’m starting to get annoyed with his campaign’s lack of appreciating my privacy.

I made my donation to the Obama campaign early on in 2007 and I received a auto-generated email thanking me for my donation; mechanical but nice touch. A bit later another email came into my inbox from David Plouff – Obama Campaign Manager filling me in on the latest happenings. Then Jon Carson the National Voter Contract Director, then from Barack himself asking for donations.

A couple of points. Just because I donated doesn’t mean I wanted to receive 3-4 emails a week. Give me the option to OPT-IN after my donation but don’t assume I want to read pages of propaganda each week. They’ve sent over so many emails that I no longer read them, they are flagged for SPAM at this point.

I still wholeheartedly support Obama but I’d really appreciate it if his campaign learns to respect email marketing best practices.

I’ve heard many search engine marketing specialist / experts give blanket recommendations to check Google AdWords once or more a day to make sure your ads are performing to their highest potential. Personally, I feel it’s misleading to give advice like this to the general AdWords audience. Unless you are managing a high transaction volume Web site or are in a highly competitve market for keywords then there really isn’t a compelling reason to check AdWords more then once a week. I suspect, but I have zero data other then intuition to believe that the bulk of AdWords users are small businesses with low-transaction sites. Sure, if your business is ecommerce related or receives a high level of transactions per day then the advice to check daily makes sense.

Here is my general guideline to maintaining Google AdWords. This is assuming that you’ve been running AdWords for more then a few months:

Check once or more a day if:

• Your margins on product sales are tight
• Your geographic scope extends to the National or Global level
• Your site is receiving over 30 orders a day under $50 an order or 5 orders a day over $50. Side note: We have a client who receives 1-3 orders a day over $2k per order and that site is only checked once a week.

Check once per week if:

• You are doing any ecommerce sales
• If you are using Adwords to generate leads

Check it a few times per month if:

• You are interested in shear traffic
• If you aren’t interested in tracking ROI in AdWords

I’m sure there are those who would debate these numbers but I think they provide a more accurate guideline then telling the AdWords user base to check their accounts daily.

The last few weeks I’ve been thinking about how SMS could be leveraged to help our clients market their products & services. In doing so, I found American Airlines txtSAAver program and Ping Rewards. I believe that SMS coupons & specials will become ever more common over time. For the marketer these ads are low-cost and can quickly be generated to maximize sales during low points either in the day, week or month.

However, I do see potential abuse in the system which opens the door to mechanisms which would make SMS marketing less attractive, namely too many text messages and unsolicited messages which would turn customers away from the service. Despite the potential shortcomings I think SMS marketing is a channel which has been largely over-looked to date.

The Denver Business Journal has reported that two area interactive agencies have now merged to form Xylem CCI. I admire both companies and I feel that the merger will be good for them, the city of Denver and Imulus.

By joining forces, Creation Chamber brings it’s web development expertise to Xyleme which has been an area leader in Flash based interactive microsites. Creating a powerful union between design, development and complex interactive.

For the city of Denver, it helps to further strenghten the image that the  Denver / Boulder area is quickly becoming a real player in the marketing / advertising space.

For Imulus, we lose two high-end competitors and it creates more space at the mid-sized project level.

All in all, great news!

There has been a lot of hype lately about Linden Lab’s Second Life. There have been all kinds of crazy numbers thrown around about millions of users and people making lots of money in this virtual world. Apparently in their effort to be more transparent and open they have let the cat our of the bag on their actual number of users. It turns out that around 5 out of 6 new users bail in the first month. Of those that stick around, only 10% of those have spend more than 40 hours total in the game. According to this article in Valleywag that works out to less than 200,000 people who have even played the game more than 40 hours over the entire history of the game. Most people don’t have enough time for their first life, much less a second life!