Twitter Verified Accounts

You may or may not have noticed that some of your favorite Twitter Celebrities have a nifty new icon on their profiles that "verifies" that are the real deal.

How to identify a verified account:

* The 'Verified Account' badge will appear in the top-right portion of a user's profile page just above the name, location and bio.
* It will always have a badge followed by the words 'Verified Account'. (This is clickable and as of this writing it points to http://twitter.com/help/verified)
* If the verified account badge appears anywhere else on a user's profile page (e.g. in the avatar or the background) it is not a verified account
* The verified account badge will also appear next to usernames in the Find People section
* The verified account badge will have the same color as shown above even if users customize the background of their profile page or change the color in the sidebar
* See what a verified account looks like!

More information about Verified Accounts.

Email Marketing No-Nos

I received an email today from someone I had gotten a service quote from in the past (for my house). I received it in both my business email and my Gmail account (because I have my Gmail set up as a "back up" for my business account). I didn't even look at it in my Outlook...simply deleted it because there was NO TEXT in the body of the email. However, Gmail has the thumbnail preview of attached images at the bottom of the emails, and I saw it was possibly a "legitimate" email, so I opened the full picture. As a result, I sat down and wrote the following email:

Hi [removed],


I received your email today with your [removed] Sunroom information. However, if I may offer some suggestions...


Sending an email to 436 people in a way where anyone receiving the email can view and save the email address of everyone else the email has been sent to is bad email etiquette. It's very easy for someone to simply right click on a name and get the email address for every single person on your list. For example, I know that [removed name]'s email address is [removed]2001@aol.com simply by using that technique. And in Gmail, I don't even have to go through all that trouble...I can just click on the "show details" link in my email and it will show the email addresses of everyone with a single click. Some people just don't want their email addresses out there. And if someone has the option checked to "automatically add recipients to my contact list" in their email program and they click on "reply all" to your email...guess what, now all those people on your email are in that person's contact list and are more susceptible to viruses and those incessantly forwarded email jokes and chain letters.


Sending that many emails at one time will many times get you flagged as a potential spammer by your Internet service provider as well as raise your SPAM score in SPAM filters...so your email might not even get seen by your customers and potential customers because it is much more likely to get filtered out by their SPAM filters.


Subject line. Most people do not open email where they do not understand the subject line. Your subject was "Emailing: Page Title". That has no call to action and does not give the sender any information about what's in the email.


No body text. There was not TEXT in your email stating WHO the email was from, what company, etc.


Only graphics in the email. Most email programs no longer show graphics unless the sender is added to your "safe sender" list or unless you physically click on the "show pictures" option. Again, if no one knows who it's from and there's no text in the message of the email to say who you are or what the email is about, so the odds of someone clicking on the option to see the picture to see what you have to say is slim since almost all the emails that have no text and only graphics are ads for "cheap pharmaceuticals" and porn.


Do you have a mechanism in place to see how many people actually opened your email, or are you just going on blind faith?


So, if I have all these reasons why no one would open the email, why did I open the email? I'll tell you why...because this is what I do for a living...I manage email marketing campaigns for small business and entrepreneurs. And I'm interested in what even the "spam" is like. I learn from every email I receive - good and bad.


If you would like to continue with email campaigns, I would be happy to talk with you about how you can continue to send emails, track who opens them, and increase your "open rate" in the process, I'd be glad to talk with you to discuss how I could help [removed] Remodeling accomplish this.

Will I ever hear from this guy again? Will he even read my email? Will he take any action to help ensure his emails get read in the future? I don't know.