Study this email. I don’t recommend you copy his style (which is reminiscent of overindulgent catalog king J. Peterman on “Seinfeld”) but rather think about how honest-to-goodness thankfulness, and transparency can be incorporated into your business, regardless of its size.

Hello there Ben Shoemate

Just wanted to let you know that I sent your bag out just a little bit ago. Your tracking number is listed below along with a link to the shipping company so you can track your leather piece every couple of hours.  To care for your leather piece and read about the photo contest please see the Questions page on the website. I have all sorts of tips to keep your leather in top shape.

Oh, and by the way, I didn’t want to tell you this before you joined, but 10% of the gross amount that you gave to Saddleback went directly to one of those aid organizations on the Dave’s Links page.  If you spent $500 + $20 for shipping then $52 went out to love people.  Basically, you just contributed to drilling a well for an entire village or partially sponsored a 5 year old street kid in Rwanda to get into a loving orphanage and go to one of the best schools in the country. This is the main reason Saddleback Leather exists. Just wanted to let you know… between friends. Thanks for helping.

The way I see it, out of the thousands and thousands of companies in the world, on the Internet or down on the corner selling leather goods, you chose mine and I really do feel honored.  You are very much appreciated.. Welcome to the family.

Thank you and have a great week.

Warm regards,

Dave Munson
Presidente
Saddleback Leather Co

Your order number is SBL-*********.

The tracking numbers are:
******************************
You can track your package by visiting the links below:
http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&InquiryNumber1=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The following items have been shipped to you:
line items
———————————————————————–
Small Wallet Light Tobacco Brown (WA-SM-LTB)
quantity: 1
total price: $28.00
———————————————————————–
subtotal:                        $28.00
sales tax:                        $2.28
standard shipping: *             $12.98
*shipping total includes handling and insurance fees
=======================================================================
grand total:                     $43.26
———————————————————————–

This order will be billed to:

Ben Shoemate
************
———————————————————————–

Orders for merchandise ship UPS and will receive a confirmation email and tracking number when your UPS order has shipped.
Orders for gift cards only ship via USPS mail with Delivery Confirmation and usually arrive in 3 to 5 business days.
—

This is an automatically generated email

Even down to letting you know this email was generated automatically – the message is honest and personal. Well done Dave.

If you have not heard of Twitter, heard of but never tried it, tried it but didn’t “get it”, or seen the value but weren’t sure how to extract it, then this article is written for you.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a website and service that let’s people “text” each other short messages. Unlike almost every other social network on the internet, Twitter is focused completely on this one feature. Each “Tweet” has a limit of 140 characters and looks like this on the website:

Let’s look at this tweet. First, Al Gore has an objective with this Tweet, he has taken a position and he wants as many people as possible to be aware of it. He is promoting his point of view. He used 136 characters in that tweet which probably meant he spent some time carefully choosing his words to make sure it fit.

When he pressed “send” some of the 26,000+ people that “follow” him saw it on their twitter page, got it on their phone, or on some other device. Some of them then ReTweeted (RT) the message or replied to it. This in return exposed the message to their audiences. As the message was repeated the number of people exposed was multiplied. Even if they did not repeat it, but just replied to it their followers saw the response and may have clicked to see the original post.

Twitter is also a social network, but for ideas…not people.

Each user has a very simple profile, consisting of a single photo, a one sentence description, a single link, and their location. But people follow each other because of what they say, not who they are.

Of coarse you can follow your friends or influencers but unlike other social networks, you don’t need their permission to listen to what they tweet (there is an option to keep your tweets private but most people don’t). If your like me, you quickly realize that you don’t really care about following your friends on Twitter, you already know what they think and have other ways of communicating with them. You use twitter to find the things you don’t know anything about and to do that you need a diverse network. 

Who is on Twitter?

Besides Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Karl Rove, Shaquille O’Neil, Lance Armstrong, everyone in Silicon Valley, almost every journalist, journalism professor, public relations professional, and executive of a internet company is on twitter. As well as lots of authors, comedians, TV personalities, thousands of web consultants (like myself @benshoemate), “gurus” , self promoters, bloggers, and million and millions of young people.

Will they actually reply to you?

Yes, if you say something worth replying to and not just “OMG I’m your biggest fan”. It’s like at a party, if you say something intelligent, they react. In fact, if I were trying to get on the Today show, or Oprah, I think I’d start on Twitter by reaching out to their people or even the stars themselves.

Why are these people on Twitter?

Same reason you need to be. Here they are:

• 140 char limit gives you an excuse for brevity. That which would be rude in an email or face to face is required by Twitter. I think busy people find this  liberating. I *wish* email had a character limit. I would love to put a filter on an email server that you could turn on that would only allow people 100 words per email. Because then they would have to think about what they are sending. They would have to get to the point. And no attachments. That would be a good experiment, no attachment friday’s. Use the wiki instead… #productidea
• 140 char limit makes twitter scanable. When you are following 50 conversations at once this is very important.
• Some smart interesting people are on twitter, if I lived in ancient Greece, I would be following Aristotle around, hanging on his every word (as long as it didn’t interfere with my job) because pearls of wisdom fall from his mouth every time he speaks. If I could, I would follow every interesting person on the planet (I made a list at the bottom to get you started)
• Influential people are on twitter
• Your customers are on twitter and you have an unprecedented opportunity to listen to them and learn about them (more about this later)
• and the number one reason – People are talking about you, your company, your industry, your products and services, your future, and your brand on Twitter.

Listen to your customers

Twitter is a way to listen to what other people are saying about you, your company, your products and services, your industry,  your brand.

What are the people saying about your company right now? Most big companies spend lots of money conducting focus groups, surveys, and interviews to understand what people think about their products and services. This is great and necessary. But their is also something to be said for listening to the word on the street. The unsolicited feedback  that arises spontaneously. In a world where these opinions are broadcast to 100s or 1000s or people and sometimes more, bad news travels faster than ever and good news is still just as slow.

Getting Started – Search and listen first

The best way to get started with Twitter is with search. Go to http://search.twitter.com/ 

Here are some samples:

Search term: UPS

This is unsolicited feedback. No matter how big or small your company is, you can’t afford to not listen to your customers.

Search term: I love UPS

I had to be careful selecting these tweets – some may get some UPS drivers in trouble…

Search term: I wish UPS

If you are looking for product ideas, listen to your customers.

Search term: UPS help me

Of coarse UPS is a big company with over 300,000 people working for them so there are already people providing help.  The great thing about this is when they do, they are overheard doing it by others. This increases UPS’s reputation as a company that cares.  But is anyone doing it for your company?

Be overheard at your best

When you help a customer through phone or email you help exactly 1 person. When you do it on the web you create a piece of knowledge that can help many. When you do it on Twitter, you also build a reputation of being helpful in realtime, one on one personal way that is overheard by others. This makes your brand instantly more personal, more responsive, and builds loyalty. Companies spend the 20th century creating unresponsive industrial giants that customers tolerated but openly despised. They jumped to the first viable competition that didn’t treat them like a number. The 21st century will be about using technology to return to our person to person roots.

Be selective of who you follow

It is tempting to follow everyone, but look for people you enjoy talking to and don’t be afraid to thin the herd if you get people who post a lot of non-sense.

Some tools you need

Twitscoop.com – See what is buzzing. When something happens in the world, it shows up in twitter first. As it is tweeted, retweeted, and discussed, that term used a lot. Below is a live feed from TwitScope. The larger a term is, the more it appears in recent tweets. The website itself is better because it shows those actual tweets when you hover over it. 

Tweetchat.com – On Monday nights at 7-10pm CST if your watching Twitscoop you’ll see word #journchat get really big. This is a  weekly conversation between journalists, bloggers and PR folks (http://journchat.info/about/) Twitter users use #topic to tag conversations that are all related. They do this for 2 reasons. First, they know lots of people have open searches for that word #topic. Second, other services like tweetchat create chat rooms out of these. I strongly suggest you try tweetchat during the Monday, 7-10pm CST time. Other #topics – #gaza, #haiku, and if there is any conference, concert or other large public event like #inaug09 then there will be a # for it. This is a great way to see the real power of twitter.

Tweetdeck.com – A tool that lets you keep several searches open at once as well as twitscoop. If your only going to spend a small amount of time in Twitter each day, install Tweetdeck, open some searches, and join in the conversation. @tweetdeck

Blogs

So what’s the deal? Why are blogs and wikis so popular? Are they really as popular a search term as music and movies? To try and find the answer I looked at the cities and countries where the data comes from. Blogs are dominated by the French and Vietnamese?

The word blog returns 3,510,000,000 results worldwide on Google (that’s 3.5 Billion with a B). My research (consisting of asking Google “blogs popular in france”) returned this article. Although it is already 2 years old, it asked the same questions and reports that users of France’s most popular blog spent over an hour there on average versus just 12 minutes in the US.

French blogs stands out in other measurable ways. They are noticeably longer, more critical, more negative, more egocentric and more provocative than their U.S. counterparts, said Laurent Florès, the French-born, New York-based chief executive of CRM Metrix, a company that monitors blogs and other online conversations on behalf of companies seeking feedback on their brands.

“Bloggers in the United States listen to each other and incorporate rival ideas in the discussion,” he said. “French bloggers never compromise their opinions.”

Wiki

Wiki appears to be crazy popular in Japan. Just look at these results:

Let’s ask the same question. First some anecdotal evidence, like this article about a Japanese government official caught doing something he should not have been on the internet…editing wikipedia articles about the robot toys known as Gundam?
I love this quote:

“The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam,” ministry official Tsutomu Shimomura said.

The agriculture ministry verbally reprimanded five other bureaucrats who contributed to entries on movies, typographical mistakes in billboard signs and local politics. The six employees together made 408 entries on the popular Internet encyclopedia from ministry computers since 2003.

Test

One term I that myself use a lot is the word “test”. When ever think my internet connection may have been lost, I open my browser, and just to make sure I’m not looking at a cached version of google, I type test. I figured I was not the only one so test is pretty high on google’s rankings. The suprising thing is where it is popular.

Note that I graphed it versus, xp and jobs. Both of those show new year increases (one for new christmas computers, the other for new years resultions I imagine).

But look how steady test is, which fits my theory that the term “test” is used to actually test google. Now look at the regions:

The Germans are not only number 1, they dominate with the top 5 cities. What is going on here? It does fit the sterotype.

The approach here seems to be – when you can’t think of anything else – have a contest.

So for around $50K – Sprint is getting:

• At least 1,000 videos featuring their new phone.
• Buzz from people like me and large gadget blogs talking about it.
• Selling at least 1000 phones

How many of these will be of the “will it blend” variety?

Powered by ScribeFire.

• Do too many cooks spoil the open source stew and lead to a natural conservatism?
• Do people save their really good ideas for patents, copyrights, and ultimately some plan for profit?
• Is the open source community not as dedicated (since I’m guessing it is not their full time job to write free software)?
• Is the open source community not as talented? Has Microsoft, Apple, and Google hired away all the talent?
• Is it a resource issue?
• Or is there some other flaw with how open source works that stifle innovation?

I have been looking at how communities like digg, slashdot, wikipedia, and other smaller forums operate. There does seem to be a conservative nature to large crowds. Mainly because the urge to contribute is high. So high, that people want to comment or tweak something even if they have no real expertise. Another issue is that as soon as some one mentions a novel or creative idea, there are 50 people eager to chime in with why its a bad idea. The burden then falls on the innovator to defend their idea. Without sources or previous examples they can cite (we are talking about innovation after all), the idea simply drowns beneath an ocean of criticism. Anyone surveying the discussion will conclude the idea was shot down.

This is all just speculation on my part. It will take more than just a few case studies to uncover any true underlying pattern.

• How long does it take for these networks to reach critical mass?
• What happens when the market is saturated?
• How many networks are people willing to invest time into?
• What’s next for them?

To answer the first question I went to Google trends and plotted MySpace versus Facebook.

From this it looks like myspace has peaked and facebook is nearly as popular now. Next I went to alexia.com which ranks sites.Here are the top 20 sites:

Rank	Change	Web Site
1	(none)	yahoo.com
2	1	google.com
3	1	live.com
4	1	youtube.com
5	3	msn.com
6	(none)	myspace.com
7	4	facebook.com
8	1	wikipedia.org
9	1	hi5.com
10	2	orkut.com
11	2	rapidshare.com
12	2	blogger.com
13	2	megaupload.com
14	3	friendster.com
15	1	yahoo.co.jp
16	7	baidu.com
17	2	fotolog.net
18	1	microsoft.com
19	4	google.fr
20	7	qq.com

Of the top 20 – Myspace, Freindster, facebook, orkut, and hi5 are all social networks (a collection of personal profiles linked together and competing for attention). The rest of the list is search engines, webhosts (which rank high because a lot of websites have that domain like rapidshare.com and blogger.com), and wikipedia – the king of user created content. Baidu.com is the top Chinese search engine.

Here is the one year trend for social sites on alexa:

One thing that is clear about the top 20 sites – user generated content is definitely king. Not a single site other than microsoft.com pay for content – they all harvest, search, sort, rank, and enable the general public to do it for them.

So getting back to social networks, how long can these things last, I think once they hit the level myspace and face book are currently, they have to innovate quickly or die. Like shopping malls in the real world, the crowds come for a while but are quickly lured away by brighter lights. Plus, a lot of users begin to get turned off when a system is seen as too main stream and want the cool factor of the next great thing. In any case there are plenty of options for users to try. While I do have profiles at Linkedin and facebook, I don’t update them. If I’m going to generate content, I want more control over it then those sites allow. Also, I want to benefit from the advertising.

This post gets a lot of attention, so I rewrote part of it. It will give you step-by-step instructions to take all your old email (in my case over 10 years worth) and upload it into Gmail. Over the years I have used several different email clients: Pine on Unix, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. I am currently pretty comfortable with Gmail and have been using it since it was released. Like many people I am a data pack-rat and have kept all my email files (well, almost all – sadly I discovered a 6 months gap). My vision is to put it all into Gmail so I can leverage the great search and tagging features they provide. So here are the steps.

Overall Strategy – get everything converted and loaded into a local server, then sync it to Google.

Why do it this way? There are many advantages. First, if your just moving 100 to a 1000 messages with no attachments, then you can just skip all this and use the IMAP interface found in Google’s FAQ. That method allows you to “see” you gmail account in outlook (or thunderbird or lotus notes) and then just drag or copy messages from one box to the other.  But if your moving more than 1000 messages (or in my case 20,000 messages) with lots of attachments, that will take you days, and you have to sit there are watch it because you can only move about 200 messages at a time. In this method, we consolidate first to a local email server (I’ll show you how to set it up below) running on pc, then let the two accounts (your local one and gmail) sync on their own. Any other way and you are stuck sitting there, dragging and dropping or copying and pasting 200 messages at a time from one folder to another. Second – this keeps all dates in tact. It is really nice to see message you send in 1995 in your Gmail account. Third, once we do this, we can use it as a local backup of our Gmail – just incase the unthinkable happens to Gmail. (I said don’t think of it!)

Ready? Let’s get started

Here is the over all process – you will notice that I installed a email server on my computer called Mercury. This allows us to set up a IMAP and POP account locally that is much faster and will serve as a local backup of all email. 

Step 1) First find all your email

I dug through all my old hard drives and consolidate my mail into one location. As you can see, I have outlook (pst) files, lotus notes (nsf) files and files from an old Unix (pine) account I had at school. The zip file (all 2.7GB of it) is the finished product – all my email from 1995 though 2005 (2006 and 2007 are in gmail already).

 
If you are looking at my files, you see a lot of overlap, that’s ok, better safe than sorry…we can delete the duplicates once they are in Thunderbird using an extension.

Step 2. Download the Software

• Thunderbird (free email client) – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
• Mercury (free email server) – ftp://ftp.usm.maine.edu/pegasus/mercury32/m32-452.exe (read about it)
• Lotus Notes (free trial) – http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/downloads/
• Outlook (free trial) – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/default.aspx

Why Thunderbird – because it is open source with a large developer base. This means there is a good set of tutorials for writing extensions if I to want later on (for those visualizations). Also, I’m making a long term bet that 50 years from now, there will still be tools that import these files – (since they are just text files with no encoding and no database) – plus Thunderbird is really fast and can read 6gb of email quickly (lotus notes and outlook tend to slow down). So Thunderbird will be the final destination on my computer and I will upload from there.

Step 3. Install the software

• Thunderbird – just default everything
• Mercury – Make sure you set it up for both POP and IMAP when you get those options in the wizard
• Lotus Notes – Default
• Outlook – Default

Step 4. Import Unix files to Thunderbird

These are the easiest because Thunderbird will read these natively. All you have to do is copy the files in to the local folder and reopen Thunderbird.
A) Find out where thunderbird is storing your local files. To do this go to Tools > Account Settings. (note I renamed the local account to Ben Shoemate (all mail) but what your interested in is the "Local Directory" copy that and go there in windows explorer. This is where you need to copy the Unix files (they are files with no extensions). Just copy them to this "local folder", close and restart Thunderbird. Your old mail will be there! That’s it!

Step 5. Set up a local Email account in Mercury.

Open Mercury – if it is all ready running you will see down in the windows toolbar by the clock.

Otherwise , Start > Program Files > etc..

Once Mercury is open, go to Configuration > Manage Local Users > Add User
Because there is so much mail, I am going to set up a different local account per year. Gmail.com can import from 5 accounts at a time, and this will save a lot of time later on. So just make up an account name – I use my initials and the year and a simple password.

It should look like this when your done.

Each of these accounts are real email addresses. When you are local (in lotus notes and outlook) you can map to them with bs1999@localhost
In gmail, you can add them as bs1999@youripaddress (i.e. bs1999@111.111.122.11).

Step 6. Lotus Notes NSF files to your local email with IMAP

Once lotus notes is installed, you can simply double click the nsf files to open them, or you can click File > Database > Open > browse

You should see your old mail now. Ahh the memories….But don’t stop to read everything again or I’ll never finish this tutorial! Now, in lotus notes we are going to map to the local email account you set up in mercury. (Note: Gmail now has IMAP so you could just map directly to gmail if you want using the same procedure – but again, it will take a 100 years if you have this much email).

Go to File > Preferences > Client Reconfiguration Wizard

Check Pop or IMAP and click next.

Select IMAP, enter your new email account you set up in mercury, and type localhost, click next.

enter your account name again, and enter the password you gave yourself.
Click next, enter localhost as the server and your email address again – this doesn’t matter since you will not be using this email address for very long and it won’t show up on any of the mail that goes through it.
next, next, next your done.

To open the view of this in notes, click the "Databases" icon on the left panel and open your new account (this might take 2-3 minutes while notes creates a new nsf file etc.)

Now you should have you local account open. Now simply open the old nsf file, go to the "all documents" folder, select all, copy (I think it will only let you copy 2500 at a time) and then switch to you new email account and paste. Once you have all the messages for that year in the local IMAP account, close the nsf and repeat for all nsf files, and all years.

Step 7 – Outlook to your local email with IMAP

The same as in lotus notes – open your pst, then add the imap account and copy and paste.

• To open the pst go to File > Manage Data files and click Add.
• To open the local IMAP account go to Tools > Account Settings > New email account

Check the box that says "Manually configure server settings".

• Select Internet Mail
• Enter your Name, Email address (bs1999@localhost) and password, select IMAP, the server is localhost for both incoming and outgoing

Once you have mapped to this account, simply copy your old mail from the PST to the new account.

Step 8 – Clean it up in Thunderbird

Connect Thunderbird to you local email server (mercury) and download all your mail. Just like in outlook and lotus notes, we are going to add an account to Thunderbird and let it download all the mail you just put into it from lotus notes, pine and outlook.

• Open Thunderbird
• Click Tools > Account Settings > Add Account
• Enter Account Name (for me its bs1999@localhost), Name, email address (bs1999@localhost)

• Click Server settings

• Click OK.
• The next thing I did was organize copy them down into my local Thunderbird account and used an extension to delete duplicates
• Then I spent some time looking for gaps…oh well

Step 9 – Upload to gmail

By now your local account has a lot of mail. Let’s start pulling it into gmail. I set up a new gmail account to test it first. From there I can pull it into my main account.

• Log in to gmail
• Click Settings > Accounts > Get Mail from other accounts (Pop3) > Add other accounts
• Add your accounts from your local account. Note: you need you IP address. If you have a router you will need to route ports for pop3 (port 110) to your local computer. Log into your router to do this. While your there, get the IP of your router (ITS NOT the one that starts with 192. or 10. those are always local addresses)

(that’s NOT my IP address btw)

Next – gmail gives you some great options to tag the mail as it comes in, do it. Even if your not a tagger – do it.

You might also want to leave the message on the server (your computer) if this is a trial run.
Click Add account. If you get a problem, make sure your firewall is open, you port is mapped, and your password is right.

Next I’ll show you how to upload all those old chats…

If you liked this post, check out my other greatest hits:

• Words Einstein never said (but everyone thinks he did)
• Rewriting the Star Wars Prequels (they need it)
• Pimp your Credit Card
• The story of the bear and the big dipper

So, I am here to tell you, that as of right, now, there is no way to:

• Add yahoo or google users to you Sametime list at work
• Add sametime users to you home google talk of yahoo IM.

Why no one is saying this is a product of the uncertainty caused by being unable to confirm a negative. It’s not just me either, there were at least 2o questions about this in Yahoo Answers. Including the one I added.

So here is my promise – if someone says it can be done, I will document it, and update this post. Also, if you can tell me it can not be done, because IBM has not set it up yet, that is good to. It is the uncertainty that kills us.