We have spent a great deal of time this Holiday Season deciding on the best way to communicate our shipping deadlines for delivery by December 24th so I know how detailed retailers must be and how important it is for customers to understand.

I received the email below from CompUSA this morning.  I have looked at it ten times and for the life of me, cannot figure out when I need to place an order by and what method I need to use to ship my order to Florida.  I appreciate the time they took to highlight some states, but what about others.  Yes, you can click through to see a detailed shipping schedule, but in my opinion, it is too much detail and not easy to decipher.

A bit of advice…keep it simple.  Order by XX/XX, get it by XX/XX

Okay, so a lot has changed since my last post way back in April. I have left Venus Swimwear to take a job with Football Fanatics as Email Marketing Manager. I now oversee the entire email marketing program from email creation to execution to analysis. I love having a more focused position, allowing me to devote to improve on what was already a successful program.

My wife and I welcomed our first daughter on September 22nd. She was a little early but is beautiful and healthy and mom is doing great as well. It is very tough leaving them in the morning but also the best feeling to come home at the end of the day to two smiling faces.

Busy would be an understatement but I welcome it with open arms. Looking forward to the holidays with family and of course with my wife and daughter. I’ll update when I can.

While I am all about cheaper alternatives to expensive cell phone plans and of course the nerdiest things possible, I do have to draw the line when it comes to in-flight phone conversations.  I will seriously reconsider a carrier if they allow in-flight calls.  Granted, some planes have phones which can be used if needed, but who the heck uses those.

Now however, with skype available on the iphone, what is to stop someone from making a call on a plane?  Would it be rude to ask someone next to you to not have a phone conversation?  Are flight attendants politely asking customers to refrain?  I honestly don’t know, but I certainly hope something is in place.  Nothing more annoying than hearing someone talk over jet engines…

My rant for the day…thanks for tuning in.

A recent report showed that twitter has seen over a 1300%+  growth since February of last year. Apparently everyone wants to answer the question, “What are you doing?”. It is getting much more media buzz right now than facebook and that other site, My-Something-or-other. It has become an effective way to reach out to people faster than TV and newspaper.

I’ve found that the same RSS feeds I subscribe to are also some of the same folks I follow on twitter. I’ve also found that I read about something on twitter and see a feed in my reader later on. So much for digg bringing me breaking news.  If you are crafty enough, you can even have all your facebook updates pipe to twitter.  

As twitter’s popularity grows, so does its user base. Everyone in Hollywood has a twitter account and has apparently been the cause of the breakup of Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer. Some big name celebrities tweet regularly such as Shaq and Dane Cook.  Retailers are getting into the mix using twitter as another customer service touchpoint or to keep customers up to date.

But lets get real, take a look at how many people follow over a thousand people.  How can you keep up with everything?  You are sure to miss the hilarious tweet a co-worker posted or 75% savings at your favorite retailer.  This is becoming serious information overload.  

I have yet to figure out the perfect group of people to follow.  I have to admit, I get a kick out of updates from William Shatner and John Cleese, but I tend to miss some industry news.  How do you manage twitter?

The web changes, its a simple fact.  How users interact with websites changes as more sites adopt functionality.  Some basic principles will never change and should not be ignored.  However, remember that “cool” functionality you thought was cutting edge and you spent hours developing 3 years ago which you removed because of a drop in clicks, sales, etc…  Why not try it out again?  If it was unfamiliar to users, it may not be so now. Chances are by now, someone else is doing it and chances are they are seeing positve results.  So uncomment the code, review the change and try it again.