In the time we’ve used Fax.com, it has worked fine for us – except that we almost NEVER need it. The first year and a half we had it, we received 10 faxes. In the past year? One.

Sending?  5 times over the whole time – and it wasn’t client contact, it was vendor contact… a vendor we no longer use.

There have been many posts relative to the death of the fax machine.

http://socialwisdom.ca/2011/07/26/r-i-p-the-death-of-the-fax-machine/

Include us in.  We just don’t need a fax service. Everything is email or FTP, and if it isn’t, it’s because it’s not “file efficient” and will be mailed/shipped to us.  There was a time when businesses had fax numbers, if for no other reason, because ALL businesses had fax numbers – it was almost a sign of brick-and-mortar legitimacy.  That time is long passed.  So…

Goodbye fax.com. You worked well, but are no longer necessary to us. 

http://www.gotomeeting.com/fec/gotomeeting_pricing

I can’t foresee doing a webinar for more than 100 participants for Kessler Freedman in the near future as we are specifically providing our webinars for clients only, as a benefit to our customers. So we use the standard $99 per month service option. Clients can either call in on a long-distance number or listen in through their computer; we don’t buy the toll-free minutes offered (it’s a bit pricey) and attendees must use the GoToWebinar user interface to submit questions during a webinar. You can test it now for a month for free, which is really nice if you want to research it for future use but aren’t ready to actually conduct webinars yet. The free version signup is here:

https://www4.gotomeeting.com/webinar/register/register.tmpl?Portal=www.gotomeeting.com&RandomSet=Try_Direct_Webinar

If you’ve never used GoToWebinar as a presenter or organizer, but are thinking about providing webinars, it’s well worth the look. A webinar organizer (and there can be multiple organizers) has lots of capabilities during the webinar – to change presenters, to allow someone else to control the mouse and keyboard, to mute or unmute presenters and/or attendees if desired, and more. Presentations can be slideshows, PDFs, web sites, videos, etc. What you can see on your monitor you can share with others. You can practice as much as you want during the period of time you’ve subscribed to GoToWebinar – there’s no real usage limit on anything other than the number of attendees for a given webinar, and the toll-free phone call-in minutes if you buy them. You can upgrade to the next level of attendees if you’re fortunate to schedule a webinar that is wildly popular. GoToWebinar allows you to manage the contacts with the attendees (including reminders) and to monitor the attendance and the attention to a live webinar. You can record the webinar for later download and use, although you need to remember to save it in a general WMV version or go through more labor in converting with their codec.

There are opportunities for glitches, which is why you practice, and as I stated in my previous post, you try to avoid doing something for the first time during a real webinar. I’d recommend that you emphasize to those who have signed up for your webinar that they visit the GoToWebinar page specifically set up for your webinar well in advance of the event and download the software that’s necessary unless they’re old hands at GoToWebinar. I also recommend that you provide the GoToWebinar support phone number in your contacts with your attendees prior to the webinar. You can’t control attendees’ hardware and software setup and issues, and it’s unlikely you have to experience to help unique situations – but GoToWebinar does and will resolve it. So let them.

If you have multiple presenters for a webinar, set up a test time that all can attend and go through the mechanics of the webinar. Make sure they understand their GoToWebinar menu items, make sure they understand that their files need to be ready and how to switch views from file to file and computer to computer. Go over the questions box, how and when they want to handle questions. Set a time to meet up on the GoToWebinar software 5-10 minutes BEFORE the webinar officially starts so that everyone’s set and there are no surprises. Presenters and organizers can talk before making the session live over GoToWebinar, any attendees awaiting the webinar will not hear it nor will they see any screen until the webinar is officially made live by the organizer.

It just takes experience to figure out the opportunities and occasional limitations to GoToWebinar.  Common sense and a commitment to practice will get you a comfort level fairly quickly.

Last week didn’t go without some hitches. It seems to me that webinar presentation has to evolve to best fit the personality providing it and the content to be provided, and I’m still working on the best way for me, personally, to conduct the webinar.  Powerpoint presentations do not yet fit my style. I also ran into a technical glitch that I created at the last minute which allowed for some echo during times in the presentation. I had practiced the webinar a couple of times without a problem, but a lesson learned – don’t change from what worked while practicing without testing it first, or you can end up with an unexpected and unwanted result.

We did get some good feedback on the webinar, though, and some nice appreciation. We’re on the right track – flowing the information of what we learn as we build and maintain our clients’ web presence to the clients directly. Last week’s session was on email distribution software and services, and some of the practices our clients should consider in using them. Next month we’ll be holding our session on Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and the importance and value of some of the statistical measurements.

Note: Some of the above providers also offer limited “free” service options as well.

We’ve worked on many sites for over 10 years, and sometimes email addresses are decommissioned. There are a lot of reasons that this can occur, and one reason for some of the oldest email addresses is due to spam, particularly with generic email addresses, such as helpdesk@whateverdotcom.com, etc. Really old email addresses eventually can get so much spam that they’re no longer useful at all.

When that time comes, we usually set up the email address to automatically dump into a special spam email folder and delete. An email goes out that the email address doesn’t exist to the sender. Every once in a while we check the spamfolder, just to make sure nothing interesting is ending up there.

It’s surprising how many emails are sent to email addresses that haven’t existed anywhere in nearly 10 years. These email addresses were spidered back in the early 2000s and then just have been sold and sold and shared and traded and sold some more with no effort to verify that they even deliver, let alone whether the person would want the sales effort. It’s ridiculous. What’s really ridiculous is that these aren’t spams from shady businesses necessarily, but from regular companies that have bought into a desperate premise.  It seems relatively low-cost. 

And probably almost no value.  Buyer beware.

• How do we determine which email distribution service/software would work best for us?
• How do we set up our email distribution service/software?
• What are recommended practices for using our email distribution service/software?
• What do these “bounced emails” mean?

And other topics.  It will last roughly an hour. 

In our 16 year history of Kessler Freedman, Inc., we’ve used many ISPs for internet connectivity, and had the option of using the same ISPs for email gateway service. Those ISPs include the old epix.net, Earthlink, Comcast, Verizon, and a few others. And if there’s one thing I’d like to say about ISP email, it’s this:

Don’t rely on it to receive everything.

ISPs are in the business of getting people online – to the Internet. It’s a pipeline, and everything else – email service, customer gateway, help desk – are features to make them more competitive in making more money. Sometimes competitiveness is about improving things to increase value. Sometimes it’s about decreasing cost. Sometimes it’s both.

And in the case of email through ISPs, I don’t think you’re getting enough of any of that.

ISPs are pretty much stuck with providing email service at this point. Commercial consumer internet service started with it, it is a huge piece of how people use the Internet, and it’s a headache. Spam, viruses, email settings – lots of effort by ISPs to deal with headaches that haven’t really gotten much better from their standpoint as far as volume is concerned. And nobody – NOBODY – picks an ISP because of email. So what competitive value is there to ISPs on email? Simple: just don’t kill the product with too terrible of email service provision.

I used Comcast for years for connectivity. I tested their email off and on, just to test. In their effort to reduce spam, they kept LOTS of legitimate email from being received by me via Comcast. It was borderline ridiculous – invoices, newsletters, CC replies – blocked by spamfilter software, and there was no way I could get it through Comcast. Since we run our email through our own domain, we received it elsewhere as well, which is how we knew how much wasn’t getting through. And in our business, missed legitimate email is a much higher potential cost than wafting through spam. We couldn’t accept the Comcast email risk, and never used it – and would not recommend that any business rely on their email.

Or any other ISP for that matter, because there are better options out there.

Short of having your own mailserver, I don’t understand why even more folks don’t use GMail, I’ve used it for years and it’s great. For individuals there’s a free version, it’s easy to set up, has webmail options, etc. To be honest, I don’t know why the big ISPs still try to run their own email when they would seem to be better off farming it out to Google – or at least their own customers would be better off.

There are other free options of email – Yahoo, Hotmail is still around, etc. As an email user, I would be looking for a service that provides the following:

1) The ability to use my computer’s email software to send and receive email, the ability to see email received online and to send through the web browser, and the ability to access email easily through a mobile app – easily.

2) The ability to look through the email that has been sent to you and defined by your receiving mailserver as possible spam. Even better – the ability to search through it. No spamfilter is perfect. I check my gmail spamfilter folder every few days to see if legitimate email has been trapped, and if so, I move it to my inbox and Gmail’s software tries to learn not to treat that sender as spam in the future. This is preferred. Not getting email that you need can be far worse than getting email you do not want.

3) The ability to customize your sending or return email address.

For me, Gmail does this just fine. The national ISPs? Not well enough.

Cumberland County (662 Likes)

Townships

Cooke Township
Dickinson Township
East Pennsboro Township
Hampden Township
Hopewell Township
Lower Allen Township  (237 Likes)
Lower Frankford Township
Lower Mifflin Township
Middlesex Township
Monroe Township
North Middleton Township
North Newton Township
Penn Township
Shippensburg Township
Silver Spring Township
South Middleton Township (400 Likes)
South Newton Township
Southampton Township
Upper Allen Township (52 Likes)
Upper Frankford Township
Upper Mifflin Township
West Pennsboro Township

Boroughs:

Camp Hill
Carlisle
Lemoyne (284 Likes)
Mechanicsburg
Mount Holly Springs
New Cumberland
Newburg
Newville
Shippensburg
Shiremanstown
Wormleysburg

I have a few areas to write about but for this week I thought I’d mention some loose ends that probably don’t need a full blog post but worth mentioning.

• First of all, one of these days I’m going to put together a piece about web design/development Requests for Proposals (RFPs). It’s a big subject and I have mixed feelings about the entire process. But one general piece of advice I have for organizations when they put out on RFP is, in all cases where software or hardware is specifically mandated, there should be an explanation as to why the mandate, and the answer “because that’s what we have” should not be considered automatically acceptable. Your investment into that software or hardware, if substantial and forward-looking, can be a great reason to require it, and that detail should be provided. But there are so many options out there now, for so many components of a web site, that a good developer is going to wonder why you’re requiring the one you’ve selected over something that may be a better fit. Detail matters.

• One component of your web presence can be the sending of “mass” email, whether they be newsletters or announcements or payment notices. Eventually email addresses fail, and you may get the error message for the failure. If you understand why you’re getting the failure notice you can fix the issues – sometimes you delete the email from your group, sometimes you can get a new email address to replace it. For reference, here’s a handy site for figuring out email error notices.

•  I check out new Wild Apricot sites as discovered by Google almost every day. I know, weird hobby. From my standpoint they’ve had a good year with bringing in associations, and particularly with smaller Chambers of Commerce. It’s been good to see.

•  Finally, I’ve been thinking about writing a piece about the turmoil going on within some associations now as their print products (magazines and newsletters) erode in both readership and advertising and the challenges they face to create at least as strong of a product, in content, readership and revenue potential, online. It might be more interesting to have someone from an association that is in that transition guest-blog here instead. I’d be open to suggestions.

Have a great finish to 2011, and we’ll post soon in 2012! Have a happy New Year holiday!