Capulet Communications

Just a quick note to congratulate an old client of ours, Steeltrace. As Joe reports, they were recently acquired by Compuware for US $20 million. We're not taking any of the credit--they've got a great product which always seemed to get positive reviews. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

Everyone's talking about the Chevy Tahoe. To help promote the new SUV, the folks at GM launched a make-your-own-commercial site. Unfortunately for them, many of the resulting ads make jokes about global warming or question the car's quality. As is happening with increasing frequency, the story has bubbled up out of the blogosphere and into the mainstream media:

"The issue here is that GM is providing a public display of the feedback versus keeping it in house," said Gordy Abel, vice president of marketing agency Carat Fusion. "An open community can see all responses. In my opinion (GM) needs to do a better job of screening these types of contests in the future to make sure the content complies with the rules before it is posted."

 

Still, everybody's talking about the Chevy Tahoe, and that can only help car sales. The people creating negative ads likely aren't SUV buyers in the first place, so I'd guess that the long term results will be positive for GM.

Via SmallBizBlog.ca, here's some recent research on the declining open rates for email newsletters:

To summarize, the study found that email open rates were 35.5% in 2005 (down 16.5% from 2004), while click-through rates remained pretty steady at around 6.6%.

We still encourage our clients to do email newsletters. That's still how plenty of people are accustomed to receiving corporate communications, and once set up, they're relatively easy to send out. Clearly, though, their time is coming to an end, replaced largely by RSS feeds and blogs.

We'll be out of town on holidays until Monday, March 27. We're going to a wedding in Edinburgh on St. Patrick's Day, and then on to Venice for a little city break. We won't be checking email. If you absolutely...

We produce a lot of corporate newsletters. We do a number for clients on a regular basis, and when we get around it, we put out one of our own (you can sign up here if you're really keen). About...