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Technical advances for members of Outdoor Writers Association
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Marketing Via E-mail
Speedy, Economical and Effective
Part one of a
two-part series
By Mike Walker 
Some say that
Colonel Colt made all men equal with his revolvers. The Internet does the same thing for
individuals who want to promote themselves and their services. E-mail marketing offers the
speed and economy of the Internet with the appeal of a printed newsletter.
Many think e-mail
marketing is the domain of the corporate world. It’s not. Many active OWAA members
use e-mail newsletters, or e-zines, to promote their work and services.
Two years ago, I
wrote a column on e-mail marketing (Outdoors Unlimited, July 2002, p.1). I asked
industry friends how they would describe an ideal marketing tool for their businesses.
They offered these characteristics:
1. Low cost
2. Personal and
targeted
3. Offers fast
response and measurement
4. Easy to use
5. Strengthens
relationships with customers
6. Versatile when
it comes to content
7. Welcome and
unobtrusive to the prospect
What they unwittingly described is e-mail.
Keep in mind that
there are two kinds of commercial e-mail: welcome and unwelcome. The unwelcome is called
spam, and it’s out of control. For example, a spammer in Russia sneaked past the
filters and firewalls on our provider’s server and sent more than 10,000 e-mails an
hour promoting porn sites, using the provider’s identifying codes as the source. The
result was any legitimate messages from our provider’s subscribers getting
blacklisted. It took several days to resolve.
But I’m not
addressing spam – rather, e-mail as a legitimate mass-communication tool. Formally,
this is known as permission-based marketing. In other words, the recipient grants
permission to send e-mail.
To successfully
use e-mail in your business, its content must be of interest to the reader and must
frequently change. The content determines your reader’s continuing interest. Take the
first step. Contact the person to ask if information is wanted.
The customer or
prospect will likely opt in if you offer information such as tips, early alerts to
specials, e-mail-only discounts or news that affects his interest in the outdoors.
Promote your
e-mail newsletter in your printed materials and advertising as well as on your Web site.
If you exhibit or offer seminars at shows and conferences, have sign-up cards available.
A Device
that Boosts Business
Your e-zine can be nothing more than a text or graphic HTML message. (HTML, or HyperText Markup
Language, is the document format used on the Web.) Surveys show that
61 percent of companies using e-mail as a business tool prefer HTML format to text only.
If you want more than text, consider using PDF documents.
No matter which
format, you must commit to doing it well and regularly.
How often should
you e-mail? Start monthly and work toward weekly.
Ali Brown, a
leading expert on e-zine publishing who is known as the “E-zine Queen,” can
answer your questions. Her easy-to-read, helpful book, Boost Business with Your Own
E-zine, is available on her Web
site.
Brown
offers five reasons why you should start your own e-zine:
1. It is an
effective way to promote your services or products. Instead of saying how great you are,
as in traditional advertising, an e-zine lets you show how great you are by sharing your
expertise.
2. An e-zine is a
great way to stay in touch with clients and prospects on a regular basis.
3. Publishing an
e-zine positions you as an expert in your field.
4. An e-zine
allows you to effortlessly spread the word about you and your business.
5. An e-zine is
cheap and easy to publish – especially compared to a printed newsletter.
Stay tuned! In the July/August Tech-E-Letter, you’ll learn practical tips on
designing your e-zine, plus examples of successful e-mail newsletters from experts in the
field.
Former OWAA Board Member Mike Walker is program editor of
“The World of Ducks Unlimited Radio Program” and president of
the Walker Agency. He writes
about advertising and public relations topics for Marine World, the trade edition
of Boating World magazine and in Boating Industry International
magazine’s e-zine.
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Unnatural Disasters
How to Survive When Your Computer Crashes
By Michael
Furtman
www.michaelfurtman.com
It will happen to
you sooner or later. A compact flash card or other memory media will get corrupted, making
it impossible to download your photographs. Worse yet, your computer hard drive will
crash, and with it, all your data will seemingly vanish.
I know, because
both have happened to me. Sure, we’re supposed to back up all our data and photos to
CDs or DVDs, but let’s face it, none of us are as diligent as we should be. When the
crash occurs, we kick ourselves for being lazy, stupid or both.
Companies can
recover the data for you, whether from a hard drive or flash card. The going rate,
however, is about $250 – a fee you may be willing to pay if the information is
critical. But before you shell out those hard-earned bucks, consider trying to recover the
data yourself.
Save Data, Save
Money
When my crash
occurred, I scoured the Internet for programs that might recover the information. There
are many. Most companies will let you download a trial version that will show you which
file can be recovered but won’t allow you to actually recover them until you buy the
product. Some of these programs cost close to $200.
But my search did
reveal several free or cheap programs that work admirably. Dtidata, a British firm, sells a program
called Digital Picture Recovery for $39. Although it took several days to crawl through my
defective, 200-gigabyte drive, it recovered thousands of images that would otherwise have
been lost. Used on removable media, recovery is much faster (and equally effective).
I also tried a
free program called PC Inspector Smart
Recovery. While not quite as effective as the Dtidata product, it works very well,
especially considering the price. This company also offers a free program called PC
Inspector File Recovery, which allows you to recover other types of files, such as text
documents.
Don’t wait
until you have a problem to look for these programs. Download them now. Then hope you
never have to use them!
OWAA member Michael Furtman hails from
Duluth, Minn. An award-winning book author, freelance writer and still photographer, he is
a frequent contributor to OWAA’s Tech-E-Letter and will chair the Technology
Committee in 2004-05.
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Why Register for the
Online Directory?
How You Benefit from Updating Your Listing
By Lisa Draeger
OWAA Member Services Manager
The Online
Directory is the No. 1 source of OWAA membership information – for members as well as
for headquarters’ administration of member records. Here are some important reasons
for registering, using the Online Directory and keeping your information current.
Accurate
search criteria
It is critically important that members keep their information up to date. The Online
Directory is where fellow OWAA members go to look for contact information, demographics or
to search specific criteria.
Mailings
from OWAA headquarters
We download data from the Online Directory to prepare mailing labels for Outdoors
Unlimited and other communications to our members. If your address is not correct,
you won’t receive OU, renewal notices, conference brochures or other
important news items we send from headquarters.
News from
supporting members
Mailing labels or e-mail lists for product and service announcements, industry news and
press releases are prepared from data downloaded from the Online Directory. The integrity
of these lists depends on accurate information stored in the Online Directory.
A
complete record
Certain information about you is not automatically included in the Online Directory.
Skills and subject-matter information for individual members and marketing focus for
supporting members are two examples. Take time to personalize your record and thereby
increase your marketability.
An
accurate description
Why limit yourself to updating your biography or your company’s description to just
once a year in our annual print Directory when you can do it now, online? Perhaps you just
wrote a new book, changed jobs, received an award. … Now you can change your
biography immediately. You don’t have to wait to inform others of your
accomplishments.
Of course, OWAA
headquarters staff is always ready and willing to take your address or contact information
changes over the phone and make these changes for you in the Online Directory. But for
those who can, it is to your benefit to keep your record accurate and use the Online
Directory to keep in touch with OWAA’s rich and extensive network of outdoor
communicators.
For assistance
with online registration or questions, contact Lisa Draeger at OWAA – 800-692-2477,
or e-mail her.
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Photography:
It's All Ones and Zeros
The digital
photography debate continues in Outdoors Unlimited and the Tech-E-Letter, and there
has been some good information and some that is just bizarre. Talk to a digital
photographer and you’ll soon be discussing workflow, the automatic
routing of documents and images through a series of steps. In digital
photography terms, workflow is the process of taking an image from the camera and
preparing it for use.
To get an idea of
the workflow from camera to print at Sports Illustrated, have a look at an
article published on Rob Galbraith’s Web site.
For those seeking
to learn more about digital photography I have found a few Web sites that are
helpful across a broad range of topics.
By Gary Smith
Photoshop
Shortcuts: Creating Actions
Is there an
alteration you consistently make on a document in Photoshop? Do you reduce a photo
multiple times to be 300 dpi, 1-inch-by-1-inch for Web sending? Or change the same photo
color saturations repeatedly?
Here is a quickie
to create an “action” that will automatically change a photo with a click of the
mouse without making alterations on 15 palettes.
Open a new
document. Under Window: open Actions, and a palette will appear. On the bottom right
corner of the palette box, is a small “new action” page icon (next to the trash
can).
You will be asked
to name that action. Then, you will see the record button highlight red on the same rule
as the “new action” page icon. As long as the record button is on, all the
modifications you do to that photo will be recorded. (A pause button and replay button are
also available on the same rule.) When you are finished, press the pause/stop.
Now, when you
open the next photo to reduce to send over the Web, just the click of the “your
titled” action will instantly alter the photo to your specifications.
By Lucia Stewart
More
Tips on Managing Your Taskbar
Does your taskbar
get in the way of your work? If you’re like me and have a monitor that’s only 12
inches wide, you need every bit of workspace you can get! Right-click on a blank spot of
the taskbar, select “Properties,” then check the box next to “Auto-hide the
taskbar.” Presto! The taskbar vanishes. Never fear: When you move your mouse to the
bottom of the screen, the taskbar will reappear.
Remember, since
you can move between open programs by hitting Alt + Tab, and since hitting either the
Windows key or Ctrl + Esc displays the Start menu, you don’t really need the taskbar
for much at all!
By Katie McKalip
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The Debate over Page-Design Software
QuarkXPress vs. Adobe InDesign
Part One of a Two-part Series
By Lucia Stewart
OWAA Intern
It’s the talk
of the page-design world: QuarkXPress or Adobe
InDesign? In the past three years since InDesign’s release, publishing corporations
to small design firms have debated which is appropriate for their needs.
To comprehend
differences between the Quark and
InDesign page-design programs, it is important to understand the architecture and history
of page-design software.
Seeds of a
Rivalry
In the 1980s,
Adobe’s PageMaker created a desktop publishing revolution, but subsequently, Adobe
focused on developing Photoshop. When Colorado upstart QuarkXPress hit the market, it took
the lead in professional publishing by including features such as ease of workflow and
superior color printing. It became the industry standard, used by everyone from
mom-and-pop publishers to Time Inc.
However,
by the late 1990s Quark became known for slow new-product development, bug-ridden releases
and poor customer support. In 2000, Adobe reentered the market with InDesign 1.0. As is
common in new programs, InDesign was slow and prone to crashes and kinks. But now, with
development and upgrades in both applications over the past four years, InDesign and Quark
meet on the battlefield of design programs.
A page layout or
design program is software that integrates text from a word processor and pictures from a
scanner. It adds cropping information, typographic refinements and so forth. It is
comparable to an architect in your computer who “plugs in” files transparently,
allowing you to modify and design the data within one layout. It works closely with the
operating system and uses multiple applications to create a finished product to be
printed.
The main
difference between QuarkXPress and InDesign lies in how the programs import files. Quark
was the first program to bring “plug-in” architecture with extensions to
publishing, as explained above. InDesign takes the same approach but splits the program up
to be a very small kernel with lots of plug-ins. That design allows you to plug in
different things much more extensively than you previously could.
Preliminary
Conclusions
My research and
experience with both programs lead me to the following conclusions: QuarkXPress is an
enhanced word processor, a workhorse for the common printer and publisher. It has speed,
maturity and a rich environment capable of basic and editorial layout. InDesign is an
enhanced design program, a fine artist’s paintbrush in large projects. It has a
powerful and complex architecture with unique features used with photos and illustrations.
Yet it is relatively immature.
Quark users have
become fine-tuned pros over the years. For large publishers or companies, the cost and
time involved in retraining people in InDesign may not be feasible at this point. But
small install bases and networks may realistically consider making the switch.
Although both
programs are all encompassing and integrate each other’s features, defining
differences exist – otherwise, there would be no debate.
Lucia Stewart has interned at OWAA
headquarters since fall of 2003. This summer, in addition to continuing with OWAA, she is
working for The Tributary Magazine in Bozeman, Mont. The July/August
Tech-E-Letter will feature part two of this series, addressing specific differences
between Quark and InDesign.
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Association
for Conservation Information
The Association for Conservation Information
(ACI) is a nonprofit association of information and education professionals representing
state, federal and Canadian agencies and private conservation organizations. ACI members
play a major role in providing natural resource, environmental, wildlife and other
information and education to the public. ACI members receive The Balance Wheel, a
quarterly e-newsletter, to keep them up-to-date on issues and trends of interest to
conservation communication professionals. ACI’s Web site includes a job board, which features job
listings of interest to conservation communications professionals. ACI’s 2004 conference is scheduled to
take place in New Orleans July 11-15, 2004.
Katie McKalip
Invasive
Species and You
Spring brings the
proliferation of invasive species. Human actions are the primary means of invasive species
introductions, so here’s your chance to see how you can control the invasion. This site answers all of your
questions about a particular species. It features a comprehensive database for locating
your particular interest or concern. A gardening section lists guides and references to
“invasive” plants. However, this site is not just for the botanical invasions
but also includes details on animals and other organisms, such as microbes.
Lisa Draeger
Regulating,
Preventing Marina Fuel Spills
The BoatU.S. Foundation
partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency to create a Web site
that outlines the environmental regulations on marina fuel-spill prevention and control. A
simple worksheet allows a marina owner or operator to easily review the requirements and
calculate whether a facility needs a Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure (SPCC)
plan, a written document that describes measures a marina has taken to prevent petroleum
spills and, if a spill does occur, how to contain and clean it up. This program is in
conjunction with the “Stop the Drops” boater campaign to prevent fuel spills of
any kind from reaching waterways. The BoatU.S. Foundation is a national nonprofit
501(c)(3) organization that creates education and outreach campaigns, researches issues
and products and helps boaters learn to be safer and better stewards of the environment
while boating.
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Dr. WoodKnot Unmasked!
 John Hong, a k a Dr.
P.C. WoodKnot, enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Hawaii. Whisked yonder to the college town
of Boston, he became a mechanical engineer. Living to the ideal that one should never take
the job for which one is trained, he discovered the freedom of software contract work and
the joys of driving, fixing and writing about old Land Rovers. He fled Silicon Valley
before the house of cards fell flat and is amused that his six years in Vegas makes him an
old timer. If you have a question for Dr. WoodKnot, please submit
it via the Tech-E-Letter feedback form.
Virus
inoculations
Dear Dr. WoodKnot,
I just don’t get it. Actually, I do get
it – all the time. My computer keeps getting infected with viruses – it’s
plague city at my house. I run an anti-virus program and update it almost every day.
I’m not a computer whiz, but I have helpful friends who are and they can’t
believe how often my computer gets sick. I love the Internet – I can usually find
answers to anything, and I learn fascinating things along the way. What can I do to make
the Internet more highway and less virus jam?
Many wet kisses,
Typo’d Mary
Dr. WoodKnot replies:
Dear Typo,
The Internet can be a hostile place.
It’s not just virus e-mails anymore, what with Web sites pushing both viruses and
spyware plus random probing attacks. Do you have a firewall installed? Firewalls help
detect and block probing attacks. Zonelabs.com
still offers a free one, but the days of effective and free firewalls may be numbered.
Assuming your anti-virus software is
installed correctly and up to date, you should let several days pass before opening
unknown or unexpected attachments. Before you do, make sure you have downloaded the latest
virus profiles. This gives anti-virus companies time to identify new viruses and write and
distribute countermeasures. Also, try to browse only the more reputable Web sites.
What type of computer operating system are
you running? Some flavor of Microsoft Windows? Not only is Windows the largest target,
lots of folks who write viruses really hate Microsoft. If you want to do something
drastic, consider switching to an Apple Macintosh computer or keeping your existing
computer but switching from MS Windows to a version of the Linux operating system.
That’ll get the “kick me” sign off your back. One could say that Macintosh
and Linux are the Canada and Switzerland of the computer world.
I run two cheap computers to access the
Internet. One computer runs Linux and is the one I use to visit new places on the
Internet. If this computer is infected, no big loss, as the most important thing on it is
my browser bookmarks, which I regularly back up. The other computer runs MS Windows, but I
only use it online for e-mail and for regularly accessing a handful of important Web
sites. I archive computer files on an external USB hard drive that is plugged in only when
needed. This not only lowers the odds of my losing them to a virus, but the search times
are much lower when I run my ad-aware
spyware-detecting software. A really nasty spyware program can send your account name
and password or credit card number on the Internet. A good firewall can help here, too.
Yes, it’s a nasty, complicated world out
there. Just washing hands isn’t good enough anymore. In future columns, I’ll
share computer bargain hints and the pros and cons of switching to Linux.
Tightly lipped,
Dr.
WoodKnot
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Questions/Comments: Let the editor know what you think of OWAA’s Tech-E-Letter.
Editorial Guidelines for OWAA’s Tech-E-Letter: OWAA welcomes your submissions of features (500
words or less), tips (150 words or less) and emerging news/links (50 words or less).
E-mail your articles or story ideas to Technology Committee Chair Betty Lou Fegely.
Technology Committee:
Betty Lou Fegely, John
L. Beath, J. Leslie Booth, Carolee Boyles, Mark Chesnut, Richard Day, Susan Day, Laurie Lee Dovey, Mike Fine, Michael
Furtman, Richard Grost,
Adela Grace Jackson, Bob Knopf, Brady W. Kolden, Matt Lindler, Kevin Rhoades, Karen Lee,
Tammy Sapp, Dan Small, Jay Michael Strangis, Mike Walker.
OWAA Staff:
Tech-E-Letter Editor/OU Editor, Katie McKalip
Executive Director, Kevin Rhoades
Member Services Manager, Lisa Draeger
Administrative Assistant, Dawn Biery
Intern, Lucia Stewart
Subscribe a friend to OWAA’s Tech-E-Letter.
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