SRF Heavy Industries

I’m possibly not the right person to be writing e-mail marketing copy tutorials, but here goes:

1) Your promotional e-mail is an intrusion into someone else’s day. All other rules proceed from this one.

2) You get the subject line for free. Make it a summary, like a newspaper headline. If you resort to a clever trick to get someone to open your message AND THERE IS NO PAYOFF, they will resent you and not bother to open anything else from you, ever.

3) Yes, they actually clicked, but that doesn’t give you free reign. You now get MAYBE THREE TERSELY-WRITTEN PARAGRAPHS to get your point across. People are busy, mouse already hovering over the close box. If your point is below the scroll point — and many people are on phones and netbooks these days — consider it missed. If you have more to say, consider your e-mail an article abstract and link to the rest of your message elsewhere.

4) Marketing lingo and managerial buzzwords officially offend. Like bad breath or body odor. Just don’t. If you waste half a sentence with a meaningless phrase that is supposed to raise excitement and positive associations and contains no meaning, you have not only wasted time and space but goodwill from your reader. This communication technology is as dead as punched cards and paper tape. WRITE IN CLEAR, PLAIN ENGLISH.

5) Spurious font changes stop people’s brains from being able to interpret text. Seriously. It turns a stream of text into meaningless shapes. Pick a readable font, a readable color, and stick with it. Bold and italics are awesome if used sparingly. If you’ve used more than three fonts in a page’s worth of text, please shoot yourself so that someone effective can have your job. Also please stop using Comic Sans. Comic Sans gives the impression that anything written in it was actually a supposed joke that was faxed from office to office back in the seventies by automatons for whom ketchup is exciting.

6) Stop it with the inline graphics and attachments. You have no control over how your recipient’s e-mail client is going to handle them and you’re just making your message slow to load. And probably it will look crappy. And shove the meat of your message off the screen. If you must have an attachment, make sure it is small and NECESSARY. If you must present a graphical message, make it a web page and provide a link. If you must have a HUGE attachment, host it on a web site and let people download it at their leisure. The mail client on my phone will TRY ITS BEST to download your attached 23MB Powerpoint presentation with embedded video, but it will fail, and I will hate you.

7) Please include a signature block. For every piece of promotional copy, there should be a HUMAN BEING who is willing to take responsibility for having written and distributed it. More than four lines of contact info is obnoxious, so make it count.

8) MY BIGGEST POINTS WERE MADE IN ITEMS 1-3 because by now you have certainly stopped reading. Get it?

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I understand Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion show on NPR isn’t exactly everyone’s favorite way to blow an hour or two of their weekend. While I can usually get a smile out of it, I will typically leave it up to chance as to whether I catch it.

But.

Embedded in this week’s (usually harmless) Powdermilk Biscuit Break is an extra-special, jaw-dropping message to our friends at Goldman Sachs that just has to be heard to be believed. Feel free to record it off the radio (just like old times!) and help me leave it on the voicemail for as many randomly selected extensions at Goldman Sachs as we can.

Listening info is here, including the link that will be available Monday to listen to it from the archives.

Share and enjoy.

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When you lead off with a link, and that link goes to a couple thousand words of financial system diatribe, you can pretty much guarantee either people aren’t going to click it or, if they do, they aren’t going to come back. I’m taking a gamble, but I believe there’s a good reason to do so:

Matt Taibbi explains via Rolling Stone the scams that will keep our economy — and the world’s — from recovering as long as these people are loose on Wall Street.

If you read that, you really can skip the rest of this post. If you didn’t, here’s the upshot:

Economic recovery has not arrived. At best we are reinflating the bubble despite the huge leak in the balloon. That huge leak is described in the number of scams Wall Street is using to siphon off TARP/bailout funds into individual tailored pockets in very expensive suits.

For instance, the Fed lowers interbank lending rates to 0% to reload banks with liquid money for the purposes of loaning it to small businesses and new mortgages. You’re a bank. You borrow $100 billion. You look around for a good investment worth loaning $100 billion to. You decide to buy Treasury bonds, which pay back at 3.75% interest. Hooray! You borrowed $100 billion from the US Government at 0% interest, loaned it back to them at 3.75% interest, and for a year of doing NOTHING USEFUL with $100 billion, you have earned $3.75 billion in PROFITS, which you may now split between shareholders and distributing as bonuses and blow on coke and whores.

It would have been better for the Fed to have just written a check for $3.75 billion, handed it to Goldman Sachs for coke and whores, and done ANYTHING ELSE with that $100 billion.

And this is the LEAST scammy trick described in the above article.

NOW please go click. Forward the link to your Senators and Representatives. Ask them whether they will be standing between you and Wall Street when things go down or beside you with a pitchfork in their own hands.

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Papa Legba, show me the way to Titanyen

Baron Kriminel kicked the island, shoved the buildings down, slaughtered the children and old people and beautiful people in their prime, for Titanyen is lonely

Baron Cimetière open the gate to Titanyen

Baron Samedi, laugh, Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte welcome all with open arms

Baron La Croix tap friends on shoulder, take coats and hats and show dancers to their places

Maman Brigitte, give everyone their cross

Inside sits Papa Ghede, playing cards with Ghede Bábáco, pick up your spades and dig

Baron Cimitière, hug all the little children and hold them close

Ghede Nibo, sing with the voices of the dead, sing all their names and all the names of all their fathers and mothers, sing as you dig

Baron Cimitière, hug all the grandpas and grandmas and hold them close

Ghede Masaka, tuck your bag in your belt and dig

Baron Cimitière, hug all the mothers and fathers and hold them close

Ghede Oussou, put down your bottle and dig

Baron Cimitière, hug all the brothers and sisters and hold them close

Ghede L’Oraille, straighten your dress and dig

Baron Cimitière, hug my cousin, my aunt, my uncle, hold them close

Ghede Plumaj, dust off your hat and dig

Baron Cimitière, hug my wife, my husband, hold them close

Ghede Ti Malis, wake up your lazy ass and dig

Baron Cimitière, hug all my good friends and hold them close

Ghede Zaranye, dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig

Baron Kriminel kicked the island, knocked the buildings down, slaughtered the children and old people and beautiful people in their prime, for Titanyen is lonely

Baron Samedi laugh, Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte, welcome all with open arms

Baron La Croix, tap friends on shoulder, take coats and hats and show dancers to their places

Maman Brigitte, give everyone their cross

Baron Cimetière, close the gate to Titanyen

Papa Legba, bring me home

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When I sit down to write it’s not exactly as if I intend to write the unreadable. It’s all these levels of abstraction I can’t ignore anymore. An example:

Physics –> Materials –> Voltage switching –> BIOS –> Operating system –> Application –> These words being written & fine-tuned & sent

(and realize this is leaving out a couple to keep things simple)

But then here I am, just sitting here thinking:

Physics –> Molecular chemistry –> Organic Chemistry –> Biological Chemistry –> Cellular abstractions –> Multicellular abstractions –> Organism –> Sensory BIOS –> Consciousness/attention –> Logical & Linguistic abstractions –> Some words in my head

(again it’s not just simple and linear layers, but a network of interlocking abstractions)

It’s not the layers that are the important parts, but the interfaces between layers. Those interfaces allow for abstractions. Abstractions make applications portable. With the right abstraction, any application ought to be able to run on any layer. Yes, even consciousness (and everything above it) on bare-metal condensed matter physics. If we create the necessary abstractions for human sensory input and communication output — write the BIOS, as it were — we should be able to move right in.

Partially, completely, aggregately.

It can go the other direction as well.

… Consciousness/attention –> Logical & Linguistic abstractions –> Communication –> Organizational behavior –> Societal tissue abstractions –> Social organism –> Social sensory BIOS –> Social organism consciousness/attention –> Social organism logical & linguistic abstractions –> … not a new idea, certainly. Really, it’s at least a couple thousand years old, bare minimum. And it’s such a natural progression.

Any application you can think of — and that’s anything that does anything — can be ported from one level of existence to another by the deliberate design and construction of an abstracted interface layer and careful duplication of inputs and outputs.

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“It just hasn’t been an evening out for you unless there was blood dripping from the ceiling, right?”

“Once you’ve broken one physical law of the universe, it’s like the rest just mill about, looking at their feet, wondering which is going to be next.”

“When your only source of reliable information is a giant frog in a space suit that no one else can see, you tend to keep a lot of stuff to yourself.”

“You sank them by dropping an ox a hundred feet onto their boat? AHAHAHAHA!” “Don’t laugh! That ox was like a member of the family!” “Which one? Your wife? HAHAHAHAHA!” “If you must know, Harold, I named him after you! And I thought about you anytime I stuck anything up his arse.“

“What is your fascination with grafting spare tongues into random orifices in the serving girls, anyway? It’s their duty to hold their tongues most of the time, regardless.” “Yes, dear, but it never said where.”

Bonus points if you know my projects well enough to know which lines go with which novels in progress.

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I once read a Richard Bach book.

There’s a confession.

Okay, maybe I read a couple of them. Johnathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah and maybe a couple more.

But the stupid confession is regarding Illusions. And here’s how it goes.

In the book, there’s this thing, basically a magic spell, where the messiah-guy is trying to tell the narrator-guy how to fulfill his own wishes with some kind of New Age visualization technique. It goes like you imagine the thing that you want, surrounded by a brilliant glow, and this will magnetize you to it, and it should come barreling down on you out of the future like a ton of bricks.

I’m not telling you what it is I imagined surrounded by a brilliant glow. I’m just not. But I will tell you that since that day, what has been barreling down on me out of the future like a ton of bricks has been magnets. I must have found literally hundreds of magnets in the twenty years since then. I am magnetized for magnets.

Found another one today. A round one, taped to the inside of the bottom of some box like the type you might get an inexpensive necklace or bracelet in, under a pad of cotton.

Go ahead and laugh now. I know you want to.

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Just in case you’re having trouble telling the difference:

The real test of where you are poverty-wise is whether you can afford to have any rich-people money. There are certainly plenty of barriers to entry — the primary of which is a relatively massive lump of money you can leave lying around without needing to spend it. Here are examples:

• The minimum balance for an interest-bearing checking account
• A savings account with no service charges that would cancel out any interest earned
• A downpayment for a car or a house
• Equity (value above the remaining balance due on your mortgage) in a house or property
• A retirement account
• A trust fund

Many people, if not most, who currently have rich-people money received seed-money in a lump from a family that had enough rich-people money to be able to share some of it — and so far have managed not to squander it. Other owners of rich-people money budgeted for savings accounts and used that money to seed downpayments and minimum balances.

The largest barrier to transitioning from poor-people money to rich-people money is the ability to stop spending it all month-to-month, which is quite possibly the ultimate luxury in the current economy. The difference is really triggered by rich-people vs poor-people cash flow, i.e., the ability to pay all of your existing obligations while still putting at least ten percent of your income into a savings account — or the lack thereof.

There are very few barriers to transitioning to poor-people money from rich-people money. In fact, here are some relatively easy ways to cross the threshold downward:

• Spend or give away all of your rich-people money. (After all, it just seems like its sitting there doing nothing, right?)
• Lose your rich-people money in a financial crisis, like:
• a serious medical emergency that isn’t covered by health insurance
• a sufficiently long spell of unemployment that forces you to spend your reserves
• a crash in house values that makes your house more expensive than the cost of your mortgage (wipes out your equity)
• become a victim of theft or arson (without appropriate insurance)
• be forced to replace some destroyed large appliance, like a refrigerator, hot-water heater, central heat/AC, or a necessary vehicle
• suffer a divorce (with insufficient prenuptial armor)
• bury a loved one (who died without appropriate insurance)
• lose a law suit or have to pay a crippling fine

Given the huge number of ways it is possible to lose all of your rich-people money (if you have any) or be prevented from saving enough poor-people money to use for seed, it would seem that the biggest factor in holding onto rich-people money is good luck. Or the absence of bad luck. Or generous wealthy relatives to lend you money to help with crises. Or enough rich-people cash flow to be able to afford a huge suite of insurance premiums. However, I am routinely informed that it is a skill.

Regardless, I strongly recommend that at the first opportunity you scale back your spending and expenses to be able to afford socking away ten percent of your income into an interest-bearing savings account and put the maximum amount you can afford/legally invest (usually caps out at 15% pre-tax) into a Retirement Account. You may still have to dump it should a crisis occur, but at least you will have a cushion.

That’s all. Thank you for your attention.

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FREE FICTION!

DOWNLOAD AND READ, PRINT AND READ, OR READ ONLINE my 2002 humor/sci-fi piece titled “Nobody Here But Us…” in any of the following ultraconvenient formats:

Rich Text Format (RTF) • Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) • ePub Format (Sony eBook – ePub) • PalmDoc (Palm/Treo – PDB) • MobiPocket (PRC) • Read in a Browser (HTML)

WITH ONE CAVEAT!

Seeing as this is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, please visit my good friend Carole Edrich’s Cyclist-On-Chemo Donation Page for Cyclists Fighting Cancer. You can also follow her progress at @CyclistOnChemo on Twitter.

Chemotherapy is God-awful grueling. Doctors wouldn’t make you go through it if they didn’t think it would improve your quality of life and extend you a few years — or, in the cases of the lucky and early-diagnosed, cure you outright. Cyclists Fighting Cancer are taking an extra step to provide bikes and enablement for families for exercise-based rehabilitation for children undergoing or recovering from cancer treatments.

IF YOU ENJOY MY WRITING and think nearly 10,000 words (~30 pages in a mass-market paperback) of humorous fiction is worth a little kickback, please click the link above and give a little. If you don’t have the money right now, that’s fine, but sometime in the years ahead remember that you owe a dribble of coins to some cancer charity or other on my behalf.

ABOUT THE STORY: What happens if you actually do get contact with extraterrestrial life and can’t make out what the message is supposed to be? The best and the brightest the government has to offer, involved at the highest level, might not quite be good enough. But hell, if the aliens look tasty enough you can always just eat them…. “Nobody Here But Us…” by Laszlo Xalieri, © 2002

LICENSE: Not much of one. All the downloads are DRM-free. You’re entitled to as many copies in as many different formats as you can stomach. Hand them around, to all your friends — I don’t care. Don’t change the words, the title, or the byline, but you can feel free to send me your copy-edits for fixing typos. If you fix little formatting issues or come up with cover or inline illustrations for me to add, send ’em along to me and I’ll post the best as replacements for the versions here. Feel free to re-host or mirror these files elsewhere, but try to stay current as the files get updated AND PLEASE PROVIDE THE ABOVE INFO REGARDING @CyclistOnChemo’s CHARITY OR ELSE THIS EXERCISE IS POINTLESS. It’s probably just best to link back to this blog post at http://bit.ly/X-NHBU-COC and let me play air-traffic-control for versions, bandwidth, and incoming links.

Pass the link to here around to all of your free-fiction-lovin’ cancer-hatin’ friends and thank you kindly: http://bit.ly/X-NHBU-COC

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PS:

Because it’s a bit lost in the text above, here’s the link to Carole’s donation page nekkid: http://www.justgiving.com/Cyclist-On-Chemo/

Thanks again!

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