I make no apologies for being an openly obsessed basketball fan. So believe me when I tell you how truly excited I am that NBA TV is doing something I’ve wanted to see for years: allowing fans to choose which game they want to be nationally televised each week on NBA TV.

Fans can easily vote for the game they want to see on NBA.com’s Fan Night page. Each Tuesday NBA TV will air the game that fans have selected, with the notion that more fans will tune in for the most popular matchup. I love this because it eliminates the problem that networks often face when a popular team suddenly has a terrible season. Last year, for example, the Miami Heat’s best player was injured and they traded away Shaquille O’Neal, making them the worst team in the league — but because the TV schedule was created 6 months earlier, the Heat appeared on national television multiple times late in the season, during what would otherwise have been prime viewing hours.

It seems like the NBA has learned something from the online world: our customers have preferences. If we listen and respond to them with relevant and timely content, viewership will increase. And hey, maybe advertisers will like that too!

At the beginning of 2008, I had a number of people ask me the same anxiety-riddled question: are Facebook and MySpace going to kill email?

My response then is the same as it is now: email is fine, the kids are alright, and we can all play in the same sandbox together.

My impression at the time was that many industry veterans seemed genuinely freaked out by the fact that their own kids were now using these new and different forms of communication a lot more than email. And truth be told, the meteoric rise of social networks, particularly among young people, was (and remains) worth noting, learning about, and venturing into for some businesses. But social networks’ relationship with email is less about “this or that” as it is about “this and that” — the two channels are not competing with one another so much as coexisting peacefully within one online ecosystem.

One easy way to understand this coexistence is to take a look at clickstream data from this past week (ending 10/4/08), provided by our friends at Hitwise:

The above data shows that nearly 15% of all social networking site traffic is currently coming directly from email accounts like Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live/Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL Mail (These are 4 of the top 13 sites visited immediately before social networks).

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As marketers, we all know the importance of segmenting our customers based on their key demographics, behaviors, attitudes, and affinities. But exactly who are these anonymous people we bucket into groups of hundreds, thousands, or even millions?

To help shed some light on what your customers look like and how they act, we proudly present “Know Your Personas,” a regular feature highlighting key customer groups to consider in your marketing strategy. This data appears courtesy of our friends at Experian Consumer Research, the home of Simmons.

The Multi-Channel Shopper is defined as ‘someone who shops and buys in more than one retail channel – online, catalogs, in-store, mail, phone.’ For this episode of Know Your Personas, we’re exploring what makes up today’s multi-channel shopper – specifically who these important consumers are, where they shop, and their attitudes about shopping to help you reach them more effectively.

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The Federal Trade Commission scored a major victory yesterday in shutting down HerbalKing, one of the most prolific spam groups on the Internet.

This is obviously a big boost for legitimate email marketers around the world. No one likes receiving spam, yet it constitutes an estimated 90% of all sent email. Many spam operations have been prosecuted by the FTC in the past, but HerbalKing is “perhaps the most extensive they had ever encountered, with ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States.”

To give you an idea of just how big HerbalKing’s operation was, consider this: they could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day. That means that HerbalKing sent more messages in a few days than legitimate, permission-based email marketers sent during all of last year.

Every few weeks, we saddle up with our team of email marketing experts to check the pulse of the industry. This week, we are joined by Yvette Mitchell, who oversees a number of high profile email marketing accounts in the retail, financial/credit, and consumer packaged goods industries.

The financial fallout caused by the sub-prime mortgage market is on everybody’s mind these days. With high gas and energy prices adding more hardship to consumers this holiday season, what tactics have you seen retailers implementing to meet their holiday numbers?

Yvette: Well, many retailers were smart in the months leading up to their holiday planning — they saw a clear path to cutting costs by reducing wasteful print dollars. With printing costs on the rise, a number of retailers got ahead of the game by sending fewer print catalogs in the spring and summer months. Other retailers reduced their catalog mailing list size by incorporating ‘catalog preference’ options in their online preference centers so that only interested customers would receive them. 

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Given that no one in Boston seemed to be working today due to the combination of Columbus Day and afternoon playoff baseball (ok, really just the baseball), this article in New York Magazine seemed all-too-appropriate.

Amazingly, it seems that many in the political sphere believe a baseball statistician — not a seasoned political pollster – might be the best candidate to successfully predict the outcome of the upcoming election.

The article doesn’t have too much to do with email directly, but it certainly reinforces the notion that there’s a treasure trove of value in your data, whether it’s used for predicting votes will be cast, who will win the World Series, or how many airplane tickets you will sell to a new market. Most interestingly, the article also gives marketers motivation to try new statistical methods for predicting customer behavior based on Nate Silver’s common-sense, out-of-the-box method:

Every other pundit, though, was doing what they’ve always done, i.e., following the polls. Silver decided to ignore the polls. Instead, he used this observation about demographics to create a model that took voting patterns from previous primaries and applied them to upcoming contests. No phone calls, no sample sizes, no guesswork. His crucial assumption, of course, was that each demographic group would vote in the same way, in the same percentages, as they had in other states in the past.

Like many of the so-called Moneyball breakthroughs in baseball, this was both a fairly intuitive conclusion and a radical break from conventional thinking…But his hunch about demographics proved correct: It’s how he called the Indiana and North Carolina results so accurately when the polls got them so wrong.

Yesterday I stumbled upon this post by Jay Seaton at the Mobile Messaging 2 blog, which covers a topic we all could learn something from: “Tips for (Responsible) Texting.”

There are a couple of real gems in there worth considering, including this one:

Remember that “Text Language” is for texting only! Sure when you’re limited to a few characters it makes sense to abbreviate and use acronyms; it’s a part of texting culture. But don’t forget Grandma won’t understand it when you respond to her joke with LOL.

The same could easily be said of making sure your email copy is understandable to your whole audience if your list covers a wide range of demographics. After all, you don’t want to alienate certain edges of your customer base by talking too much about, say, your memories of the William Taft presidency when most of them are concerned with the latest episode of Hannah Montana.