• 65% of people like offers on their mobile phones

• 83% would prefer to receive no more than two offers per month

• 75% of smartphone users prefer receiving offers via SMS

Even with market penetration of smartphones reaching 50%, consumers still prefer opt-in marketing offers through SMS instead of viewing push ads through mobile websites or apps. Keeping the offers limited, no more than two per month will keep redemption rates high. SMS marketing redemption rates average 20% across all business categories. This is due to the limited frequency of messages being received, time limited redemption window and consumers must give permission to the business to receive the offers.

Mobile phones and personal computers have many differences. Mobile sites must be set on W3C. Tables in the layout are dangerous for mobile websites. UTF-8 is the character encoding to use and XML or XHTML coding. Mobiles phones differ in terms of screen size too. 20 kilobytes are the maximum size of a mobile website. The top of the page should include important information about the business. These are some tips to develop the right mobile compatible website for your business.

• 1. Customers should find the same products in the mobile version of your website that you have on the parent site. Quality photos and specifications of the products should be in the mobile site too. The mobile version of your website can be more efficient than its parent site.
• 2. The mobile site and the web site should have the same design. Please keep in mind the small screen of the mobile phones.
• 3. The checkout process must be hassle free and smooth. It is not necessary to make the registration compulsory.
• 4. Users should be able to find what they need quickly. They should buy without problems. Mobiles phones might have problems with connection quality, so the mobile website should have the right features to deal with this situation.
• 5. The easiest way to promote your mobile compatible website is to redirect your user automatically to it.

• “Should I join Facebook, too?
• Why should I advertise on Facebook?
• What can I gain from it?”

Don’t worry. Many other companies who haven’t joined the Facebook bandwagon are having the same thoughts. But whether you’re zeroing in on the local market or want to go international, Facebook is a good place to start advertising your brand. Here’s why:

It’s a growing social network. One reason why you should advertise on Facebook is you get access to more than five hundred million active users. These are people who log onto the network every day and interact with their friends, click ads, and play online games. All it takes is to get through to a portion of these users. Once a number of Facebook users hear about your brand and like it, their friends—hundreds of them (each Facebook user has at least 130 contacts)—are sure to know about it.

You reach a large group of people with purchasing power. Another reason why you should advertise on Facebook is that you can get your brand seen by people who have the capacity to buy. Facebook is not just for teenagers. Some of the social network’s leading users are between 26 to 34 years old, people who are working and have the money to spend.
Facebook lets you connect directly with your customers. Still another reason why you should advertise on Facebook is that you get to be up close and personal with the people who like your brand—people who may have bought from your company or heard of it. These are people who already know you—and they’re telling their friends, too! Unlike traditional advertising in which you get your brand in front of thousands of people, many of whom you’re not sure are even interested in your products, Facebook lets you reach only those people interested in your brand. This happens with the Like button. When people “like” your brand on Facebook, your ad goes on their walls and their friends see it.

It doesn’t cost you much. You don’t have to spend much on ads. That’s another reason why you should advertise on Facebook. You can start with a simple fan page and gather your fans—your customers or people who like your brand—and announce new offers, sales, and other promotions.

Get through your target audience. Another reason why it’s so much easier to advertise on Facebook is that the social network enables you to present your ads to users from a specific state or city. Obviously, there’s no point in advertising to people who do not have access to your brand or live in a different country or state and aren’t your actual market. By reaching out only to potential customers, it’s so much easier to close a sale.

It’s versatile. Another reason why it pays to advertise on Facebook is because it gives you so many ways to promote your brand. Aside from the usual fan pages, you can do a poll, invite people to an event, get people to sample your products, hold a contest, and upload a video ad. Sky’s the limit!

With all the advantages that Facebook brings, why are you still stuck on traditional advertising? If you haven’t gotten on Facebook yet, do it now. Don’t let your brand be left behind!

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We often get the question: “How do I know if my company is on a SPAM Blacklist?” Followed by “If my company is on a SPAM blacklist, how the heck do we get unlisted?

There are several hundred SPAM blacklists but luckily, there are a few tools that can help you check most of them quickly. We’ve included here a handy reference with the sites that you can use to check your blacklist status. We’ve also highlighted one or two of the more prominent SPAM blacklists.

What you need to know to check Blacklist status

Most SPAM blacklists track the reputation of the email servers that are being used to send outgoing email for your domain, so to get started – you’ll need to know the IP address of the email servers sending emails for your company. If your company uses its own servers to send email campaigns, you’ll need top know the IP addresses of those servers. If your company is sending email campaigns via an Email Service provider (“ESP”) then you’ll need to know the IP addresses of their servers or specifically – what IP addresses are being used for your domain (if you have a dedicated IP address as part of your service).

Some SPAM blacklists track more than IP’s – they also track domains, URL’s and a few even create a unique ‘hash code’ based on the content of the email. If their systems see more than a few dozen emails with an identical code – meaning dozens (or more) of identical emails, they’ll list the specific email content as SPAM.

Here are 3 sites where you can check multiple public blacklists if you know your servers IP address(es):

• http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. MXToolbox is free. Enter the email service IP addresses and mxtoolbox checks about 100 blacklists.
• www.dnsstuff.com. DNSStuff is an inexpensive (almost free) service where you can check 97 blacklists. Includes other DNS and network tools too.
• http://www.dnsbl.info. (Domain Name System Blacklist). Free service. Checks about 80 blacklists.

A Few blacklists deserve “special mention”

Spamhaus.org. (www.spamhaus.org)

One of the most widely used blacklists, SPAMHaus.org’s mission is to rid the world of unsolicited commercial email (“UCE”) by creating and monitoring a network of millions  of  ‘spam honeypot‘ email addresses. These are email addresses that are expired, or that never were ‘real’ recipients that Spamhaus acquires from ISP’s. They re-purpose expired domains and rumor has it  - also plant addresses on various websites around Etherspace.  Since these are not ‘real people’ – the addresses should never end up on an opt-in list, so if you send an email campaign and it ends up in one of Spamhaus’ inboxes – clearly your list development practices are not cool.  [Note: Some list vendors develop emails lists - albeit illegally - by scraping websites for email addresses.  This is why you should never us these lists].

Spamhaus then adds the sending email servers to their blacklists. Overall it’s a pretty good system but not flawless in our experience. For example, if you are capturing registrant information from your website or from online events, an ill-willed smart-alec can enter a bogus / honeypot address into your list. Your well intentioned campaign gets caught and viola – you are on Spamahaus’ [s]hit list.  Solution: Always use double opt-in processing (most email services providers like Pinpointe provide mechanisms to enforce double opt-in when using their forms to collect subscribers).

UCEProtect(http://www.uceprotect.net/en/rblcheck.php)

UCE Protect deserves mention because its one of the few major SPAM blacklists where you can blacklisted because of something someone else did.  UCEProtect monitors and tracks the SPAM reputation of individual email server IP addresses, and factors in the reputation of other servers in the same network as well as servers hosted by the same ISP. UCEProtect’s ‘guilt by association’ approach means your servers can be blacklisted if your ISP hosts other systems that are caught for SPAMMing.

Here’s an example. Your company’s servers are hosted with ‘hosting-company.com’ (we made that up just on case you weren’t sure). Now, assume ‘hosting-company.com’ hosts hundreds of thousands of companies and has 30,000 IP’s under management, including your one, lonely email server. One day, a SPAMMER who is a customer of ‘hosting-company.com’ sends a few email campaigns that are UCEPRotect flags as SPAM. UCEProtect flags the offending IP, but it also flags the adjacent IPs within the same network. If there are enough SPAM complaints from adjacent IPs, the complaints ‘escalate’ and can cause an entire network block or even an entire ISP’s address block to be blacklisted.

UCEProtect’s logic (along with some very valid and convincing data) is that – ISPs who host one or two SPAMMERS probably host dozens or hundreds of spammers.

SORBS.  (http://www.sorbs.net.)

SORBS is one of the more difficult blacklists, and it it based on hitting SPAMtraps (aka SPAM Honeypots.)   An email server’s IP address, sending domain and any URLs that are embedded within an email campaign can get added to the SORBs blacklist and will not be removed for a long time (if ever) unless you specifically request removal.  SORBS requires a ‘donation’ of $50.00 per incident to be removed.

Uribl.com (www.uribl.com)

URIBL uses ‘SPAM honeypots’ – just like Spamhaus.org does. The difference (we believe) is that URIBL will keep the URL (or domain or sending email address) of the offending domain on their list for an undefined time — until any (offending) traffic stops and you clear your domain with URIBL by confirming that the offending problem has been fixed.

Microsoft Frontbridge (88.blacklist.zap – not a website)

If you find your emails are getting blocked by recipients who are using Outlook, then you may want to review your MTA logs (email server logs) for references to 88.blacklist.zap.  That’s Microsoft’s internal Frontbridge SPAM filter service that is used to protect aanyone using Outlook, and who has their email configured to use Microsoft’s spam filtering service (which is free).   If you have stumbled onto Microsoft’s blacklist Your email server log will include an entry such as “550 Service Unavailable; host [xx.xx.xx.xx] blocked using 88.blacklist.zap.  Please forward this message to delist@frontbridge.com.  Response time is within 24 hours.

Enterprise Firewall SPAM Blacklists

Companies that make SPAM firewalls each maintain their own network of systems that share SPAM information. All of them track results based on IP address; several also track history based on URLS within emails, the sending domain and sending email addresses. The most common Enterprise SPAM firewall companies and their respective SPAM databases are summarized here:

–

UPDATE: More Blacklists to Check

Here’s how to check if you are being blocked at several major newtworks:

Roadrunner:  (http://postmaster.rr.com/amIBlockedByRR)

An excellent blacklist check and removal tool for the Roadrunner (Microsoft broadband) network.  The Roadrunner check is very useful because it checks and reports on RoadRunner’s internal blacklist as well as Cloudmark, ReturnPath, SPAMHaus and more.

www.valli.org:  (http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/)

Another excellent and comprehensive blacklist check tool we recently ran across – this one checks 120+ blacklists.  Note that valli.org is not a blacklist – it is an aggregate checker – i.e., don’t send removal requests to them directly.

Surriel:  (http://psbl.surriel.com/listing)

Surriel maintains their own private passive blacklist here.

Facebook has reached  the 5 million mark in Holland and has grown with 1.1166.340 members a month.

A good moment to have a look at  some figures and facts

Hyves  seems bigger at the moment with  9.7  million Dutch users users , but the activity  on this social network is dwindling. At some point this social network had the most reach in Holland but Facebook is winning this  battle. In fact Facebook is the  one of the most visited website in Holland.

It won´t surprise you to know that  Google is number  #1.

1. YouTube is no # 3
2. LinkedIn  is no # 6
3. Twitter is no # 8
4. Hyvers is no # 10{ resource Alexa}

At the moment we have 5.002.180 Facebook users in Holland. That puts Holland on the 26th  place of all the  Countries Facebook statistics. The statistics also show that the penetration from Facebook in Holland is  29,80 %, in comparison with the population, and 33,63% in comparison with the Internet users in Holland. Looking at this score we do  a little better than Jordan. About half of the users are using a mobile device such as an IPhone or android

The  man/woman ratio is nearly the same: 49 % vs 51%. The largest age group and also the fastest growing is  at the moment the 24 to 34 years old with a total  of 1.200.523 users. Next is the age group  the 18 to 24 years old{  resource  Socialbakers]

The top 5 places in Holland where mobile aps are used via Facebook Places

• Amsterdam Airport Schiphol 90.085 check-ins
• Red Light District – Amsterdam 13.325 check-ins
• Central Station, Amsterdam 6.798 check-ins
• KLM Crown Lounge 6.037 check-ins
• Dam square 5.874 check-in

The Top Dutch brands on Facebook are:

• KLM 264 405
• Sensation 237 654
• Networking4all 100 500
• Uit met korting.nl 94 226
• Hi 84 515

Interesting fact about the Dutch user (2011):

• The Dutch user logs 27 times a month h into Facebook. Of these people 50% log in daily.
• 77% of the users logs in weekly
• 33 % of all active users are using  a mobile device to log into Facebook
• The people who use mobile devices are twice as active as the people who use a desktop.
• The average users  is a member  to 80 community pages, groups or events.
• 90 status updates are placed per month.
• The average time spend on Facebook is around 55 minutes per month

Facebook Growth worldwide.

• December 2004: 1 million
• December 2005: 5,5 million
• December 2006: 12 million
• October 2007: 50 million
• Augustus 2008: 100 million
• January 2009: 150 million
• December 2009: 350 million
• December 2010: 600 million
• January 2011: 650 million
• Juli 2011:750 million

resource used: http://www.recruitingroundtable.nl