I don’t mind shameless promos of things I really love. And, I love Meetup. I’ve been using them for about six months now and have been really happy with how they continue to improve the service, the site and the offerings to meet the needs of their users.

Those cats know who they are, how to promote and when to communicate. Today I received an email with this copy that proves to me that they are growing up quite nicely:

Here at Meetup HQ we always want to help people get offline and attending your Meetups. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone realized that when you meet real people face-to-face, amazing things can happen? We think so! So we made a video.

With so many people these days plugged into their cell phones, email, and online social networks, it seems like only an intervention will help get them offline! We all probably know someone like this.

Check out unplugyourfriends.com and send an intervention to anyone you know who may need an “unplugging” of their own!

-The team at Meetup HQ

Watch the video. It’s really well done. And it only takes a few secs to fill out the funny form and send it along to someone you know. With this one little promo, Meetup has:

1) Gotten my attention by tapping into a cultural pain point: we all know someone who could use a breather from updating their status on Facebook or Twitter (okay, that someone is usually me but, whatever!).

2) Created something fun and interactive that is directly in line with their positioning: Meetup is your online answer to connecting with like-minded people in offline ways.

It’s so refreshing when an ecomm company uses common sense marketing to create something clever and effective! Go Meetup, go.

7) Create Auto-responders. For most of us, email activity takes precedence over web surfing. If your clients order from you online or interact with your website, keep them engaged by delivering an automatic (but personalized) email two days later and then maybe a different message five days later. Content could be a quick “you might also like” tip or recommendation that showcases your expertise.

6) Bring Community to the Community. If you’re going to have an active blog with news and updates, invest in the programming required to alert visitors by email of new posts or add RSS for feed aggregation. Your visitors will be the first to drop conversation by not returning to your blog. It’s up to you to ensure the dialog continues.

5) Tap Into Timing. What is happening with your customers? If you are B2B, send a product or service update that relates to easing their current woes such as cutting costs or getting through the busy season with sanity. If you are B2C, pay close attention to the trends, reports and studies released that reflect your customer’s demographics. Use the information to spark conversations by sending short-paragraph emails that connect your business to trends. Be sure measurements are in place to track results.

4) Understand New Media Before You Implement It. Pay-per-click ad campaigns (i.e. Google Adwords) is not at all like a static print ad that is bought, created and left alone to do its job. PPC, text message ad campaigns or even investing in the creation of Podcasts or a video series require continual testing and measuring to ensure true effectiveness. Just like your website, hire technical and marketing experts to create, implement and measure campaigns.

3) Use Face-to-face to Jump Start Your E-teraction. If you’re attending a trade show or networking event, use that business card as a temporary pocket database. Take notes on your conversation that include trends discussed, publications mentioned, competitors or anything that will continue your conversation when you’re back at your desk. Always transfer those notes to your electronic CRM or Excel file or wherever you keep tabs on your clients.

2) Understand the Dynamics of Online and Offline. If you’re going to use direct mail (letter, postcard or other) to promote an online special, don’t dump visitors to your home page. Use a very short dedicated URL that allows customers to input a coupon code or information into a form that takes less than 30 seconds. Long URLs will be ignored and if customers have to dig for a promotion, they’ll go somewhere else.

1) Fix Bad Usability. If your analytics tool tell you that 13% of online visitors are dropping off at Step 4 of your sign-up process, find out why and fix it. That number may seem small now but will continue to climb. Set up an automatically generated email that is initiated when a drop occurs. Make sure the email is personalized with the visitor’s name, lists the correct contact in the signature and can be easily replied to. Customers that walk into a store and have a bad experience that is not resolved don’t go back. The online experience is no different.

When emailing, always adhere to legitimate practices. Require confirmation at sign-up, don’t spam, write relevant subject lines and always provide your business address. Those big brother search engines are watching your every move.

If you have other ideas for improving the e-experience, we’d love to hear them.

Yesterday I attended a Hasbro vendor fair at their Pawtucket, Rhode Island headquarters. If you think hanging out all day at the birthplace of Mr. Potato Head is all candy canes, pumpkin pie and green apple licorice . . . Yahtzee! You’re right.

The purpose of the fair is to connect freelancers (writers like me, product and package designers, molders, illustrators, photographers, etc.) with in-house Hasbroites. I have been doing some work with excellent copywriter Kara Parlin at the East Longmeadow, Mass. location and was really psyched to attend this one-day only event. I invited my graphic design co-hort, Amanda Bedard of Spielman Design. Amanda does incredible work and she’s a networking hound like me so it was a perfect fit.

First things first, I need to give some major props to our organizer, Susan Algeo. Susan has more energy than Spiderman on speed and could give lessons on how to keep an event ticking while dealing with 800 interruptions, competition with the buzz of daily life at headquarters and a four-hour window to ensure a productive day for 50+ folks who have traveled as far as Portland, Oregon. At one point, I caught Susan attempting to fill up a plate for lunch and told her that I had a question for her when she was done. Nonsense! We chatted while she tried to eat and then, of course, also took care of a few more interruptions along the way. Along with a catalog of all vendors, a fab hot lunch, an afternoon snack of kettle corn, access to the discounted Hasbro boutique (Christmas for my nephew is done!), we also received either Scrabble or Yahtzee! as a parting gift. It was better than spending the day in Candy Land.

Talking with the Hasbroites was really refreshing. These people love what they do. I talked with copywriter Danielle Slawsby who has great war stories from the dotcom days and is working on some cool web stuff for Hasbro, Joanna Kalafarski who manages packaging and product copy and was kind enough to let me bend her ear while I could tell she was swamped with work, Art Director Kathleen Murray who apparently loves pop culture more than me (although I think it might be a tie) and Design Director Melissa Mips who began with Hasbro at the East Longmeadow branch and seems to know just about everyone in Hasbro’s extensive network of past and current employees. I also met tons of designers like a kid (I think he was older than 12 but I’ll still call him a kid) who designs GI Joe and a guy who’s worked on Play-Doh for ions.

Equally cool was hanging with the other vendors. Here’s a list of my favs:

Fuszion - Killer design company located in Virginia. Rick and Jeff let me babble on about branding and marketing so I loved them even more. How can you go wrong with a name like Fuszion? These guys have awesome years ahead of them.

Smith Design - Mr. and Mrs. Smith are green-concerned packaging and product designers out of New Jersey. Their daughter Jenna, an ex-Silicon Valley girl, represented the fam and did a great job of showcasing their excellent work.

Gary Leveille, Berkshire Creative - Gary is a fellow writer who has quite an extensive list of experience in the biz. He had some great writer-to-writer advice for me which I will keep to myself.

Smartshape Design - Did you know Cleveland is really just an old ‘burb of Connecticut? These guys did - they know everything! Smartshape are innovative engineers who can also hook clients up with tooling and manufacturing. Smart.

Gary & Maggie Houston, A Printer’s Film Service, inc. - Gary and Maggie are a husband and wife duo who met in Providence, RI and worked for Hasbro “back in the day” and now live in North Carolina. Spunk doesn’t begin to describe them.

Philip Hatter, Thistledown Puppets - You have not seen puppets until you’ve met Philip and his puppet posse. His work is incredible and his love for puppet theater really shows in his designs. I kept meaning to ask him why he went with the name Thistledown versus a play on Mad Hatter. For another day.

Pumpkin Pie - Jennifer and Sheridan specialize in branding, logos and package design. They practice what they preach and have done some of the best branding for their own company that I’ve seen in a long time.

Adam Gillespie, Night Light Graphics - Adam is an extremely talented illustrator and graphic designer of cool other worlds. He has a very bright future ahead of him.

Floating Pear Productions - Digital animation experts, Floating Pear were our neighbors and Hasbro’s too since they are based out of Providence, RI. Co-founder Dee Boyd’s bubbly personality and their cool mug give-aways kept the traffic flowing our way. Thanks Dee!

And last but absolutely not least . . .

The Linnett Sisters - A long-forgotten ’50s pop band? Nope. Two creative New Hampshire gals, Katie and Patti, daughters of illustrator Charles Linnett (also an ex-Hasbroite) and owners of Linnett Studios. The Linnett Sisters are talented illustrators and innovative package and product designers.

All in all a great networking event. I’m sure Susan will be looking for feedback on how to make the day better and I really only have one suggestion:

The Catalog - The catalog of vendors was not distributed to Hasbroites unless they strolled down to the event. I would flip this entirely. Why not offer up an electronic catalog teaser to those groups (Design, Creative, etc.) one week ahead of time? In the teaser, I would allow the vendors a quick promo paragraph and also a chance for them to say which Hasbro projects (or types of projects) they’d like to work on.

Life gets in the way - meetings, sick days, unexpected work issues - if someone isn’t able to meet with the vendors on the day we’re there or from the 10-2 time frame, it’s possible that Hasbro staff might want to meet with vendors before or after the event. I say promote the folks who are traveling to Pawtucket, RI as much as possible. There was a lot of talent hanging out in that Hasbro hallway. Keeping us a secret is like telling kids about this great movie where funky fighting, car-morphing machines attempt to destroy the world versus showing them this.

Either way, I’ll be back again next year. To those vendors who declined to attend because they considered it a Trivial Pursuit: you’ll be Sorry! next year if you Boggle an opportunity to Connect Four hours with folks that could move you along in The Game of Life. And let’s not forget the kettle corn. That’s worth the trip to Pawtucket alone.

Understand that online marketing is both science and art. Here are some specific points of interest for all businesses, whether you are high e-commerce or a brick-and-mortar that needs online presence:

Start Conversations
What type of email is opened the most – newsletters, promotions, ads? None of the above. Emails with the highest open rate are transactional. Confirming sign-ups, receipts for purchase and delivering passwords are considered transactional. While you have these eyeballs at the ready, why not promote something and get them engaged further?

No Dumping
Once you start a conversation, keep it going. If you are going to send people to your website from a direct mail piece or advertising, make sure they find themselves on a landing page or can easily continue the conversation you started. Don’t make them work for something that should be instantly gratifying. If you want to capture their information before they can get what you promised, get their name and email. Later on you can build more information on them.

Connect With Opt-ins Only
The more you send out emails that get hard-bounced, get put on black lists or avoid protocol (such as neglecting to put your company name in the “from” line or not using a dedicated URL in a campaign delivered by a sales management platform), the more you will be seen as less legit by search engines.

Some great resources for email and web marketing include:

Tamara Gielen – I met Tamara at a conference in Miami - she has great info on the latest in email and marketing trends on her blog, Be Relevant! at: http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com

TheEmailWars.com – eROI is a company that is focused on email marketing and this blog is the better of their four. It showcases best and worst examples of email campaigns and creatives.

Jakob Nielsen – the king of online usability, has a great article on “writing articles not blogs”: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html

Bazaarblog – Produced by a marketing firm, this blog has some great info on word-of-mouth strategies, ecommerce strategies and marketing.