I have been under the rock of launching a new Podcast for and about San Francisco. MosaicSF launches next Monday.

MosaicSF is the cornerstone of our SF agency marketing program. I will talk more about this next week.

In the meantime, check out our placeholder site.

If you are like me, you may be wondering about the health of email marketing. Email, once the golden boy of Internet marketing, has taken a bit of a hit in recent months with what seems like ever more spam, more powerful spam blockers that even block wanted mail, lower open rates and consumer email fatigue.

Well, the good news is that email marketing is still going strong and remains a powerful tool to help you acquire new customers and retain existing fans. One just has to do it right. This week’s interview with Dylan Boyd, VP of Sales and Strategy for Portland’s powerhouse email marketing company eRoi, helps us better understand email marketing and what the best practices are. The interview answers some key FAQ’s including words of wisdom on delivery and click through rates, how to create effective subject lines, plain text vs. HTML and the fine art of personalization and relevancy.

In the interview, Dylan points us to a great viral marketing program by Career Builder called Monk E Mail that includes a brilliant use of email. As Dylan points out, this campaign makes you want to send Monk E Mail to all of your friends. That’s the way to do viral folks.

If you want to learn more about email, and lets face it who doesn’t, head over to eRoi’s great list of email marketing resources.

This Podcast is 28 minutes.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcast [28:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

And I thought that there weren’t any more new ideas!

Don’t forget to play the demo.

So I open my March 20^th issue of ADWEEK to see if there is something useful in it. OK, what I am really looking to see if they listened to me and mentioned my Podcast interview with Michael Keeshan. Hmmmm, I had thought that actually having a 60 minute interview with a real live major league search consultant might be of interest to the thousands of agency folks that live and die by what these consultants do for a living. Of course, I was wrong (but, not surprised.)

So, what did I find that was very useful in this issue? Well, I find a feature called “Search Campaign 101” on page 21 that starts out by saying:

“For those in the advertising business who haven’t run an online search campaign – and this is most of the industry – here’s a quick guide for how to go about it.”

Huh, most people in advertising have not played with Google’s AdWords or Yahoo!’s sponsored search??? Is this true? Are most advertising people that lazy and lacking in curiosity? Google has a market cap of $108 Billion precisely from devising a new way for the world to advertise. You’d think that every ad agency person would have played with Google AdWords by now – right? No wonder so many clients are wary of their agency’s gray matter.

So I wake up and wonder why I am not getting more comments. I think that my Blog and Podcast are doomed.

But wait….

Then I go to my stats and I see that I am getting an average of 109 new Podcast feed subscribers per day - after only 7 weekly shows. If I trend this out, that’s over 35,000 subscribers by the end of Year One! Hey, this is rather positive and a decent indicator of the power of Podcasting. Now, my Podcasts are fairly targeted (like, just how many marketers are out there?) so imagine the potential a strong marketing Podcast from Toyota on car maintenance, or a show from Post Cereals on nutrition, or…. A design show from Apple. Or a show on San Francisco from Microsoft (yes, we are soon to be pitching MosaicSF). You get the idea.

By the way, if you want to get out ahead of Podcasting as a marketing strategy, remember that I am speaking in Boston on April 28 -29 at the Boston University Podcasting Academy.