Jeanniey-

If you owned a restaurant would you want your patrons to tell you when they had a horrible meal? Lemons in fact do make lemonaide and from this outsiders perspective, this whole EEC things has felt more like a mutual admiration society than an organization that represents the interests of the community.

Do with these thoughts what you like but most of us don't like to be talked down to from the committee level. Especially when there's no purpose.

E-Mailer

(note the capital E-M... did you really spend time deciding amongst yourselves the "Right" way to spell this?)

There seems to be something personal going on here between Al and the EEC. Personally I don't feel that your subscribers should be part of this. I surely did not sign up with Click Z or the EEC to receive such e-mails.

Thank you very much for taking the time to write- and... you are correct - we do have opportunities to improve the way the eec works. We always will.
That said, to make inaccurate statements about what the eec has done in order to make a point in a column was not neccesary. Should Al have made specific comments about the work the eec has published or the way members network I don't think the response would hav been the same.

I really hope you are a member of the eec and can get involved with us to make a difference. You sound like you could add some great perspectives.

To your point on the spelling of "email"- yes, we did in fact do a few months of research. If you would like, I'd be happy to send it to you. Just email me and I'll send it along.

What happened to the praise for an industry coming together on any initiative.

I applaud the efforts to date.

Did we go a little over the top with the “calling all cars” APB email? Maybe. But when people who clearly don’t know much about the EEC fling criticism at us, our pride and the pride we have for our extremely dedicated members smarts a bit. As a member-driven organization it’s offensive to hear our accomplishments denigrated so casually. Here are some of those accomplishments:

- Demonstrated the power of email by helping the Ryan Andrew Kaiser Memorial Foundation set up an email program for free—and we’re doing it again with the Women’s Bean Project this year (http://www.emailexperience.org/iniatives_and_standards/current-eec-reality-focus/)

- Raised awareness of the ubiquity and indispensability of email and helped standardize the spelling of the word with our “Hyphens Equal Disrespect” Petition (http://www.emailexperience.org/events/eec-petitions/)

- Boosted awareness of the need for standard metrics, which led to the formation of the Email Measurement Accuracy Coalition by JupiterResearch (http://emacoalition.org/)

- Created and coordinated several Marketing Roundtables, which performed and published original research and provided valuable networking opportunities (http://www.emailexperience.org/iniatives_and_standards/marketing-roundtables/)

- Released dozens of exclusive research reports through our Whitepaper Room, which has served as a library of industry knowledge (http://www.emailexperience.org/Login-Whitepaper-Room/)

- Published hundreds of posts via the Voice of Email blog (http://blog.emailexperience.org/) and RetailEmail.Blogspot (http://retailemail.blogspot.com/)

- Hosted or participated in a number of webinars

- Supported the launch of EmailStatCenter.com, a repository of email marketing stats (http://www.emailstatcenter.com/)

Not good enough for you? Us either. We’ve got much more in the works, and thanks to our merger with the DMA we’ll be able to do it all more quickly.

Have an idea? Want to help solve industry problems? Want to network with other email marketers? Have some great research to share with the community? The EEC can help with all of that and more. We’re open to any and all suggestions.

Al does have a point. The conversation has not moved on in seven years. I am however, regularly asked to speak about deliverability at industry events here in the UK because this topic area scores very highly from conference participants.

I would much prefer to talk about cool strategies for delivering high impact comms strategies with email fully integrated with other marketing channels (not just matching luggage), but many clients are not there yet. Until those building blocks are in place, we cannot have real discussions about these advanced techniques.

That said as email professionals, we need to find the right balance of cutting edge thinking to excite and drive the market forward while maintaining a firm grounding in the practical "boring" basics.

If Al wants to create his own non-profit association based around multi-media, interactive marketing, great! But his harsh criticism of the eec is completely off-base. Thanks to items such as the apparantly outlandish topics of 'deliverability' and 'list growth' I have been able to get my small business started on the very profitable venture, email marketing. Email marketing has afforded us the ability to have personal contact with hundreds of thousands of our customers that we normally would not have access to. Being a 'newbie' I would be lost without the efforts of the eec and the kind of education they generously share. Thank you eec for providing this resource. Please don't leave us 'newbies' in the dust!

Here's what I wrote to Al recently about his article:

"Hi Al,

I've always respected you in the industry and what you've done. I do however disagree strongly with your comments in this article.

"I would have hoped by now -- fully 7 years since I got started in the e-mail communications business -- the conversation and insights we'd be discussing would have gone well beyond guidelines on around issues such as e-mail list growth."

Why? Do you think marketers out there all know about these crucial issues? Many of my clients do not and learn from the EEC papers about them. That lets us get beyond these issues and into more exciting areas like true viral and social networking programs that their email efforts can support.

Don't knock the basics. Ever. That's what I say. The EEC reminds us of these basics and pushes the envelope on them as well. Some things to note the EEC has offered my clients perspective on to improve their business strategies ... whitepapers on retail marketing welcome programs and opt-in strategies, value of an email address file roundtables, and oh yes, eytracking studies and practices to promote creative tactics that work in email.

Thanks EEC. Al - why don't you join and really learn what we stand for?"

My main points are a) if you want to talk about it, join it and contribute, and b) so what if in addition to new issues and roundtables we still focus on the basics that many of the most sophisticated brands still fall short on with email?

I can have sophisticated digital dialogue programs with my top clients precisely because they see the support for simple basics best practices. That was made easier by the EEC's basic topic-tenets. Sure, let's move on and keep the topics fresh, but don't run from the basics because people say they are 'old and tired.' There's plenty of folks out there that don't have any standard ways of measuring their email programs, what hope do they have of generating stable Web 1.0+ digital dialogue platforms?

On behalf of all the hard-working EEC sponsors and members, I was happy to see Al DiGuido apologize for his earlier comments in his ClickZ column today:

“To view that earlier column as an attack on the DMA or EEC misses the point. And I sincerely apologize to anyone who may have misconstrued my comments concerning these groups. These organizations clearly do purposeful work for our industry and provide invaluable tools for their members.”