Twitter was one of the fastest growing social networks of 2008, with 664% growth (!). Our individual Maximum blogs now have a Twitter widget in the sidebar so you can keep up with our frantic pace.

We’ve rolled out some improvements to our blog - hope you like them!

Our initial blog was designed to look like any other page on our site. Good for uniformity, bad for those wanting to read more than one entry at a sitting.

Too, we’ve added smiling mugs to our entries so you can match a face to the wisdom that pours forth. You can also use the “share” button to send an entry to your friends or other social networking sites that you may frequent.

In the summer of 2007, an article appeared in Fast Company which declared that “email is dead.”

Remember when a new email in your inbox was as exciting as the postman dropping off a card from grandma with a $5 bill in it? Those days are over. Now email is a crushing tsunami. The average corporate email account receives 18 MB of mail and attachments each business day, according to the analyst firm Radicati Group; the figure is projected to grow to 28 MB a day by 2011. No wonder there’s a fledgling movement afoot to periodically declare “email bankruptcy”—delete all your saved emails and start over.

I don’t find this to be the case at all, although they make some good points. Yes, email inboxes tend to get overwhelmed. But tell me, if you are one of those who let your inbox get out of hand…what does your desktop look like?  Not your computer desktop, but your actual physical wooden or steel desk. Is it also jammed with stuff that should have been dealt with weeks ago?

With a few techno-organizational adjustments, your inbox can be kept in better shape. My first effort at this involved creating a Gmail account just for work. I had all of my emails automatically copied over to the Gmail account. I thought that this would allow me to archive and more easily search the hundreds of emails I see every month. The problem with this approach is that all that info isn’t available without logging into Gmail, which takes up valuable time.

Now I just rely on my regular email client (Thunderbird) with a dose of steroids in the form of Google Desktop (also available for Mac and Linux). I don’t run the fancy bits which put stuff all over your desktop. All I need is the computer indexing service.

Anytime I need to find an old email or web link, I just tap the CTRL key twice and up pops the Google search box. My emails as well as my browsing history all are instantly available by keyword search.

This is an issue that our clients bring up all the time. How can you make sure that your marketing e-mails reach their intended recipients? The quick answer is: you can’t. All one can do is to follow some simple guidelines that will increase the chances of successful delivery.

1. Use descriptive and engaging subject lines; don’t use “spammy” words!
2. Use a good “from” e-mail address, not a commercial sounding one like “info@abc.com” or “sales@abc.com”
3. Don’t send one big graphic as the e-mail, even if the graphic shows a lot of good text. Use as much real text as possible while avoiding the words mentioned in item #1.
4. Ask that your customers add your “from” e-mail address to their address books.

Your customers can throw up an intimidating gauntlet (sometimes quite unintentionally) with several layers of spam filtering and there is no sure way to bypass them. After all, you have no way of knowing which filters might be in place and the “bypass” rules for each filter. But using the tactics listed here will increase the likelihood that your message will be seen.