Often downloading these things requires registration, and some level of profile information: an email address, a phone number, a corporate address, etc. (Optaros often does this as well, and I can’t tell you how many times luke_skywalker@rebel_alliance.org or similar has registered to download whitepapers – but I generally use my real email address. I like to follow rules.)

Recently I got this email, presumably in reference or followup from one of those downloads:

From: Sales Person
Subject: BigCo

It has come to my attention that you requested some information from BigCo. Please let me know if I can be of assistance.

Take care
Firstname Lastname
sales@BigCo.com

I’ve removed the names not to protect the innocent but because I want to make a general point, not a company specific one.

Taking registration information is fine (though perhaps after the initial fervor dies down you might take down the registration wall and set the content free) but please:

• Be clear about what you’ll do with that info, and more importantly what you won’t do with it
• Give me an option to be contacted. I may not immediately want someone to follow up, or I might – but it should be my choice not yours.
• If you are going to follow up via email, don’t make the prospect feel like they just got caught stealing wifi, or some other bad behavior. “We see what you have done, and we are not amused!“

Publishing thought leadership is a wonderful inbound marketing technique, and gathering registrations can help you understand the audience you’re reaching. Just make sure the follow up is appropriate, on message, and preferably at the option of the receiver.

The focus was quite technical – not sure if the “suits” in the room (there aren’t normally many at a BostonPHP meeting, but there were a few this time) really expected such a deep dive – and made you appreciate the herculean effort it takes to mount a sustained campaign like that one.

You can listen to the podcast version of the presentation, see some photos and check out Elena’s notes – she managed to capture the great majority of the details they shared.

Forgotten Attachment Detector

(This is a feature on Gmail Labs, which you’ll find under the settings label in Gmail)

The use case is so simple. The user writes “Attached you’ll find” or “in the attached” or something like that – basically anywhere they use the word “attached” – if there is no attachment, ask the user if that’s ok.

The number of times you say “attached” and don’t mean to attach a file is presumably outweighed by the number of times you mean to attach a file but hit send before you attach it.

How can I get this in Apple Mail or (sigh of the reluctant user) Entourage to do this?

Tripit’s mechanism for adding trips is superior. The ability to simply forward (or even set an automatic rule to forward) confirmation emails is a major step forward . . . Where TripIt seems better at pulling data in, Dopplr seems to be better so far at pushing their data out, or letting people pull it into other contexts.

Well, now Dopplr’s gone and added some new import mechanisms of their own. This post from the Dopplr blog (ok, it was posted back on July 8th, but it has been sitting in my queue to write about) lays out three new options: Twitter, SMS, and Email:

Today I’m really happy to say we’re taking the wraps off a number of new ways to get your future into Dopplr and share your travel information with those you trust: Dopplr by Twitter, SMS and… Email!

Although I love twitter as a notification service (a way of letting me know something relevant happened) I don’t see myself using it as a data input service. For those of you who would like to, just follow the dopplr user and send direct messages with your trips, like: d dopplr a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd. (Nicely, it also happily accepts @dopplr posts, in case you want to announce your trips as well as put them in dopplr). SMS is another option – you associate your SMS number with your Dopplr account and you can text message the same types of messages to Dopplr’s number.

Finally, they’ve got email working at trips@dopplr.com (wonder how many people will confuse plans@tripit.com with trips@dopplr.com – did they make plans@dopplr.com an alias?).

Interestingly, you can use the same kind of shorthand messages used for Twitter or SMS – “a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd” – or you can forward confirmation messages from booking services (which is how TripIt handles import). This is because Dopplr did not set out to parse all the complex formats used by different agencies, but took a simper approach, as explained by MattB:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

In other words, rather than specifically targeting all the different potential formats, and parsing them in some structured way, Dopplr looks for some specific patterns in the text and tries to understand their meaning without knowing the format of the email in advance.

I wonder how different this is from what TripIt actually does behind the scenes – how much they plan for specific formats they know in advance – and how successful it will be “in the field.” For now it is enough to convince me to turn off my automated importing and give trips@dopplr.com a try on my next few confirm messages. Then, I can automate a rule in my email such that travel confirmations get auto-forwarded to both plans@tripit.com and trips@dopplr.com, and be sharing my travel plans painlessly.

(Not that I’m old enough to have watched Laugh In, but I keep seeing (in my head) the video of Richard Nixon’s deadpan “sock it to me” in the name of this feature)

This is genius – simple, clean access to the info I need without having to launch a web browser, navigate, etc:

TripIt To Me is an email interface to the trip information in TripIt. (This is better known in the tech world as a “command line interface.”) When you email simple commands like “get flight tomorrow” or “get trip 10/15/07” to plans [at] tripit.com, TripIt will email you the information you need whenever you need it. For the absent minded like me, TripIt To Me will be a lifesaver as I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve dashed off to the airport without my itinerary and had to call someone to remember the airline I’m flying on, or the hotel I’m staying at. Also, it will be great when picking someone up at the airport to be able to email “get flight” and see which flight they’re on.

They also took the time to create a “Tripit to me Wallet card” (PDF) so that you don’t have to remember all the potential commands.

If you don’t travel a lot for business, it might seem strange that you could arrive at the airport and not know which airline you’re on, but the reality is I’ve had that experience myself.

Tripit just keeps getting better.