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Christmas might be over but the spirit of giving continues here at MarketingProfs. Until New Year's Eve, December 31, you can buy a Premium Membership for someone else, and get another one for yourself, free! That means that as a MarketingProfs Premium Member, each week you'll get exclusive new case studies, articles, and reports that help you implement your marketing plans. It's a bargain at $149.95 per year. (And as my mother would say, you can't afford not to buy it!)

If you really want to impress, you can give (and get!) a MarketingProfs Premium Plus Membership for just $100 more. Premium Plus members get free access to all of our online seminars, led by marketing experts. We host at least 36 new online seminars annually (retail price $129 each). I'll do the math for you: for a MarketingProfs Premium Plus gift of $249, you are giving (and receiving) more than $5000 in seminars alone.

More information on this sweet offer is here.

(And, by the way, if you are already a Premium member, we haven't forgotten about you. Your gift is here.)

p.s. If you want to buy a member but need a friend to share it with, leave a comment below and I'm happy to play matchmaker, as I've already done for a few folks on Twitter. Include your email, so I have a way to contact you.

It is cool to see how Comcast is sharing how your email delivery works better with a higher Sender Score rating. We watch our IP Sender Scores all day long using ReturnPath and I love to see this sort of ISP transparency. I would hope that more ISPs could share how this impacts email delivery in 2009.

It just goes to prove that email reputation and best practices do make a difference.

View the info here

I have established brands of gifts that suit Christmas, weddings and funerals. I use them whenever I need to and feel that they enhance and express my personal brand with humor, compassion and taste – all qualities I strive towards. I’m not a pitchman for any of these products (last one notwithstanding), but think that finding a perfect fit for one’s self-expression is always to be desired.

Weddings were the first celebration I personally branded by establishing a tradition of gifting a naughty, festive, fanciful wedding night outfit to the bride and groom to inspire and provoke a more memorable night, no matter how long they’d been together. Lingerie is one gift that both members of the couple may enjoy for different reasons; it adds humor and a sense of play to any wedding night. My late Honey began this tradition and I observe it still. A Fredericks of Hollywood box on the wedding table never fails to excite interest and incite amusement.

I’ve recently begun to memorialize the passing of friends with a gift to the Heifer Project, an organization that provides livestock, farm fowl, bees and trees around the world where they’re needed. To celebrate a friend’s passage I choose an appropriate menagerie from among sheep, goats, cows, pigs, water buffalo, chickens, bees, trees (and probably a few I forgot) with gift notification sent to the bereaved. I like the continuity of life that the gift implies, and the specificity of its intent.

At Christmas I send perishables. My mom doesn’t need another thing in her life, but she can eat and enjoy six beautiful pears and be done with them. I have a long list of relations and friends that I annually gift with fruit and other evanescent delicacies. I employ Harry and David who thoughtfully keep track of my gift list’s addresses year after year, making it way easy to keep up and expand. Way too easy perhaps.

Having branded gifts for special moments means I’m never at a loss as to how to respond. Oh! I just thought of another personal gift brand. Whenever a friend begins to learn a stringed instrument I give an electronic tuner. I like clip-ons because you can tune quietly before beginning to play even if there’s other music going on or a lot of noise. A beginner (or anyone else for that matter) playing a well-tuned instrument sounds better from the get-go and with one of these magical gizmos you can be pitch perfect every time.

Everyone knows by now that WordPress 2.7 is packed with new features. Now that it’s available (almost 600,000 downloads as I write this!), it’s time to start working on 2.8. There were dozens of things that got tabled during 2.7 due to time constraints, and there are a lot of high-rated features in the Ideas forum, so there are a lot of potential features under consideration.

Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. The rest of the development time will be taken up with bug tickets and additional features/enhancements from a prioritized list. To that end, we’ve posted a new survey for you to help us prioritize features for 2.8. The list pulls from the developers’ “2.7 leftovers” list as well as the most popular features from the Ideas forum. Just rank each feature and tell us your top pick (up to three). You also have the option of adding comments or additional suggestions, but this is not mandatory. For your response to count, you must rank all of the features in the list. The survey has only one page.

Note that media features are not included in this list as we will be posting a separate survey for media-specific features soon.

Cast your votes any time this week, but as always the sooner the better. This survey will close at noon on December 31, 2008 UTC.

In the new year, we will be reviving scheduled IRC developer chats, where the lead developers will discuss the week’s progress on feature development, providing opportunities for people to ask questions or make suggestions. These will be held early in the day on Wednesdays (U.S. Wednesday), and the specific time will be posted here on the development blog once it’s been finalized.

As a related aside, we spent a significant amount of time during 2.7 development sifting through Trac tickets that really shouldn’t have been there. Feature ideas and requests do not belong in Trac, they belong in the Ideas forum. Please reserve Trac for reporting bugs and things that need fixing (typos, code enhancements, etc.). If you are asking for a new UI, a new feature, or a new approach to coding something, that’s not an enhancement, it’s a new feature. New features will be entered into Trac by developers once it has been determined that the feature should be included in core. To help speed up development, moving forward we will close Trac tickets that are actually feature requests, with the comment that they should be posted in the Ideas forum instead. Please help the developers maximize their time by following this guideline.

Thanks for your help!

At this months' Email Insider Summit, Stephen Geer, director of email and online fundraising for Barack Obama's presidential campaign began his keynote presentation by sharing the three cornerstones of any political campaign: messaging, mobilization and money. He explained that winning campaigns execute in those three areas. While Geer walked us through successful examples from the Obama campaign, it was easy to make parallels to email marketing. The following are some lessons from each area that email marketers must apply to their own programs.

Click here to read the full post!

At this months' Email Insider Summit, Stephen Geer, director of email and online fundraising for Barack Obama's presidential campaign began his keynote presentation by sharing the three cornerstones of any political campaign: messaging, mobilization and money. He explained that winning campaigns execute in those three areas. While Geer walked us through successful examples from the Obama campaign, it was easy to make parallels to email marketing. The following are some lessons from each area that email marketers must apply to their own programs.

Click here to read the full post!