• by Bill McCloskey , December 12, 2007

Dear Readers,

  
I'm swamped running around to sessions and events at the Email Insider Summit and I tried to get my editor to let me off my column today, but she said no dice. She did suggest writing it as a letter to a friend, so that is what I'm doing:

Well, I arrived at the Summit fine. The ski season opened yesterday and there were three days of snow, so the skiing is excellent for those that ski. Personally I can think of nothing crazier than heading down a steep hill on a pair of wooden sticks, so I'll be in meetings around the hotel and shopping in town.

The Stein Erickson Lodge is amazing, and some of the VIPs were reporting that they had rooms with hot tubs on the deck. One had a bi-level room and a poker game was underway to the wee hours of the morning last night among some of the email insiders.

Of course the networking is the real draw of the show. Between dinners and cocktail parties, participants were coming up to me saying the event was like networking on steroids.

The actual agenda has been well attended, starting with Hal Brierly's presentation on eMiles. Basically the old getting paid to view ads, but with a twist: Participants earn 5 milegage points for each ad they read and respond to. Five miles doesn't sound like a lot, but apparently the company got the same response if it offered 5, 10, or 15 miles, so 5 miles was enough.

David Daniels from Jupiter was up next, and talked about how people are doing "email triage" from their phones and how important it is to make sure emails render correctly for the BlackBerry crowd. David took some shots from some of the attendees with his comments that a "do not track" law would be disastrous for the Internet economy. One of the attendees accused him of using inflammatory rhetoric. But don't take my word for it: all the presentations were videotaped and will be up on the MediaPost site in a few days.

After an amazing dinner, and drinks later at the bar, the attendees made it into the next morning's sessions, albeit a bit sore from the slopes the day before,

The Email Experience Council had its general meeting later in the day. The various chairs of the EEC roundtables reported on various initiatives they were working on, including providing statistics on the size of the email marketing industry, reaching out to local organizations to educate marketers on the power of email marketing, and general advocacy of the email marketing industry.

It is time to head off to cocktails and dinner. Check out the sessions on line, and I hope you all can be here next year.