Let’s be honest: we all get way too much email. So much so that checking email has become a dirty chore, something many productivity experts say you should do 2-3 times a day tops, simply because it's a tremendous timesuck.  In professional communication, it’s all too common to send an email only to find that days later, the recipient didn’t take the time to read it or – worse – deleted it.

Before you blame them, ask yourself: did I make it easy for them to delete my email?  Was I too wordy?  Too many pleasantries?  The decision about what to do with your message may happen much quicker than you think.

Most email systems preview message content for the first 50-100 characters of the email.  So, as Steve Rubel suggests, try writing the first sentence of your email like a tweet.  Skip the introductory small talk and get right to the point.  Set your hook within 75 characters and you’ll have a far better chance of the reader giving your email the attention it deserves.

75 characters isn’t a lot, so this takes some practice.  I suggest heading over to a site like this that will give you a character count as you write your  hook.  Once you’ve got it pared down to a reasonable size, tab back to your email client and paste in what you’ve written.  (If you use Twitter regularly, you're probably familiar with what 75 characters looks like.)

It’s the attention economy these days. Instead of trying to fight it, learn to play better within its rules.

I'm not much on raving about new places to eat, but I just had arguably the best lunch I've had in years.

The Plymouth Coffee Bean (aka The Bean), a humble coffee shop in downtown Plymouth, just started offering crépes of all sorts.  To my knowledge, they are the best crépes in Michigan, and they're better than the fancy, foofy gourmet crépes I had while skiing in Colorado a few years back.  Come to think of it, they're the best I've ever had.

Simply put: they are awesome, full-stop.  If you live in Michigan and are anywhere near (and by near I mean anywhere within a 30 minute drive) Plymouth, you need to make the drive to The Bean.  It's more than worth your time.

So what are my recommendations?

For lunch, try the bean burger, pepperjack, hummus, tomato, onion and spinach crépe.  For dessert -- and you have to get dessert -- get the chocolate chip, peanut butter and banana.  Trust me on these.  Each crépe is big enough to be a meal unto itself, but you'd be cheating yourself if you went there and didn't at least try one of the dessert crépes.

If my recommendations don't sound like your thing, no worries: you can choose whatever ingredients you want from their picklist, and they cook it right in front of you.  As simple or foody as you like -- you create it, they make it.

I can't recommend them enough.  It's hard to find crépes period, but it's nigh impossible to find truly excellent ones.  I just had one for lunch, and already I'm wishing I got one to go for a box dinner.  Serious.

(If you're on Facebook, you can find The Bean's page here.)

Some pics snapped before they called security on me:

               

Click here to download:

found-the-best-crepes-in-michigan-phciyifnFiHmyDuJyhra.zip (13780 KB)

Pringles Can Hands is a Webby 2009 award-winning banner ad.  It's a great example of what a brand can do when it decides to have a little fun with itself and not worry about making everyone in a conference room happy.  Far and away, the #1 concept-killing thought process is giving birth to a creative idea and then drumming up every possible way some segment of the potential audience could be offended.  At that point, the concept dies and the race to the LCD begins.

Pringles didn't fall into that trap.  Even more, they'll probably will win more of the attention game than others do.

For a great percentage of web users, ads are automatically shoved out of their attention spans, just like we get up from the TV or start channel-surfing the radio when an ad begins.  It goes without saying, then, that if  you do manage to attract someone's attention with a banner ad, you'd be wise not to blow it with a generic landing page or, even worse, direct them to a top-level brand domain.

I love what Pringles did here, but echo what Brandon Chesnutt asks: how many people will follow the clickstream to the end?

The story of bottled water, broken down to its basics.

(Via DF)

The best sign I've seen in some time.  Go free market, right?

(Via Chris)

(crosspost)

Todd Wasserman, reporting for BrandWeek:

By opting for these tin-eared retorts, AT&T does nothing but set itself up as a foe to consumers. At a conference in New York in early December, CEO Ralph de la Vega responded to charges that AT&T’s iPhone service was slow by turning condescending. “The first thing we need to do is educate consumers about what represents a megabyte of data,” de la Vega told reporters—this while floating the idea of charging heavy users more than others.

AT&T’s position seems to be that consumers are consuming way more data than the company had expected and everyone just needs to chill until the company can recover from this inconsiderate overuse. When the conceit is that ass-backwards, no amount of spin is effective.

If there's one company whose reputation has been steadily slaughtered over the past two years, it's AT&T.  The malign is deserved: I have followed the blogs, Twitter conversations and press releases as much as the next gadget/tech geek, and to me it's plainly clear that AT&T hasn't learned any lessons from brands who have had their business practices change due to consumers leveraging social channels.

But it's even worse than that.  They view iPhone users as the problem that led to their damaged brand, not their shoddy network to begin with or nearly flat capital expenditures since the iPhone's inception.

As a realtively new AT&T customer (who joined simply because of the iPhone), the vibe I get is that they believe it's easier to milk this iPhone thing -- however long it goes in exclusivity -- for all it's worth than it is to listen to your customers, address negative feedback, and build out your network to accomodate your users happily using your product.  AT&T had a chance to become something special, pehaps even to vy for extentend exclusivity, but instead chose to treat the iPhone deal as a racehorse: flog it as hard as you can until it dies, keep the share price at a decent level, get your bonuses, and move on to what's next.  That sort of myopia will be part of AT&T's enduring legacy, especially when they could have built a race team and made their customers their fans.

When the iPhone opens up to other carriers in the US, AT&T will see a hemhorraging of subscribers like never before.  Given how I drop at least a call day with AT&T, I will likely be among them.

Enjoy your early termination fees, Mr. Stephenson: they're the last vestige of what could have been.