Gross as it may sound, this is the title of Seth Godin’ new book - Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?. Boil it down to this - all the new Internet marketing of blogs and YouTube and Web 2.0 stuff are all the toppings on a sundae. They are in fact the whipped cream, nuts and caramel. But, the basis of that sundae is your core business. And if you are still doing business the same old way, then you are putting all those new toppings on old meatballs. A pretty tasteless creation. You need to revamp what you are doing and your entire mentality of doing business so that your base is sweet ice cream. Then, and only then, will all those fancy toppings be any more than expensive window dressing.

This is not a long book and in many places it contains statements of the obvious. But, there are other moments and insights that make the book more than worth the price. One of those is on pages 58 and 59 and contain a clear distillation of “What’s and E-mail Correspondence Worth to You and Your Organization.” Here Godin gives a concrete example of a traditional direct mail campaign versus an email campaign. Both are being sent to 1,000 names byt due to differences in response rate and cost of mailing, the net profit from the email campaign would be $19,000 versus a mere $125 for the direct mail. Powerful stuff.

The other big take away is the difference between interruption based marketing and permission based. To understand the difference all you have to do is think about the annoying sales calls during dinner or commercials breaking up your television show (interruption based) contrasted to catalogs you have requested or emailing lists you subscribe to (permission based). But here is the key - knowing the difference is one thing, reforming your organization based on those differences is something else. And that is where Meatball Sundae comes into play.

Overall this is a great book and a fast read. I finished it in just a little over a day, with interruptions, but the lessons learned will stick with me for a very long time. And hopefully I can remember to put those lessons into action.

When you are working with people, be they clients, prospects or co-workers, it is always useful to know what their personality is. You wouldn’t want to address a sale to someone who craves adventure and excitement in the same way you would talk to someone who’s core values are stability and security.

So, how do you get to the center of a person without being to nosy or obvious? Try this on for size - ask them their favorite of the four main characters from Winnie-the-Pooh! First of all it will give you both a good laugh. Most importantly though it will give you some good ideas about your person’s personality. So here goes…

Winnie-the-Pooh: A steadfast friend or companion. A “Pooh” will always try to help out and make things better. Will try to fix things.

Tigger: So emotional as to almost be bi-polar! Has great highs and great lows - thought generally more up than down. Likes social situations, parties, and exciting activity.

Eeyore: Very down-to-earth. On the pessimistic side of being a realist. Will make due with the status quo rather than rock-the boat.

Rabbit: The intellectual. Very pragmatic and dogmatic. Wants to see proof and the reasons why. Rabbits make great accountants.

So, there you have the four basic type. Similar to all the other four-archetypes that you will find in studies such as the Meyers-Briggs analysis and others. But this research is a little easier to do, a lot more fun, and a great ice breaker for conversation. After you know the information though, the really key concept is to use it in how you communicate with the person.

In this case, your children are your emails. Last time we talked about watching out for formatting gotchas. You know the best way to do that? Read your own emails on every platform and provider possible. Services like AOL, GMail, MSN (Hotmail), and Yahoo all provide free email addresses to anyone just for the asking. There are others too, so find as many as you can. Sign up for an address with all of them with a name something like YourCompanyNameEmailTest. And then just use that email address for testing purposes.

Once you have the email address you can do multiple things. First, and often the most important, you can simply see if you email gets through. Maybe AOL is blocking all emails coming from your company as spam and you don’t even know it. You will if you send an occasional email to your test AOL address and see if you get it. If you don’t, you know there is a problem.

Second, you can see how your emails look in each of these service’s different web based email clients. Trust me, AOL will format differently from Hotmail and different from Yahoo. And don’t forget to try your own providers web based email and a mobile phone based email if you can.

Finally, with most of these services you can attach Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and many other client based email clients to the service to retrieve the email. Do that to. You want to do it just to make sure your images and formatting come through. You also want to know if any of these combinations result in any of your messages be unceremoniously being dropped into the spam bucket.

If you do the simple action of testing your email broadcasts you will solve 90% of your problems before your prospects ever notice them. Or at least you will know about them and can start to work on solving them, because your prospects will never tell you. In most cases they won’t even receive the offending email, so they simply can’t tell you.

Yes, your stationary is pretty. At least to you. And yes all those underlines, bolds, and italics really show off the important words that you think have extra meaning. But, consider this - many people can’t or won’t see them. That’s right, there are a lot of people out there who through either choice or technical limitation cannot see all the fancy formatting you are applying to your message.

The hard cold reality is that different email programs show your email differently. So you may be composing in Microsoft Outlook, but the person receiving your email may be using GMail, or Mail on the Mac, or Thunderbird, or even their cell phone. It is also possible that they are even using Outlook, but have the security function to prohibit image display turned on.

How do you get around this, you don’t. What you need to do is is construct a good email that conveys your message and prompts a call to action. That action should be to visit your website where the reader will find all the pretty formating and wondrous pictures. There you can use links and shading style sheet tricks galore. But for your email, tone it down.

That doesn’t mean not to use any formatting. That would lead to very boring and unattractive emails. Just be careful, don’t overdo it, and make sure to test on as many different platforms as possible. And if your really insist on doing way over the top formatting, maybe you should get some expert help from a company such as Constant Contact or Get Response.