Swedish automaker Saab has filed for bankruptcy after months of struggle to stay alive. Saab’s owners have turned the company’s assets over to a Swedish court-appointed receiver.

General Motors (GM, Fortune 500), Saab’s former owner, had objected to a recently proposed deal under which the company would have been sold to Chinese investors including carmaker Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile.

The deal required GM’s cooperation because it still supplies parts, designs and engineering for Saab products. China is one of GM’s largest markets and the U.S. automaker was reportedly concerned that its technology could end up in competing vehicles.

GM still maintains an ownership stake in Saab.
Saab’s greatest hits (and misses)

The Board of Saab Automobile subsequently decided that without further funding the company will be insolvent, and that filing bankruptcy was in the best interests of its creditors.

There is a chance that Saab could be purchased, in whole or in parts, out of receivership, Saab spokesman Eric Geers said. Potential buyers would have to negotiate with the defense and aerospace company Saab Group, a separate company which still owns the rights to the Saab name and trademark, and with GM.

“Once an administrator or a receiver is appointed, it is up to them to see what they can do,” he said.

GM had no immediate comment on Saab’s decision.

GM sold Saab to Swedish Automotive in early 2010 as part of GM’s bankruptcy reorganization. Swedish Automotive is a Dutch company that was then known as Spyker, a high-end brand of hand-made sports cars. But Saab continued to struggle under the new ownership.
The most disliked cars of 2011

Swedish Automotive said it does not expect to realize any value from its ownership of Saab.

Saab had announced a different tentative deal with two Chinese companies in June. But within weeks it said it had run out of the cash it needed to pay its workers.

Even after Saab arranged financing to resume paying salaries, it had problems making payments to suppliers, which essentially stopped it from resuming production. By early September it was forced to file for bankruptcy protection.

Saab still operates a network of U.S. dealers, but sales have been suffering as the company has struggled to survive. This year, U.S. sales dropped to 5,305 as of the end of November. As recently as 2000, it had sold 39,479 cars to U.S. buyers.

Saab was founded as airplane maker Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget (Swedish Airplane Inc.) in 1937 and entered the car business in 1946. The defense company Saab Group is a separate company today and remains in business.

The best time to buy a stock and make a lot of money off of it is often when the company is universally hated. When so many investors think a company is doomed, it doesn’t take much to move the stock higher again.

Research in Motion (RIMM) is probably not one of those stocks.

The BlackBerry maker is now absurdly cheap based on any conventional metric. Shares fetch less than 3 times earnings estimates for its next fiscal year. The company is trading at about a third of its expected sales.

And RIM is well below book value, the price it theoretically would be worth if it liquidated and sold off assets.

But none of that matters. For anyone who thinks RIM may be a value stock, I give you these sage words of advice from Admiral Ackbar in “Return of the Jedi”: “It’s a trap!”

There is no sugarcoating RIM’s latest earnings report. The company warned that sales and profits for the next quarter will be far below already reduced forecasts.

It also announced that its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones, trumpeted as the company’s savior, have been delayed until the end of 2012. That’s an eon in the fast-moving consumer tech world.

That’s why the stock plunged 12% Friday morning. Shares are now down 77% year-to-date and are trading at their lowest level since January 2004.

The company can’t afford to be Research in Slow Motion at a time when it is facing brutal competition from Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and from handset makers like Samsung and HTC that have latched themselves to Google’s (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android wagon. Even Nokia (NOK), thanks to an alliance with Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), is a threat.
BlackBerry drops BBX name after court order

If you take a look at some of the analyst reports on the company following its most recent disaster, you have to wonder if it maybe should change its name and ticker to GRIM. Or DIM.

“We give management credit for an honest appraisal and outlook,” wrote Cowen and Company analyst Matthew Hoffman.

That’s about the most charitable thing I could find.

“We now believe that RIMM needs to adopt an existing ecosystem (Windows Phone) in order to remain a relevant player in the smartphone market,” wrote Alkesh Shah with Evercore Partners.

In other words, RIM has to become the Canadian version of Nokia.

“We have modest BB 10 sales estimates,” warned Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley.

“If management’s marketing-based strategy to support sales fails, then the company may have to resort to gross margin cuts to retain relevance. Once this happens, we expect device business margins to fall to zero and possibly into negative territory,” was the dire prediction from Nomura analyst Stuart Jeffrey.

If you’re looking for gloomiest forecast of all, Kris Thompson at National Bank Financial in Toronto — essentially RIM’s home turf — takes first prize.

“This could be game over for the BlackBerry franchise,” Thompson wrote. “We can’t be confident RIM even hits the 2012 holiday season.”

For the win!

So what, if anything, can RIM do to save itself? The company had no comment beyond what co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis said during the earnings conference call. They stressed the need for patience and touted RIM’s strength outside the U.S.

But that is unlikely to end calls for one, if not both, CEOs to step down — even after each agreed to cut their salary next year to $1 (American, not loonies). Many investors feel that RIM desperately needs a fresh new look at the top.

“The cosmetic change of taking a dollar a year in salary is a slap in the face to shareholders,” said Vic Albioni, chairman and CEO of Jaguar Financial, a Toronto-based bank that owns a stake in RIM and has been pressing the company to make leadership changes.

“They see it as an admirable thing to do. The admirable thing to do is recognize they are the problem, not the money that they receive,” he added.

Still, even a new CEO (or two) may not be enough. At this point, with product launches for phones and new PlayBook tablets massively delayed, the company may need to follow the lead of Palm — the company RIM is drawing unfortunate comparisons to — and sell out.

Palm, which like RIM was once a leader in mobile devices, sold itself last year to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500).

Of course, HP wound up shutting down Palm’s hardware business only a few months later and is now “contributing” its WebOS software to the open source community. But that’s another story.

To be fair, RIM may be able to get a lot more than what is trading at now in a takeover or breakup scenario.
New BlackBerry tool to support iPhone and Android

The company has a treasure trove of patents, and tech giants are showing a willingness to pay up for them. The most prominent example of that was Google’s stunning decision to buy Motorola Mobility (MMI) for a more than 60% premium earlier this year.

Evercore’s Shah estimates that the sum of RIM’s parts could be worth $20 a share, with more than a third of that coming from its intellectual property. A $20 price is about 50% higher than its current price.

Then again, the stock began the year at $58.13. Oops.

The fact that RIM is so wounded right now doesn’t help the company’s chances of a takeover at a big premium. Nomura’s Jeffrey wrote that RIM may only be worth $15 in a break-up — and that a suitor may not need to make a bid unless the stock falls below $10.

That’s a big problem. Albioni worries that things will have to get even worse before RIM will decide to do something drastic like look for a white knight. In that regard, Balsillie and Lazaridis may be acting more like European leaders dealing with the debt crisis.

“We don’t have tremendous confidence in this board stepping up and putting someone in charge like Sanjay Jha at Motorola who sold the company to Google,” he said. “I hope we’re wrong.”

If recent RIM history is any guide, the best chance for a major change in the executive suite may only come if one of the CEOs gets inebriated and kicked off a plane. But you probably shouldn’t hold your breath — or chew through restraints — waiting for that.

Best of StockTwits and reader comment of the week: RIMM wasn’t the only tech stock making waves Friday. A little gaming company called Zynga went public too.

howardlindzon The 100th person to short $ZNGA tomorrow gets a virtual cow….exciting times in the markets

Hail to the chief of StockTwits! Very funny, Howard.

intelligentspec: $ZNGA to be valued at $7B with $306M revenues last quarter compared to $LNKD $6.4B val with $140M revenues…

Good point. One reason for the “lackluster” first day performance of Zynga (ZNGA) is that the company and bankers did the admirable thing and didn’t overprice the offering as much as other recent social IPOs.

ZorTrades: So if $ZNGA is coming out with 100 million shares then what is the lock up going to look like 180 days from now? Probably small, everyone selling now.

Another good point. The big initial float may reduce lockup expiration and secondary offering risk. This isn’t Groupon (GRPN), which sold only about 5% of its total shares in the IPO. LinkedIn (LNKD) also sold a smaller percentage of its total shares in its offering than Zynga.

As anyone following me on Twitter knows, I have been OBSESSED with a certain NFL quarterback this week. Readers have had plenty to say about the former Florida Gator play-caller. But my favorite was this one from Alex Ferguson.

“I wonder if they’ll start calling the last 2 hours of the trading day ‘Tebow Time’ $SPY,” he tweeted.

If stocks keep experiencing big moves up in the closing moments, trademark that puppy Alex! Although the realist in me has a sinking feeling that the wheels on the Tim Tebow bandwagon will fall off against the Pats Sunday.

Are you close with your business? Ask yourself what really would you answer to big questions asked about your company. We will have found the must know questions all business owners need to be able to answer about their company business.

This is also useful for starting your business and getting prepared for new business ideas.

1. What are your business’s greatest strengths and weaknesses?
2. What are your biggest challenges and opportunities?
3. Who are your current customers, and why are they patronizing your business?
4. Who are your competitors’ current customers, and why are they patronizing their businesses?
5. What changes or new programs would have the greatest potential to boost your sales?

Answer all of these every six months to keep track of new shifts that happen to most businesses.

The holiday shopping season got off to a strong start on Black Friday, with retail sales up 7 percent over last year, according to one survey. Now stores just have to keep buyers coming back without the promise of super savings.

Buyers spent $11.4 billion at retail stores and malls, up nearly $1 billion from last year, according to a report released Saturday by ShopperTrak. It was the largest amount ever spent on the day that marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the biggest year-over-year increase since 2007. Chicago-based ShopperTrak gathers data from 25,000 outlets across the U.S., including individual stores and shopping centers.

Online shopping was strong as well, with a 24.3 percent increase in online spending on Black Friday, according to IBM, which tracks sales at 500 online retailers.

Bill Martin, who founded ShopperTrak, said he was surprised by the strong showing. He had expected the weak economy to dent consumer confidence and keep more shoppers out of the stores, or at least from spending much. Instead, he said, consumers responded to a blanket of promotions, from 60-percent off deals to door-buster savings on electronics.

“I’m pleased to see it. You can’t have a great season without having a good Black Friday,” Martin told The Associated Press in an interview.

Still, he suspects things will quiet down this weekend, as promotions end and the buying frenzy subsides. ShopperTrak is expecting holiday sales to be up 3.3 percent overall through Christmas.

There were few shoppers at Pioneer Place Mall in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday.

“This is great, I’m glad I waited,” said MaryJane Danan, who drove two hours from Corvallis, Oregon, to go shopping with her teenage daughters. She stayed home on Black Friday because she thought the crowds would be huge. But she was surprised by how few people were out Saturday.

Internet Traffic

The first part of the equation, internet traffic, is possibly the most fought over and hardest part of affiliate marketing. It is best summarized as the quest to get those elusive surfers to your site. Traffic is the foundation of e-commerce and no website is successful without it. There are two fundamental ways people can find you online. The first and most popular is through a search engine.

Search Engines

When most consumers go online to find a product or service, they use a search engine. Popular search engines include Google, Yahoo, and Msn to name a few. Generally, the consumer will go one, maybe two pages deep in their search for a website they’d like to visit. Logically, the better your rank in a search engine, the more consumers that will come to your site. Because surfers won’t go 10 pages deep in a search engine’s results, site ranking is VERY competitive.

SEO

There are two ways to get ranked with a search engine. The first is referred to as SEO (search engine optimization). This is by far the most competitive (and profitable) route. Google, for instance, places a great amount of emphasis on your website’s links. The more links you have going out and coming into your website from other “like” websites, the more “relative” your site becomes. Consequently, the more relative your site is, the higher your page rank. There are numerous other ways to optimize your site for SEs. Our team will be happy to give you with this and point you to more resources.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

The second method by which a website can get ranked with a search engine is using a pay-perclick (PPC) campaign. Above, you can see the PPCs on the right side of the google page. Instead of competing for page rank, these listings pay to get listed here. PPCs are beneficial, because the owner of the ad ONLY pays when someone clicks on their listing. So you’re only paying for surfers to come to your site who’s interests were sparked by your ad.

Most PPCs allow you to write your ad and bid on different keywords of your choice. For example, if you are running a penis enlargement review site, you might choose keywords like “longer penis” or “penis extension”. You could then bid on the keywords, specifying that you’d be willing to pay $0.20 per click. Submit your ad and away you go. Again, a word of caution. If done poorly they can take you to the cleaners. A good rule is to make sure you get sales before buying PPC.

Alternative Traffic Marketing

There are virtually no limits to where you can get traffic for your website. You can set up reciprocal links with other like websites and trade traffic (this also helps your SEO). Email campaigns, as long as they are targeted and are not spam, can work well. Snail mail mailers, flyers, and traditional advertisements can also work. Just like building your site, be creative in its promotion. This helps you stand apart from the crowd and will lead to more traffic to your site.

Product Promotion

So once you have the surfer in your site, what do you do with them? Your task is to get them to want to click on the links to our sites. Different affiliate programs have different ideas on how to do this. A lot of it depends on the products or services that they offer and the site having call to actions done correctly.

Product Matching

A big part of affiliate marketing is matching the products you promote to the site you run. If you can do this well, you can convert well.

The Informative Site

The second and more successful way to market a product is to build your website around it. An example of this is a review site. This kind website is devoted to giving the surfer as much information as it can. It gives information about the different types of products available and then reviews the different products that are out there. It will usually pick one of the products (the product with the best website – OURS!) to be its number one pick. Surfers will come to your site, become educated on the subject and move on through your link to buy a product.

This type of site is successful for a few different reasons:

1) People like to shop around. This site gives them the opportunity to shop around without ever having to leave.

2) Information builds trust. The more information you have in your site, the more the surfer will perceive your site as an authority. Trust = conversions

3) Penis Enlargement, for example, is possible. However a lot of people don’t believe it. Yet, they are still perusing your site in the hopes that it is. The more informative your site is, the more likely you’ll convince them that they CAN enlarge their penis. This will lead to more sales.

4) If you slap an enlargement banner ad on a website that has no relation to penis enlargement at all, the majority of your click-trough’s will come from surfers satisfying their curiosity, not because they are genuinely interested. The informative site mitigates this and ensures only quality surfers get through.

An informative site can be built for ANY product out there. It may take a little more time than throwing a banner up on your site, but your effort will be amply rewarded.

The Psychological Sell

The following tips are meant to help you sell your surfers on the products you are reviewing. The more you pre-sell them before they get to a product site, the higher your conversions will be.

1) Identify your audience
Ask yourself who are they? Most importantly, why are they at your site? What are their fears and what are they hoping to accomplish? The answers to these questions will enable you to write your site’s text with your specific audience in mind. The more your text speaks to them, the more likely they are to buy.

2) Identify your audience’s problem and exploit it
It may sound bad, but you want to foster a feeling of insecurity in your surfers. You must include a section on the problem your surfer’s are there to fix and it’s hazards. Highlight what happens if the problem goes untreated and its detrimental affects. Convince you surfer that it is imperative that they fix this problem.

3) Assure them that their problem is treatable
Fairly self-explanatory, but let them know there is help on the way.

4) Include as much info as you can get your hands on.
The more in depth you go, the more the surfer will trust you as an authority and get lost in your site’s information.

5) Include specific information about each product you review
Again, gains trust.

6) Build their confidence
Once you have selected a product as your #1 pick, include information about it’s guarantee, the company’s reputation, etc. Shout from the rooftops why this is the best product out there. A word of caution – do not bad-mouth any product. It’s negative, amateur and unprofessional. Read “Website Development” for more website tips…

PPC Campaigns – Product Promotion the Easy Way

Reviews.

The benefit of this new system is that instead of having to build your own informative site, we’ve done it for you!
This system is now available to you to use in any way you wish. If you are using a PPC campaign, you can plug your affiliate code and special link directly into the PPC ad’s url. Surfers will click on your ad, go to our feeder site, move on to our product site, make their purchase and you will always get credit. You can also use our feeder sites as supplements to your own site. Add a link or menu option on your site and link it to our feeder. Our site will do all of the work for you by educating your surfer on our HUGE range of products. You’ll get credit on any product they buy.

Website Development

There’s no arguing it, there’s a lot that goes into developing a quality website. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written on the topic. Here, in a “do’s and don’ts” format, we’ll give you a few of the most important features your website should incorporate.

Do’s

1) What is your mission? Every company has one and so should you. It doesn’t have to be complex, just figure out what you want to accomplish through your site. If you want to promote ClearPores with an information site, your mission could be something like this –
“Create a website that will inform consumers in a clear and concise format about how sleep works, causes of insomnia, the detrimental effects of losing sleep and include reviews and suggestions of products that are available that can help cure sleep disorders.”

2) Just like writing a paper in college, map out what you want to do first. Get a good idea of the layout of the site, where buttons and images will be located, and how you’re going to organize your information. Once you have an idea of this on paper, move onto doing the html.

3) Make information easy to get to and organized logically for your surfer. One word – usability. Nothing is more frustrating than being on a website and not knowing where to go.

4) Check out other product websites, including your competition, and see what they are doing well. The best places for website ideas are other websites.

5) Spend time on your text. Anyone who is interested in your website and wants to use it as a source of information will read your text. Make sure you spell check, grammar check, and use your words to your advantage. The text is what will sell your surfers on trusting you and using the products you recommend.

6) Post your site on forums and let other take a look at it. You’ll get some great advice on what you could do better.

Don’ts

1) Do not use too many colors. The more colors you use, the more amateur your website looks. Amateur = no trust = no conversions.

2) Do not use too many fonts, same reason as above.

3) Do not make a website that is one looooooooong page. Again, amateur.

4) Do not have HUGE blocks of text. Break up your text with key points. Use headers, bulleted points, etc. for the major statements you don’t want your readers to miss. Surfers will skim through looking for your main points and will be more likely to read your text if you spice it up and make it look interesting. Besides that, breaking up your text makes your site look better.

Alright, now you’ve got the basics. There’s a lot to know about this business and always something new to learn. It’s a dynamic marketplace and those who survive, learn to roll with the punches. Learning, changing and adapting are the keys to making it. If you’re trying something and it’s not working for you, stop, get some advice and try something else.

Copenhagen-based ad agency Bates Y&R created this realistic painting of a giant constrictor snake squeezing a city bus. Very nice. Link here.

If your company sends out an e-mail newsletter to customers, you may find yourself suffering from a new problem I call “spam trap poisoning.”

Spam traps are e-mail addresses that antispam groups post on the Web but don’t use for sending e-mail. Instead, these addresses lie in wait until they’re found by “harvester” programs. These harvesters are key tools for spammers: they scan millions of Web pages, scooping up every e-mail address that’s visible.

If a spam trap receives any e-mail, therefore, antispam groups assume the message must be spam. This can automatically put the IP address on a “blocklist” that keeps the sender’s messages from getting through to some mail servers.

Unfortunately, spam traps are starting to bite legitimate businesses. I’ll explain how and what you can do about it.

How Spammers Can Poison Spam Traps

I discussed spam trap poisoning with Julian Haight, the director of a controversial blocklist called SpamCop.net. In an interview, which formed the basis for my column last week on SpamCop, Haight said he’s reduced his reliance on human spam complainers and has dramatically increased his use of spam traps. “80 to 90 percent” of the reports he receives are now generated by such bots, he explains.

Spammers, however, are learning how to discover which e-mail addresses are spam traps. How can this injure your company’s reputation and e-mail deliverability?

• Spam Traps Lead To Swift Blocklisting. Because spam-trap addresses can react immediately to any e-mail they receive, as little as a single message can add a sender to a blocklist within minutes. Spammers don’t much care about one individual source of spam being blocked, of course. The top professionals in the spam business use a massive network of hundreds of thousands of PCs they’ve infected with Trojan horse programs that actually send the spam. Some infected PCs may be blocked, but spammers have many others that aren’t.

• A Process of Elimination. Because the biggest pros send millions of junk e-mails a day, they can segment their lists and send messages through different computers to try to identify spam traps. If one sender was added to a particular blocklist at 10:00 a.m., for example, it was probably due to a spam-trap address that received a piece of spam after 9:30 that same morning.

• Poisoning the Spam Traps and Your Company’s Good Name. By watching mailings that are sent out on subsequent days, spammers can soon isolate a few addresses that are almost certainly spam traps. The spammers then sign those addresses up for legitimate e-mail newsletters to ruin the effectiveness of the spam traps. Now the addresses are receiving legitimate e-mail, not just spam.

• Reliance on Spam Traps Backfires on Blocklists. To best “poison” the spam traps, spammers use the newsletters of the most respectable companies possible. When mail servers that use blocklists start to reject mail from these large, respected brand names, the blocking services lose credibility. Many end users had wanted to receive those company’s mailings and blame the blocklists for being wildly inaccurate.

If your company’s newsletter is used in these exploits, the pain can be severe. Your routine e-mail messages can suddenly start to bounce — or simply disappear, deleted forever by mail servers that blindly relied on the blocklists.

Choose One: A Terrible Problem or a Horrible Problem

Haight is adamant that companies can avoid damage to their reputations by requiring all newsletter subscribers to “double opt-in” as opposed to “single opt-in.” He also considers double opt-in to be a requirement because it prevents one person from signing up another person’s e-mail address to an unwanted list.

Let’s take a closer look at what single and double opt-in mean:

• Single Opt-In. A single opt-in newsletter allow customers to sign up by entering their e-mail address in a Web form and clicking “Subscribe.” The publisher usually sends an immediate message welcoming subscribers and telling them how to unsubscribe if a mistake has been made.

• Double Opt-In. This method, also called “confirmed opt-in” or “verified opt-in,” doesn’t initially send any newsletter to customers who subscribe. Instead, the subscribers receive a message saying they must “verify” their e-mail address. The message usually instructs the recipient to click a hyperlink or generate some kind of e-mail response.

There’s a big problem with double opt-in, however. The newsletters of most Fortune 500 companies don’t require it, because a huge number of customers simply don’t understand why they have to verify their address — “I just gave it to you, it’s valid, you idiots.” Other consumers don’t respond because they’ve been told never to follow any instructions that an e-mail requests, as a precaution against “phishing.”

“I’ve seen the rate as low as 40% confirmation,” says Paul Myers, publisher and editor of TalkBiz News, a newsletter for business owners. His own publication, which uses double opt-in, has a very targeted audience and gets almost 100% confirmation, he says. But he doesn’t believe double opt-in should be a requirement for every company. “There shouldn’t be any reason why people miss the mail they want because they didn’t understand the confirmation process — or that one was required.”

The Battle Over Opting-In

Anne Mitchell is CEO of ISIPP (the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy), a whitelist organization that works with Internet service providers and spam filtering companies. “The push for double opt-in was really by the antispammers, not the ISPs,” she says. “They [the ISPs] don’t care how you build your list, as long as you don’t send spam.”

ISIPP maintains online scoring systems that are used by SpamBouncer and other antispam filters. One ISIPP scoring formula for trusted senders gives a maximum of 90 points to those who require double opt-in. But single opt-in newsletters can still achieve 80 points. The difference is small — because single opt-in newsletters aren’t spam.

As far as the percentage of cases in which one person is subscribed by another person to a single opt-in newsletter, the number is “miniscule,” Mitchell says.

How Many Mistakes Are Made, and Who Makes Them?

AWeber Communications is one of the world’s largest e-mail service providers. Literally thousands of different customers use the firm’s technology to send opt-in e-mail newsletters, according to company CEO Tom Kulzer.

AWeber requires the double opt-in method for new subscribers to get its own newsletter, Kulzer says. But his firm allows its individual publishers to choose to use either double opt-in or single opt-in. “More of our customers use single opt-in, fewer use double opt-in,” he explained in a telephone interview.

Confirmation rates for the double opt-in newsletters he’s monitored range from “nearly 100%” to “as low as 20%.” Meanwhile, cases in which an innocent person has been signed up to a single opt-in newsletter without consent are very rare, in his experience. “We see that maybe once a month,” Kulzer says.

“Usually the only time we see problems with somebody maliciously typing in someone else’s address is vehement antispammers who are signing people up to a list,” he continues. “When we track that down, the newsletter’s been sent to a ‘postmaster’ account that only these [extreme] antispammers would know about.”

Conclusion

You’re caught between two awful choices. If you require a double opt-in policy for people to subscribe to your company’s newsletter, you may lose half of more of the people who want to sign up for it. That’s bad customer service. On the other hand, if you use single opt-in, as most companies do, anyone can add spam-trap addresses to your database of subscribers. Your company could suffer e-mail deliverability problems for days after every issue of your publication goes out — activating the blocklists each time.

The answer is to carefully monitor which blocklists point to or don’t point to the IP addresses that your company uses to send mail. OpenRBL.org is one free service that allows you to enter any IP address or domain name to see whether it’s on any of 30-some real-time blocklists.

If your company does get whacked by a blocklist for a few hours or days after your newsletter goes out, use some of the same tricks that spammers use to identify spam traps. Segment your e-mail list into 24 groups at random. Send mail to each group, one hour apart throughout the day. If one group triggers a blocklist, segment it even further until you’ve isolated the potential problem addresses.

Finally, consider dropping subscribers who, according to your server logs, haven’t clicked a hyperlink in months — they could be robots disguised as ordinary newsletter readers.

Check out our new twitter updates page for CEO’s. Have a favorite CEO you want added? Contact us here

The new page at MarketingSpot.com allows you to see all of the listed top CEO’s Twitter posts all at once. It also filters out the replies and junk so you just get wind of the good stuff. “This is a fun page to leave open on a second screen” Says DWHS Inc. President, Charles Yarbrough. You can get lots of great information in real time without running a full program or getting stuff you don’t need from other Twitter update sites.

Check out the new Twitter CEO Posts here.

We will also add a link at the bottom of each page.

Facebook slowly becoming known as the do anything for money internet business attempts to hit Google below the belt but gets caught.

It seems like the ongoing rivalry between Facebook and Google has taken a turn for the subversive. Last night, a spokesman for the social network confirmed to the Daily Beast that Facebook paid a top PR firm to spread anti-Google stories across the media and to encourage various outlets to examine allegations that the Mountain View company was violating user privacy. The PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, even offered to help blogger Chris Soghoian write a critical op-ed piece about Social Circle — a service that allows Gmail users to access information on so-called “secondary connections,” or friends of their friends. Social Circle, in fact, seems to have been at the epicenter of Facebook’s smear campaign. In a pitch to journalists, Burson described the tool in borderline apocalyptic terms:

“The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day-without their permission.”

Soghoian thought that Burson’s representatives were “making a mountain out of a molehill,” so he decided to prod them about which company they might be working for. When Burson refused to spill the beans, Soghoian went public and published all of the e-mails sent between him and the firm. USA Today picked up on the story, before concluding that any claims of a smear campaign were unfounded. The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons, however, apparently forced Facebook’s hand after confronting the company with “evidence” of its involvement. A Facebook spokesman said the social network hired Burson to do its Nixonian dirty work for two primary reasons: it genuinely believes that Google is violating consumer privacy and it also suspects that its rival “may be improperly using data they have scraped about Facebook users.” In other words, their actions were motivated by both “altruistic” and self-serving agendas, though we’d be willing to bet that the latter slightly outweighed the former. Google, meanwhile, has yet to comment on the story, saying that it still needs more time to wrap its head around everything — which might just be the most appropriate “no comment” we’ve ever heard.

Facebook Buying Out Skype? $4 Billion Deal Was Being Talked About. Now the hammer has been dropped and the winner is Microsoft at 8.5 Billion (yes billion). We just hope Microsoft doesn’t screw things up, skype is near perfect.

After rumors that first Facebook and then Microsoft were in talks to acquire Skype, the latter announced that it has acquired the VoIP giant for $8.5 billion in cash.

Skype will be integrated into Microsoft devices and systems such as Xbox and Kinect, Xbox Live, the Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, Microsoft said in a statement. The company has pledged to continue supporting and developing Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms as well.

The deal, which was spearheaded by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with assistance from Charles Songhurst, the company’s head of corporate strategy, was completed Monday evening, AllThingsD reported earlier.

The acquisition is an expensive one for Microsoft. Not only is it the largest price Microsoft has paid for a company in decades, Skype is not yet profitable. Despite revenues totaling $860 million last year and operating profits of $264 million, the company lost $6.9 million overall, according to documents filed with the SEC. And the company carries $686 million in debt.

Much of the company’s appeal rests in its largest user base of 663 million, 145 million of which use Skype monthly (Update: Microsoft says Skype has 170 million regular users), and 8.8 million of which are paying customers.

There is one clear set of winners here: Skype’s investors. A group including Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board purchased the company from eBay for $2.75 billion in September 2009.

In August, Skype filed for an IPO but put plans on hold after Tony Bates joined the company as CEO in October. Bates will take on the title of president of the Microsoft Skype Division and report directly to Ballmer.