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- What’s Behind the Title of ‘Postmaster General’?
- What Can Posts Have That Google Never Will?
- A Paperless Life
- If Google Got Into Mail
- How the Posts are Uniquely Positioned to Cure the Fundamental Flaws of E-Mail as a Replacement for Physical Mail
- Are You Ready for the $10 Postage Stamp?
- What the Screen Actors Guild and Postal Unions Have in Common
- Earth Class Mail VP speaks before Postal Regulatory Commission
- Why Start-Up Leadership Isn’t for Everyone
- How Long Will Postal Mail Stick Around?
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What’s Behind the Title of ‘Postmaster General’?
By Ron Wiener, CEO and Postmaster General, Earth Class Mail
People are often curious why some of our senior management-team members append their corporate titles with classic “postal” titles. For example, our Chief Operating Officer is also our “Deputy Postmaster General.”
The practice started at our company a few years ago when we introduced the novel concept of Earth Class Mail online postal mail to the media and reporters often responded with confused looks. Sometimes it took them awhile to understand that we are not an email-service provider – that we instead bring analog paper mail into the digital age and provide an online alternative to traditional P.O. Box and mail-forwarding services. We tried to address this misperception by weaving the words ”post” and ”postal” into our website copy, press releases, and marketing materials – and, yes, even into our titles.
Our aim was simply to overcome the natural pattern-matching that occurs inside the human brain. When a person hears about a new concept the first thing she will try to do is match it up with something she is already familiar with ― to categorize it and learn what it is by comparison with the known. Because our company name is most often seen or repeated with a “.com” on the end of it, people sometimes automatically categorize us, at first blink, as an email platform. Read more
What Can Posts Have That Google Never Will?
By Cameron Powell, VP of Strategic Development, Earth Class Mail. A modified version of this article was requested for publication in the postal-industry media. Each image in this entry can be clicked to launch a larger version in a separate browser window.
People are always talking about Google. Google this, Google that. The talking heads say that Google – search, local, print, and wireless all in one – is the future of advertising. (More breaking news: the Google phone, “G1,” was just released to capture searches for and present advertising. Now back to our story.)
What they really mean, of course, is not Google the company but the new model Google has proven, because students of business know that like any father great or small, Google will eventually be overtaken or even eaten by its offspring. The connected-advertising model is growing at over 20% year after year, while mail volume is shrinking and will diminish for as long as the number of delivery points and the cost of gas go up. Is that why these smart people aren’t talking about the posts’ technology future?
What’s disturbing is that the posts aren’t talking about the posts either. Can it really be that they are too close to what they have, or too focused on what they have been doing, to see what they alone could do in the near future? Read more
If Google Got Into Mail
By Cameron Powell, VP of Strategic Development, Earth Class Mail. A modified version of this article was requested for publication by Postal Technology International.
Note: The views expressed in the following dramatization do not necessarily reflect the views of its author or of Earth Class Mail. The views do, however, reflect what people in an innovative, fast-moving, world-beating company might think and say.
If Google got into mail, mail would never look the same again. Google would digitize mail, move a larger and larger share of mail and mail readers to the Internet, and either take market share from traditional businesses or put them out of business entirely.
Early users of Google may recall reaching the search results pages and scratching their heads. How will these people make any money? you may recall asking. What’s their model? In the early days, Google did not have any paid ads. They displayed only what are now called the natural, or organic, search results.
Now we know. Google provided an extremely useful service that made life better. Only then did it introduce the advertising.
One can imagine Google would begin its assault on the beaches of mail by bringing its generals into one room and asking them the same question its founders asked when they started their search engine:
Sergey: Where is the expensive consultant?
Larry (pointing): He’s in the corner. He’s the one with the marker.
(Expensive Consultant raises his hand, the one with the marker).
Sergey: Tell him to write on the white board, “Strategic Objective.”
Larry (nodding at Expensive Consultant): Make it so. Read more
How the Posts are Uniquely Positioned to Cure the Fundamental Flaws of E-Mail as a Replacement for Physical Mail
By Ron Wiener, CEO & Postmaster General, Earth Class Mail (Note: This article will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Postal Technology International.)
It took posts three centuries to reach their peak worldwide volume of about 440 billion pieces of mail per year. Contrast that with email, which has exploded in popularity in just the past decade to the tune of over 50 billion messages per DAY (net of spam), not counting billions of additional MMS and SMS messages that these days may contain everything from utility bills to airline reservations, in addition to teenage girl chat. The one billion PCs in the world are like tiny post offices able to receive mail from anywhere in the world. Add in the sales of over a billion more portable, ultra-miniature post offices sold each year – cell phones, iPhones, Blackberries, et al. – and it is easy to see why email and text messaging have reached such behemoth levels of usage in such a short time span. Read more
Are You Ready for the $10 Postage Stamp?
By Ron Wiener, CEO & Postmaster General, Earth Class Mail
[Editor’s Note: This special feature article is longer than a blog article would normally be. It is part of the upcoming online publication entitled Earth Class Mail – The White Paper, Volume II. If you’ve never read Volume I, you can download it here.]
Might we see the USPS issue a $10 postage stamp in our lifetime?
It may not be such a ludicrous prospect. Given its scale economics the USPS is the most productive post in the world, processing about 212 billion pieces of mail per annum (48% of the world’s total volume of mail) with less than 800,000 employees. It delivers more mail per-household and per-business than any other nation, and it does so with the lowest ratio of letter carriers to mail volume.
Of course its capital equipment investment is also the greatest in the world, and its overall carbon footprint dwarfs that of any other national postal operator. Last year it spent $6.5 billion on energy, including the fuel to keep 220,000 trucks — the largest vehicle fleet in the world -– rolling from door to door throughout a vast geographical territory from the wilds of Alaska to the dense concrete jungle of Manhattan. Read more
What the Screen Actors Guild and Postal Unions Have in Common
By Ron Wiener, CEO & Postmaster General, Earth Class Mail
If you work in the postal industry — and especially if you are a member of a postal workers’ union — you may not have been paying much attention to the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) dispute with the entertainment industry, but you should be. While the SAG’s beef with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) isn’t over jobs but payscale, it’s fundamentally about how the Internet has irrefutably altered their industry’s business model.
In the good old days life was simple. Actors would get paid residuals on their work based on the revenues that their TV shows and movies generated when they were rebroadcast. Along came DVDs as a new distribution channel and the SAG had to renegotiate their union contracts based on this newfangled medium. But that was nothing compared to the much less definable world of Internet distribution.
Today a television show or movie could wind up being distributed for free on hulu.com, for a small download fee on iTunes, or on any number of other outlets. Actors are trying to protect their incomes at a time when it isn’t even clear what the revenue models are for the production companies in this brave new world, and negotiations have been arduous and, so far, not completely successful. Read more
How Long Will Postal Mail Stick Around?
By Ron Wiener, CEO, Earth Class Mail
Reporters, investors, and other people I meet often ask me, “How long do you think it will it be before postal mail goes away altogether?” Now, I’m in the alternative postal-mail delivery business. I’m also a technologist who built his first computer in high school 26 years ago. Not surprisingly, I may be somewhat biased in my response.
The postmaster general of the U.S. Postal Service, answering this question in front of Congress, or the CEO of Pitney Bowes, answering this question in front of Wall Street analysts, might also be somewhat biased in those situations. In light of pressure from labor unions and millions of postal workers, the paper- and printing-industry lobbyists, the direct-marketing industry, and decades of calcified tradition and habit, I don’t envy these officials’ public-facing responsibilities.
The long-term future of postal mail is a question that the founders of Earth Class Mail in fact had to answer for ourselves before we sunk millions of dollars into launching a business that ostensibly relies upon the continued existence of postal mail.
For a long time my favorite quip response to this question was, “There’ll be a paperless office when we’ll have a paperless toilet.” That quip served me well until an experienced world traveler pointed out to me that paperless toilets now exist in Japan. I’m now looking into buying one so that I can reduce my carbon footprint and never buy toilet paper again.
The forces of change can arrive in the form of blazing electrons, like the Internet, or glaciers that might move only a few inches per year. Many people say that postal organizations are more likely to embrace change on a geological time scale. Read more
The Inconvenient Truth about Unwanted-Mail Removal Services
By Ron Wiener, CEO, Earth Class Mail Corp.
Just about everyone complains that he or she gets too much “junk mail.” And everyone’s definition of the term varies by personal interests. One person’s junk mail is another’s beloved Sunday night bedtime-reading companion. The outdoorsman’s cherished Cabela’s catalog is junk mail to his wife, whose Pottery Barn catalog is junk mail to her husband.
The definition of junk mail is simple: Poorly targeted, unsolicited advertising mail is “junk” – to the unwitting recipient, to the shareholders of the company that sent it, and, most of all, to the environment. Various studies show that only 20-30% of junk mail gets recycled – most of it winds up in our landfills.
The problem is now more palpable than ever, as two recent trends have shown. First, U.S. residential mailboxes are now so oversaturated with competing pleadings for disposable income that marketers complain of ever-declining response rates, against a backdrop of ever-increasing postage rates. This economically lethal combination has led thousands of catalog companies and direct marketers to either go bankrupt or shift their advertising dollars to online channels instead.
Second, tens of millions of dollars of venture capital have flowed into a rapidly burgeoning junk-mail removal industry, whose companies include Greendimes.com, ProQuo.com, 41pounds.com, CatalogChoice.com, among others.
Every time one of these websites gets coverage on CNN or ABC News, the printing and postal industries reach for the defibrillator. Consumers have been signing up for these services by the millions, including the industry’s own “Mail Preference Service” operated by the Direct Marketing Association. Read more
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