Almost a month ago, I was the lucky person who got to write The Listserve message of the day.
In my message I talked about email and I asked people to respond in the hopes that I could engage people in the medium. Well, I am writing now to say it worked, sort of.
First of all, I got more than 2000 messages in response! A number so large that I haven’t actually been able to deal with them in a meaningful way. Many of them were simply replies but many of them were much more that I feel compelled to follow up with. (I think this may represent one of the problems with email ;-))
Part of my problem is that the reply address assigned to the message by the good folks the run The Listerve (shawn.van.every at thelistserve.com) was not not the same as the address I asked people to email (thelisterve at walking-productions.com), instead it had an autoreply. A week or so later they changed it so that the messages to that address were forwarded to me. They also forwarded me all of the messages that they had to that address as well. It now appears as though I have a bunch of duplicate messages.
This is the type of hiccup I really should have expected but I didn’t really think it through. I suppose if I had, I wouldn’t have done what I did and I would have missed out on the fun (and I am serious, reading these messages has been fun). When I get a chance, I hope to pare the number of messages down to unique senders and do another tally.
In any case, if you are someone who sent me a message, I am sorry for the delay and I am still working on the stats but for now I can say that roughly 2,000+ folks out of the 20,000+ on the list replied. A solid 10%!
I will do my best to send a response with the stats.
I’m one of those persons who replied. I’m very curious to know “what happened”. :D
Thanks so much for putting the time into this, and sending an email back! I’m sure it was a copy & paste thing but I really appreciate it none the less. After not hearing back from you I assumed the numbers were too large to put together.
It must be wonderful for all those who have sent listserve emails, but also incredibly overwhelming.
Happy new year to you as well!
I echo Veronica with the exception that I thought you just flaked out on the promise rather than too many responses.
It was awesome to get your email and unfortunate that there were duplication issues.
Tony
Wow!
I was also one of the people who replied your mail, I was so surprised to have recieved an answer! Thanks a lot for following through with it and have an awesome 2013 :)
Well done Shawn on an exciting project, utilizing the power of the Listserve community. Looking forward to the data! I can imagine how much time it will take, so pressure. :-)
James Preston
Durban – South Africa
Whoops! Meant to say NO pressure!! :-P
Thanks Everyone..
@James, I am sorry to say that I don’t think I’ll be going forward with any additional data collection beyond the raw numbers.
Right now, I am almost complete emailing everyone back. Hopefully I’ll finish over the next week.
Good for you to answer what you have answered! It was great hearing back from you! :) You interacted with 2,000 people!
thanks for taking the time to respond, shawn.
Thanks for the reply Shawn! I had forgotten completely; happy new year to you too.
Ditto – thanks for taking the time to email us personally. I also had forgotten about it :)
I also replied. To be honest, I can’t remember exactly what you meant to do with the data. I look forward to the results!
Hey! I just opened my email this morning and saw your reply. Thanks for being true to your word and responding after all this time! (Thought I’d reply here than send you an email as you must be pretty sick of them all by now ;-)
Thanks for the response and best of luck with wading through all the feedback!
A nice surprise to see this in my inbox this morning…