Thursday, June 25 marked the return of Blue Sky Factory TV and our 14th episode! Watch the recorded version here.

I opened the show with the latest Blue Sky Factory video from the Inbound Marketing Summit. Nikki Schiavone talked with industry experts from HubSpot, Radian6, and Hoovers while in Dallas, and asked them about inbound marketing. Watch the video to find out what they had to say. (The video isn’t on the recorded version of the show - just on our YouTube channel.)

We introduced a new segment, “Marketing Rock Star of the Week”, on this episode. This week’s rock star is a well-known personality and Blue Sky Factory client, Gary Vaynerchuk, director of operations at Wine Library. Gary has most recently been seen on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Gary deserves a shout out for truly knowing how to market Wine Library and for rocking it out with Jimmy Fallon last week. Check out the segment here.

This week’s special guest was Joey Liner, executive vice president of sales at DoublePositive Marketing Group, Inc. DoublePositive provides sales professionals with live, qualified, and interested consumers, along with the customer’s data, all in real time. Joey and I talked about the benefits of using a service like DoublePositive’s, how it works with email marketing to be more effective, and different upcoming conferences in the marketing industry.

Melanie Sims, Blue Sky Factory’s support manager, joined me at the end of the show announce the new Publicaster Learning Center! The learning center is an interactive resource for the Publicaster community, including help guides, an FAQ section, discussion boards, and other email marketing resources. Blue Sky Factory clients can sign up here.

Tune in for this week’s episode. In honor of the holiday we’re having the Red, White & Blue Sky Pie Eating Contest! You don’t want to miss this. Tune in here.

The thirteenth episode of Blue Sky Factory TV aired on Thursday, June 11. Watch the recorded version here.

Jenny & Nikki opened the show with me, and we talked about recent industry events like the NEDMA Awards Show and the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. After the show we were headed to pour at the GBTC Summer Wine Tasting, so Jenny & Nikki’s “Top 5″ helped viewers determine what kind of email marketer they are based on the wine they drink.

Sean Carton, Chief Creative Officer of idfive, was this week’s special guest. Sean and I talked about the early days of the Internet (including stories of some early hacks), why Sean is not on Twitter (gasp!), and marketing for higher educational institutions. Sean also talked about balancing his busy schedule, which includes speaking engagements like the upcoming eduWEB Conference and his column for ClickZ.

Amy Hollomon gave the email marketing tip-of-the-week. This week’s tip was about the importance of landing pages for your email campaigns.

Blue Sky Factory TV will be on vacation this Thursday, June 18! Stay tuned for the June 25 episode with Joey Liner from Double Positive as the special guest. Tune in here.

The twelfth episode of Blue Sky Factory TV aired on Thursday, June 4. Watch the recorded version here.

Jenny Schuerholz and Nikki Schiavone helped me kick off the show with their “Top 5″. The email experts gave 5 reasons your email might need a face lift, and they did it Jeff Foxworthy/redneck-style. Watch for some useful tips for your email creative - and for a good laugh.

Amy Wielunksi was this week’s special guest. Amy is the membership director at WTMD, a local, listener-supported radio station. Amy talked about WTMD’s activity in the social media world, and how they make the most of social media marketing tools. We also talked about marketing for a non-profit organization and what strategies WTMD uses to make their events (like First Thursdays) a success. There was a lot of activity on Twitter and in the chatroom, so Amy took a lot of questions as well. She gave more information about membership benefits and other WTMD initiatives and activities.

Keith Nickoles, Blue Sky Factory’s creative director, gave the email marketing tip-of-the-week. Keith talked about the importance of having your email analyzed by a professional designer. Watch the show to find out why.

Next week’s special guest is Sean Carton, chief creative officer of idfive, helping clients understand the constantly changing intersections between design, marketing, communication, and technology. Tune in here next Thursday at 4 PM ET.

And don’t forget to check out our new Blue Sky Factory TV page. We switched things up a bit - let us know what you think!

The eleventh episode of Blue Sky Factory TV aired Thursday, May 28, and we were live at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Dallas. Watch the recorded version here.

Mike Volpe, vice president of marketing at HubSpot, opened the show with me, and we talked about upcoming industry events from Social Media Camp to the Social Fresh Cruise to HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing University. Mike told me more about HubSpot TV (tune in Fridays at 4 PM ET) and we talked about social media strategies in the real world (i.e. @SouthwestAir on Twitter).

Next, Amber Naslund, director of community for Radian6, joined me. Amber told us more about what she does as a director of community and how community management fits into a company’s overall marketing efforts. We also talked about monitoring a company in the social media world - what it takes and where you need to be, and Amber’s busy schedule led us to talk about traveling in the business world.

Join us next week as I’m back in the Blue Sky Factory studio. Amy Wielunski from WTMD, a Baltimore-based listener-supported radio station, will be the special guest, and we’ll talk about WTMD’s marketing efforts as a non-profit. Let us know if you have any questions for Amy or myself prior to the show. Send us a tweet - @blueskyfactory. Tune in here.

The 10th episode of Blue Sky Factory TV aired on Thursday, May 21. Watch the recorded version here.

Jenny and Nikki opened the show with me, and we talked about recent Blue Sky Factory events like the GBTC Golf Classic and the Inbound Marketing Boot Camp. We also announced the new hashtag on Twitter for Blue Sky Factory TV. If you’re tweeting about the show - or want to check out what other Twitterers have to say - please be sure to use #BSFTV.

This week’s “Top 5″ segment focused on the top 5 tips from the Email Exclusives series on our blog. Every week Amy Garland interviews a Blue Sky Factory client, and talks with them about how they use email and social media. The top tips included words of wisdom from Chris Brogan, the marketing team at Seiko, and other marketers using email and social media.

Tim Kassouf, marketing manager from G.1440, was this week’s special guest. G.1440 is a leading Baltimore IT staffing and consulting firm. Tim talked about G.1440’s new web security application, “Web Vulnerability Scan”, and why marketers should be concerned about web security. Tim also talked about branding with regards to your online marketing efforts as well as G.1440’s email marketing efforts - what works and what doesn’t.

Ilija Stevcev, a member of our product development team, gave the employee tip-of-the-week. Ilija talked about APIs (Application Programming Interface) and the importance of integrating them into your email campaigns.

We also gave away tickets to Brew at the Zoo from the Maryland Zoo. Kimberly Ritchie was the big winner! Thanks for watching, Kim!

Tune in next week - I’ll be airing live from the Inbound Marketing Summit in Dallas. See you then!

The 9th episode of Blue Sky Factory TV aired last Thursday, May 14. Watch the recorded version here.

As usual, Nikki and Jenny opened the show with me. This week’s “Top 5″ segment focused on tips for effective email subject lines.

Our special guest of the week was Mario Armstrong, radio/tv tech show host on NPR Morning Edition, XM, and WBAL-TV. Mario brought some Natty Boh with him, becoming the first official guest to drink a beer on Blue Sky Factory TV.

Mario and I talked about his new site, Tech Tech Boom!, a website developed specifically for high schoolers that helps teens connect, be inspired, supported, and motivated to pursue STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) academics and careers. We also talked about Mario’s upcoming weekly series, Baltimore Washington Tech Show, that will highlight Maryland and Washington D.C.’s hottest talent and tech companies in the region; and Mario brought tons of cool gadgets with him to show the audience.

Mario did his own trivia question, with the winner receiving a Peek and a year’s subscription to Wired. The winner, Vince Buscemi from MindGrub, answered the “true 80’s video game addict” question with “Galaxian”. Curious to what the question was? Tune in to find out!

Blue Sky Factory’s own Tim Barton made his debut on the show with the employee tip-of-the-week. Tim talked about the importance of knowing your competition. Follow your competitors and know what they’re doing, so you can do it better.

Once again, thanks to Flowers and Fancies, a local flower shop, for providing the set decorations. We got tons of compliments on this arrangement! Check it out here.

Tune in next week for the next episode of Blue Sky Factory TV with special guest Tim Kassouf from G.1440, a leading web design and development company.

Today we announced the availability of Share With Your Network (SWYN), a new feature allowing email subscribers to easily share email content with their social networks, merging email and social media into one platform.

With the increasing adoption of social media, marketing is a more immediate, direct, and two-way dialogue between brands and consumers than ever before. By adding the SWYN functionality to Publicaster, we’re able to harness the power of social media allowing email marketers the ability to share the content of an email, and extend its reach beyond the inbox and into some of the leading channels of social media.

Through a simple code snippet, we’ve allowed clients to give subscribers the option to share their message with friends on popular social media networks, including:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Digg
• MySpace

People turn to their friends, family, and colleagues for validation on products and services, so when your customers, prospects, and other contacts share your email, it automatically becomes a validated, more trustworthy endorsement. This extended reach gives each message the opportunity to become viral – and allows brands to grow their audience in a convenient and cost-effective way.

Clients are also able to run comprehensive campaign reports around this activity. Our reporting metrics not only allow marketers to see how many times a message was shared, but they can also see which networks were used to share the message, and the number of views and clicks each message received – based on the network that was used. Reporting also allows marketers the ability to pinpoint their influential subscribers, and target future messages based on this data.

If you’d like more information about this new feature, please contact us. We’d be happy to talk with you!

Blue Sky Factory TV aired live from San Francisco on Thursday, April 30! Watch the recorded version here. The seventh episode came on the heels of the Inbound Marketing Summit. Blue Sky Factory sponsored and exhibited at the event, and I spoke on the “Using Outbound Communications for the New Web to Drive Exposure and Results” panel.

Bebo was generous enough to let me air live from their headquarters. Now part of AOL, Bebo is a popular social networking site allowing users to organize and share their life online as well as easily connect with friends on the social web.

Frank Gruber, project lead for AOL’s Lifestream products, was the special guest this week. Frank writes an award-winning blog, Somewhat Frank, that offers candid editorial on Web & Personal Technology and Social Media. Frank and I talked about everything from Lifestream (Frank describes it as sharing snippets of information about everyday life) to technology startups to TECH cocktail, a startup offering events and community-powered projects open to bloggers, technology enthusiasts, and other professionals. Jean-Paul Cozzatti also joined us, and we talked about Bebo 2.0.

We’ll be back on the East Coast this week. I’ll be at NEDMA’s Annual Conference in Boston, so Blue Sky Factory’s COO, Doug Broujos, is hosting. Special guests will be Jen Krupey and Brian Williams from Viget Labs. Tune in at 4 PM ET here.

The sixth episode of Blue Sky Factory TV aired on Thursday, April 23, and we had a record number of viewers! Thanks to everyone who tuned in and participated in the chatroom. If you missed this week’s show, you can view the episode here, or check out this recap of what went down.

Jenny & Nikki helped me kick off the show with their “Top 5″ list. This week they provided tips on growing your email list organically, a hot topic for marketers - especially at a time when having a strong subscriber list is more important than ever. Jenny & Nikki not only gave their top 5, but they also rocked some major bling provided by Samuelson’s Diamonds, bringing me to our special guest of the week, Ron Samuelson.

Ron is the CEO of Samuelson’s Diamonds, buyers and sellers of the finest diamonds in the world. Ron and I talked about his Facebook fan page (he has 259,000+ fans!), JCK Las Vegas (we’re doing a roundtable discussion together called “Become a Digital “Rock” Star”), the local business scene, music (specifically the Grateful Dead), and, of course, diamonds.

We played some live music (US Blues to be exact), then Ron gave away a diamond necklace! Congratulations to the winner, Tina Flikas from Montreal!

Alex Waddell, a Blue Sky Factory support representative, gave the email marketing tip-of-the-week. Alex talked about the importance of using A/B Split Testing in email campaigns.

This week I’ll be airing live from San Francisco! We are sponsoring and exhibiting at the Inbound Marketing Summit taking place at the Marriott San Francisco tomorrow and Wednesday, so I’m going to hang out and broadcast from the west coast and talk with some of my friends who will also be at the event. Tune in at 4 PM ET here.

The fifth episode of Blue Sky Factory TV aired last Thursday, April 16. Watch the recorded version here.

Nikki Schiavone and Jenny Schuerholz helped me kick off the show with their weekly “Top 5″ segment. Nikki and Jenny gave the top 5 email marketing tips from Blue Sky Factory employees. From building your list organically to having fun with your email campaigns, Nikki and Jenny included some great tips for viewers to take away from the show.

Our special guest of the week was Ethan Giffin, CEO of Groove Commerce. Ethan and I talked about how to drive traffic to your website, then convert that traffic to leads. Ethan gave some really useful tips to viewers, and in turn we had a lot of solid questions and interaction from the viewers.

Melanie Sims, Blue Sky Factory’s support manager, gave the email marketing tip-of-the-week, which was about personalizing your emails. Collect information about your subscribers via opt-in forms and the subscriber preferences tool to keep your emails relevant to subscribers.

Blue Sky Factory TV airs every Thursday at 4 PM ET. Don’t miss this week’s guest, Ron Samuelson, CEO of Samuelson’s Diamonds. Ron and I may have a little surprise in store for you - hope you like live music! Tune in here.