Today, they even sent “Matthew” an invitation for the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference.
Problem is I don’t have a brother and haven’t planned (or ever thought about it for that matter) any gender-changing surgery.
Lori from the conference committee gave the explanation in a blog post posted yesterday:
Due to a mail merge snafu with our conference mailing lists, some folks received a “Save the Date” postcard this week that appeared to be addressed to an unknown sibling or spouse.
While I saw Lori’s post yesterday, I got “my” invitation in the mail today (yeah, I leave in a far far away corner of the world) just a couple of hours after reading the following excerpt in a very interesting article, ‘Dead-tree Medium’ No Longer: For Many Marketers, Print Outperforms Digital published yesterday in Knowledge @ Wharton:
According to Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow, print offers marketers a clear advantage over digital media, such as email. “Many people see email as impersonal and costless to write,” he says. “People want to feel special. In marketing [terms], email is transactional; paper is relational.”
Calling me “Matthew” sure makes me feel… very special.
Related posts:
- HighEdWeb 2008: Save the date and design the website!
- Have you submitted your design to the HighEdWeb Conference Design Contest? Don’t miss today’s deadline
- HighEdWeb 2008: Check out the redesigned conference website and submit your presentation proposal
- Special UB column about RSS: Matthew Winkel from The College of New Jersey
- Could Bowdoin College have found an efficient and cost-effective solution to the student portal problem?
Lin Larson on 
Julie on 
That is a fabulous story :-)
I think that those who actually think print out-performs digital because of personalization (and like we haven’t all figured out how a mail merge works at this point) have never truly tried to personalize the content of their e-communications. At my last job, I personalized e-mails up to 14 different fields. Now I’ll admit that variable digital printing can do some cool things that I’m not sure we can replicate over email (and still have them work in all the most popular clients) but to say that makes it more relational is ridiculous.
Hah! We got a good chuckle around campus comparing names. Had some pretty good combinations!
Heh. Interestingly enough, both my director and I got our “Save the Date” cards to wrong names.
Gotta love technology.
We got two here and they were both incorrect. We had crazy name combinations on ours (including a George ??). They’re hanging on a community bulletin board now.