Using only a laptop and readily-available online tools, Nate Anderson managed to expose 8,059 encrypted passwords in a matter of minutes:

I was at least in a position now to crack thousands of passwords in mere minutes. I could get everything from common passwords (iloveyou1, iloveyou13, iloveyou19, iloveyou81) to odd passwords (hahapoop3) to long passwords (rangefinder12) to passwords incorporating mixed case characters, numbers, and symbols (Jordan2!). Had I been the one who “liberated” this particular set of hashes, I would have been well-placed to wreak havoc on thousands of accounts—more than enough for some real mischief.

So if you use one password for everything, and it’s compromised on just one site through an attack like Anderson demonstrated, every online account you have could be compromised. Scary.

Some links to start your work week:

• **Focus your copy on what your customers need. **Nathan Berry walks us through his landing page copywriting process and reminds us that our copy should speak to our visitors’ needs and address a pain they have. His suggestion: “First write out the pains, then write out the reversal of those pains (dreams).”
• **No unsupervised thinking on checkout pages. **Graham Charleton explains why you should “enclose the checkout process” and limit the distractions that may keep your users from completing a transaction. That means cutting off the navigation links and other ways your customers can abandon the checkout. This is a great example of eliminating friction.
• **Content is independent of medium. **David Sleight argues that publishers should stop distinguishing between “real” and online content. An online newspaper is just as much a newspaper as one made of ink and paper.
• **Small changes can have big effects. **In a recent test, swapping out a single word on a signup button had a huge effect, David Kirkpatrick explains. The original button said “begin your free 30-day trial.” Amazingly, “changing ‘your’ to ‘my’ resulted in a 90% lift in sign-ups.

It has become almost a mantra among fundraisers: integrating your online and offline fundraising yields higher returns.

In my experience at Heritage, coördinating our direct mail and e-mail appeals brings in more money from both the online and the offline channels. This tracks with what Convio has found in its nonprofit benchmark reports (link in PDF).

But the Obama campaign, famous for testing every element of its work, did very little to integrate its online and offline efforts. That’s according to Steve Diagneault, who reports that “they hardly integrated with snail mail”:

The online program was mostly a separate entity from the direct mail stream. They used some of the same basic branding and content, but, by and large the channels were optimized to raise the most revenue possible, and that meant not integrating the details.

Does this mean the campaign didn’t even try to integrate its direct mail and online channels? Or that they tested it and found integration not to be worth the trouble?

If you have any insights, please let me know in the comments.

Harsh words for Google Reader aside, Aldo Cortesi offers an interesting analysis of the competitive landscape of the RSS reader market.

¶

Nathanael Yellis asks an important question: “why not make your organization’s emails more like the emails you send to your friends and colleagues?”

He’s right. There’s really no good reason not to do that.

Here are a few ways you can strengthen your organization’s e-mails to make them livelier, more interesting, and more personal:

• Include a salutation. Open your e-mails with a greeting: “Dear Jim,” or “Rebecca –.” That’s how you open your messages to your friends, right?
• Write your e-mails to one person. Remember, it’s an individual receiving your e-mail. Especially if you’re using a salutation, write to one person, not a group. Avoid at all costs language like “all of you” that’s addressed to a group. If it helps, keep one recipient in mind as you write.
• Be casual. Nobody writes an e-mail like they do a formal letter. So you shouldn’t either. Use short sentences and short paragraphs. When appropriate for clarity, break grammatical rules: start a sentence with a conjunction or end with a proposition.
• Use simple e-mail templates. Avoid the temptation to make e-mail templates pretty. Remember, an over-designed e-mail not only seems impersonal but may distract your readers from your message’s goal, whether it’s clicking or even just reading your content.

What else? What other elements can help make your e-mail marketing more human?