Between smart phones and desk jobs, people are checking their email at enormous rates. As a business, this can be an important way to reach customers. Yet, with an ever growing amount of spam and sales junk, people are learning to skim through their inbox, eyeing the most important emails and deleting or ignoring the rest. You don’t want to be one of those emails.

Still, ATYM Market Research found that 27% of people prefer company updates in the form of emails. Thus, there must be companies that have successful email tactics. The question is: what are they?

2012 is the year of the customer. With so many tools at their fingertips: Facebook, Twitter, etc, they are in the driver’s seat.  To get your emails up to speed, you should take advantage of exactly that.

Ask For Feedback

It is safe to assume you already have some sort of email newsletter right now. This will be a good start to deciphering what your customer wants. Through a simple feedback form, you can get instant information. Before you can hope to get any information, though, you need to get their attention. To do this, you should consider your subject line.

• People will react to numbers. Because you should be giving your customer a reward for their participation, use your subject to tell them what they’ll get. “60 points toward…” “30% off…”

Take to Social Media

Valuable tools you already have are your social media accounts. Whether you have a blog, Twitter account, or Facebook page, there are a variety of ways you can employ them for your benefit.

• An astounding 42% of people have mentioned a brand in their Twitter. Social media users want to be heard, all you have to do is listen. Here they air grievances, positive thoughts and questions, which are all hints into what they want to hear more of.
• Facebook is considered a more interactive network, and it’s here that you can post questions in your status updates.  A Constant Contact survey found that 77% of consumers interact with their favorite brands on Facebook via posts and updates. Posting questions here presents a valuable opportunity to get the information you need.
• Reading through the comment section in your blog is another easy way to find what your customers are looking for. This is a place for them to discuss what they think is missing within the post, what they like and what they question. Take this into consideration as well.

Sign up for competitor email newsletters

Apparently there are companies that currently have an email campaign that has been successful. Because every business and their cousin are offering an e-newsletter, sign up for a few. What do you like? What don’t you like? You aren’t taking ideas, simply contrasting current and potential ideas.

Focus Group

A focus group would be ideal. With an unbiased collection of people, who have been exposed to a variety of corporate emails, newsletters, etc, you can get invaluable information. Within this group you want to ask the right questions, and be very specific.

• What do you look for in emails from companies?
• What are the most appealing subject lines?
• What causes you to open an email?

Website Analytics

Social media marketing becomes more popular with each passing day, because of which there have been a variety of programs created to help businesses measure how effective they’re efforts are. While the software can be used for various information gathering, a program such as Google Analytics is able to give you important details to create a better email campaign. You can find out:

• What keywords brought them to your site? This is helpful in determining what your customer actually wants.
• What pages are they looking at? With this you can determine what products or information they are most interested in.

With all the tools you now have, it can be very easy to discover exactly what your customer wants. While it may take time to gather this information, and recreate your tactics, the tools are available and ready. When you figure out exactly how to use them, you’ll have no problem building the best customer emails.

Sharing a good bottle of wine with friends is simply a much richer experience than consuming one alone. Additionally, a mutual appreciation for the same types of wines you and your friends consume creates a far more substantial sharing experience. In this two part series, I’ll explore why mutual associations with brands will dramatically increase open rates and drastically reduce spam complaints, paving the way for better deliverability metrics, engagement and brand reputation.

As marketers, we put too much pressure on our subscribers.  First, we insist they recognize the label on our wine bottle, (The From: Name) then we expect them to read our subject line, and subsequently we hope subscribers actually “taste” (open) the email and glance at what we’re peddling.  If we haven’t lost their attention by now, we continue to plague them by asking them to share the given email using a functionality called SWYN (share with your network).  If that isn’t enough, we still yearn for a conversion…..and it all gets to be too much, ultimately, perhaps, pushing the subscriber away.

Messaging of this nature is still outbound.

What lies ahead is a significant evolution in email marketing which will work in concert with social networks to “reverse engineer” the social characteristics of email and bring social directly to your inbox.

Email offers will drastically change in the near future.  Next-generation emails will benefit from a deeper level of peer transparency. This new level of transparency will be earmarked by advanced or universal preference centers and highly intuitive sign up processes. By selectively capturing social media credentials of your subscribers, several layers of data points will become immediately available to harvest.  These socially focused data points will change ordinary subject lines to engaging peer notifications from a given brand.

Consider this:  you are far more inclined to “friend” someone on Facebook if you have mutual friends, correct?  And, you are more inclined to become a fan of a Facebook page if other members and colleagues of your social network are fans of that same page.  So, why not apply this same concept to email?

Industry statistics from Bazaarvoice illustrate that 74% of online shoppers who receive advice from their friends on social networks allow that advice to influence their purchasing decisions. Also, this article by Shiv Singh supports that statistic with its discussion of when and why we trust our peers when determining types of online purchases. Furthermore, in a recent Purchaser Influence Survey by EXPO, featured in emarketer.com, over 90% US Moms trust peer reviews more than manufacturer information. (Special Thanks to Anthony Schneider of Mass Transmit and Jeffrey Rohrs of ExactTarget for that snippet.)  With that said, we must reverse-engineer the current dynamic of outbound marketing based emails and bring our social networks to the coveted inbox.  At its core, should be a socially focused “über-email” program which acts as your brand’s private reserve.

Shoppers of a given brand instinctively want to know what “a subset of their trusted friends” bought online.  Similarly, shoppers also want to know what their friends think about those same products before they decide to purchase them.  Our marketing based email messaging should produce unbiased, first-hand knowledge of how our social networks “feel” about a product, not a subjective marketing message from your brand with ordinary subject lines.  Moreover, user-generated content is comprised of written and/or video testimonials of a product or service.  But, these testimonials which are often placed in an email, or on a brand’s landing page come from random people we don’t necessarily know. These testimonials although sincere in nature, don’t reverberate.

Reverse engineering social email

Would you like to know if any of your friends subscribe to the same brands as you do?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see which of your friends reviewed that new trendy restaurant on Yelp? Would receiving immediate notifications from peer actions with the brand build trust, directly after that review?

Currently, dynamic content in email allows us to customize a message to a particular segment or to an individual on your list, based on attributes in their profile.  We’ve learned that FedEx has as many as 144 attributes for a given record, which allows for granular customization of each email communication for each given email stream.  With increased social media data points culled together through an evolved master preference center adds an increasingly richer dimension for email marketers.  With these richer dimensions comes pinpoint information about your friends’ recent actions associated with a given brand.

Savvy marketers will ameliorate the quality of such social media data points by dynamically inserting social attributes into a given email program. This concept completely reverses the current outbound system which is somewhat dysfunctional, because marketers still rely on subscribers outbound actions. The evolution of such a program will bring these messages to the inbox and will have far superior return on your email marketing investments, because this messaging adds increased value for the subscribers.  More value equals a more relevant email. With more relevant messaging comes drastically reduced spam complaints and dramatically increased open rates.

Let’s say you received an email from Barnes and Noble.  And, Barnes and Noble has been granted permission by you and many members of your social network, to publish information about actions your social network is undertaking with Barnes and Noble. Images of your friends may be dynamically and creatively populated in the creative, so when you open up your email, not only will you see friends’ images with links to their social media pages, you’ll also know which of them are subscribers, and which ones purchased that new Stephan King book Barnes and Noble is featuring.  What’s more is that the subject line will be highly engaging because it’s about your network “first” and not about the item being featured.

Part II of this series will discuss the challenges associated with this concept and why future marketing based subject lines will no longer matter.
Subject lines will become highly relevant notifications, and how these “relevant notifications” will increase open rates and dramatically reduce spam complaints.

The fear of a bad reputation or negative feedback keeps many businesses from engaging in conversations with customers and prospects on social media. At the basis of this are often misconceptions and a lack of strategies to efficiently monitor, analyze and respond to online feedback.

This leads to missed opportunities and often to wrong investments of time, resources and budgets in tools, practices and efforts that provide no business value.

Monitoring and analyzing online sentiment, reputation, trends, influencers and conversations must lead to insights and actions. It must be measured and is a must for businesses that care about what people say and do and about their brand.

Social marketing is still unknown territory for many businesses. If you have been working with social media for a longer time, you know that most of the brand reputation and negative feedback related fears with social media marketing,  are what they are: fears. However, many businesses do not have this experience yet and are still just exploring the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and (perceived) threats of social media and public online feedback.

Every day, people and businesses tell me that, regarding social media, they are most of all concerned about a “bad” reputation or criticism. In a way it’s normal: for many businesses the whole social media phenomenon is new and overwhelming. That is all too often forgotten by early adopters and experts.

However, the fear for the extent of possible criticism on social media and Internet is not realistic and a clear illustration that many organizations are not used to really listening to what people say. Businesses also often fear that they will need too many resources to deal with all the criticism.

What they unfortunately fail to see is that social media feedback and interaction offers a huge opportunity to gain business and customer insights, detect trends, enhance communication and improve the customer experience.

3 things you should understand about social media monitoring, reputation and sentiment:

1. Social media monitoring, sentiment and reputation management are not a matter of constantly being on guard as a watchdog. Brand equity matters, but you do not strengthen it by ignoring or silencing online feedback.
2. One doesn’t always have to respond immediately, or even at all, to every form of criticism everywhere all the time. Yes, we live in a world with increasing customer expectations and both positive and negative customer experiences can travel fast. And, yes, customer service and relationship marketing are key factors, but business is still a combination of customer satisfaction, the bottom-line, selling and ROI.
3. Companies that are active in social media often take on a defensive attitude and are prepared with a small army of opinion makers and brand advocates to stamp out the negative buzz as it were. There is no need for that. Even a seemingly negative social comment can be an opportunity if you react positively and constructively.

Social media phobias cost.

• You invest more time and resources than needed
• The ROI of such practices is negative
• You don’t help your clients at all
• Traditional “PR” tactics are likely to be viewed as insincere by social media users
• You don’t focus on your core business and value creation processes
• Fear keeps you away from one of the main information and communication channels your prospects and customers use: social media

Are there threats? Yes, you always have the malcontent former employee, unethical competitor or eternal complainer.

So what do you do?

• You monitor and analyze in a structured and efficient way
• You use the thus gained insights to improve your communication strategy
• You ensure an optimal customer experience
• You define a reputation management plan
• You define the resources and structural needs to put it in place
• You listen to feedback and respond correctly
• You define some guidelines
• You offer people channels to give feedback
• You keep the communication lines open
• You measure and improve
• You don’t just listen, you act
• You use a tool that enables you to act

But most of all: you act, react, interact and focus on the positive instead of the negative.

Takeaway: Negative feedback and reviews are not a threat but an opportunity if you listen and act the right way.

There’s one thing I can promise you about social media, email marketing and the internet in general and that is that you will screw up at some point. It might be a small misstep or it could be a rake slamming right into your face, but you will have to deal with an “oops” or worse at some point.

In the past, traditional channels and the push marketing model meant that at worse, if marketers made an error, they would perhaps have to deal with only a few critical voices and could (in most cases) hunker down till the storm clouds passed. Social media and the switch to pull marketing has changed all this and while no one likes to have people looking over their shoulder, the fact is that today, it’s a reality and we simply have to be far more accessible and accountable.

So, what do you do when you make a mistake? Well, it’s certainly not rocket science. In most cases, you can lift yourself out of these pitfalls with common sense, transparency and sincerity – not too mention some humility.

Apologize and take responsibility

Life is 90 percent made up of how you react to any given situation. The only real control you have is how you react. You can’t control the reactions of others, but you can step up, acknowledge your actions have caused a negative response and apologize for that. Reacting in a negative or defensive way will guarantee more negative backlash.

Respect the vent zone and don’t take it personally

This isn’t about being right and it sure isn’t about you having four more years of college in marketing than any of the people you’ve upset. Don’t take it personally because it’s not a personal issue and it won’t be a seriously negative reflection on your character unless you make it one by reacting in a negative way.

Don’t delete or censor reasonable negative comments on Facebook or your blog. Let  people have heir say and view these comments as an invitation for you to demonstrate your sincerity in your responses. Censorship assures people will get even more upset with you and increase the volume.

Tell them how you will fix it

Have a plan on how you will address the error and post it to your blog then point people on other channels such as Twitter back to the post.

Be grateful

Thank those who took the time to point out the error or misstep and be sincere about it. If the problem was in a brick and mortar, wouldn’t you want to know something needed to be fixed, rather than people just quietly leaving your business to shop elsewhere?

Rise up

The information super highway is littered with brand road kill because some marketers decided to react badly and let pride go before the fall. It’s no different online than in real life; the most important thing is not so much how you fall, but how you rise.

With a joined up strategy, the channels can support each other and become more than the sum of their parts. With that in mind, more ‘traditional’ email marketing should be adapted to complement social marketing. Here’s my five tips on how to do just that.

1. Socialise your email audience
Links that drive users to join your social accounts are easy to add to existing email templates, and with minimal effort can serve to boost follower counts. Of course, once your subscribers are following you, it’s down to good social strategy to ensure they’re engaged – follower numbers on their own don’t mean that much. Aspirational marketers may create specific campaigns that encourage their email audience to join them on social networks, for example by using competitions or a discount as an incentive.

2. Virally share email campaigns
The facility for a user to post a marketing email on social networks (typically referred to as ‘Share With Your Network’) is now one of the standard features on most email platforms. It allows a user to share either the email itself, or similar content from a website, with their friends and extended network – which in turn gives marketers increased exposure. As you might expect, the content that tends to be shared the most includes competitions, compelling offers and product launches – it’s vital to think about what you’re asking your audience to share, and which networks they’re likely to use.

3. Acquire social users into email
Whilst many marketers look to ‘socialise’ their email list, there is also a lot of value in doing the reverse – encouraging your social audience to also receive your email campaigns. As an audience starts to become engaged with the brand in multiple channels, marketers can then become more relevant in terms of communicating a message using the right channel at the right time. Simple ways to drive a social audience to also engage via email include adding email signup forms to Facebook pages, using in-stream signup modules and using Twitter to direct users to a signup page.

4. Look at social data to inform your marketing efforts
Using off the shelf analytics tools, or even good old Twitter search, marketers can access a significant amount of insight from social networks. Aspirational marketers can, for example, look at social media to find out when users are most engaged about a brand, or what type of content excites the target market, and then use this knowledge to inform their message and increase the relevance of their email campaigns across the board.

5. Combine your email and social audience to drive acquisition
‘Member Get Member’ isn’t a new concept – it’s been used in email circles for years to encourage mailing list members to recommend their friends to join in. This viral concept is built into the ethos of social networks, and marketers can take advantage of this by producing interesting campaigns that encourage the existing member base to involve their friends, and thereby introduce them to your brand.

With so many ways to integrate email and social media we have almost unlimited options for leveraging connection between these two powerful conversation marketing channels.  Still, for those at the beginning of the process it pays to know where to start.

I’m often asked what the number one way to connect email and social media marketing is, so whether your presence on social media is brand new or you’re an experienced marketer wanting to make sure you don’t overlook the obvious, here’s my answer:

Use email marketing to invite connections on social media

This of course assumes you have a presence on at least one of the big three social networks – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – if not also on others like YouTube, Ning and Meetup.

Why start with something so simple and obvious? Here are three good reasons why and a few ideas how:

1) Leverage Your Broadest and Most Established Online Channel to Build Connections in New Channels Today it’s still true that a greater percentage of your customers use email than social media.  That makes email the broadest online channel you have to invite customers to engage with you in any other channel – online or offline – especially emerging channels like social.  It’s probably also the oldest (and for some, still the only) online communication channel you have with your customers, so chances are, not only are more of your customers reachable via email than social, they’re also more comfortable with and open to hearing from you through email than social media.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip: leverage email marketing messages to entice, invite and remind subscribers that you’re present and interested in engaging with them on social media.  You can use email to do this in a variety of ways: a) through dedicated email invites and announcements to visit and “like” you on social media sites, b) through Facebook-based contests (where a visit and “like” of the page is required for entry), and c) by embedding in email messages social media connection icons that link to your corresponding pages on those networks (now common practice).

2) Hedge against Email List Attrition. Using email to stimulate social media connections is a hedge against losing a customer connection in the email channel.  If and when an email subscriber does want to leave your list, provided they’re connected with you on social media you can still engage and communicate with them there.  And that’s better than not at all.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip: Recognize that as marketing channels continue to proliferate, people have more choice than ever.  Some email subscribers will leave your list and instead prefer to connect with you on social media.  Some social media fans will never subscribe to your email list. Honor preferences and don’t unreasonably expect everyone to connect with you in every channel.

3) Multiple Channels = More Valuable Customers.  It’s a continually proven marketing truth that customers who engage in more than one channel purchase more often and spend more overall than customers who only interact in a single channel.  While email is an ideal broadcast and targeted messaging channel, social media is a highly interactive and more conversational than email.  The two separately are ideal for different types of messages, but when used together can create powerful, deeper engagement with customers that translates into more sales and higher lifetime customer value.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip: Don’t overlook email’s potential to initiate a conversation or process which you then continue on social media.  It’s likely you’ll receive most customer ideas, suggestions, feedback, reviews and ratings through your social media points of presence.  You can even use email to intentionally solicit that sort of input, which you’ll then gather on your social media pages, blog or through surveys.  Since email is your broadest online channel, use it to launch a request for feedback, then transfer that conversation, discussion or interactivity to the context it’s best suited for: the social network.

Of course, we’re rarely limited to just a single way of doing anything, although we may have to tackle one method at a time.  After leveraging your email to invite connections on social media, you’re ready to do just the opposite: use social media to build your email list. I’ll have a bundle of suggestions for why and how to do so in an upcoming article.

Email seems to get shorted.

What’s the deal Forrester?

As Cotton Delo continues to explain the data’s she’s read, she quotes, “Email marketing is projected to have a growth rate of 10%, bringing it to $2.5 billion in 2016, but the total spending is kept down because of its low cost of reach 1,000 consumers, or CPM.” While I agree that email marketing is an inexpensive channel to use, this doesn’t seem completely correct. Now; I’m no statistician and I’m not an expert on industry growth, but this chart just doesn’t sit well with me – nor does the logic. The social and mobile channels are undoubtedly, “hot right now” and with the overall spend doubling there’s room for aggressive growth between the mediums, I just don’t see how with all the other mediums going balls-to-the-wall email isn’t going to leverage the data they collect.

The goal of each channel in this report is to somehow generate revenue. Most of these channels are measured via revenue through e-commerce as offline revenue is typically harder to trace back to online efforts. So, I think it’s safe to say that these are all evaluated by majority, online.

How do we do that? Websites.

What do websites need to process: sign ups, registrations, memberships, purchases, affiliates, renewals, rewards, alerts, etc? Data.

And finally; what’s email so-so very-very good at? Transaction-based messaging and providing a positive dollar-to-dollar ROI. I don’t see how tandem channels can grow around email to the tune of 38% and email manages to up-tick 10%.

Will Email Marketing Only Grow Ten Points?

I have to say no. I must say no. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Almost every social network that I can think of uses email, every website that I’ve purchased something on emails me, the majority of my mobile activity is email, and display and search all have a goal to either capture users or sell something – ALL mediums can leverage email in some capacity. And they will, once companies see how much measurable straight-to-the-cash-register effective email can be with their messaging. Data is the key for the internet’s future; the most successful outbound acquisition/retention channel for interactive data-driven initiatives is arguably, email.

While increasing the budget over the next 48 months is positive and any growth is good growth, I think Forrester’s selling us short emailers.

What do you think?

Viva la Email

Facebook has been hyped to the point where some marketers have pronounced email to be dead. Of course, it should be intuitive that as long as people still have email addresses, email can’t be dead. Email marketing reaches people where Facebook can’t. Just like Facebook reaches people where email can’t. That’s why the two must work together to reach the broadest possible audience. Facebook reaches the “everyone else” of email marketing, and email marketing reaches the “everyone else” of Facebook. Successful marketing campaigns must learn to integrate the two for greatest effect. Here’s how to get started:

• Provide email signup options on your Facebook page and Facebook like buttons in your emails. Make it possible for people to engage with your company wherever they encounter you. Asking them to sign up for additional marketing options keeps your company in the forefront of their minds as often as possible.

• Promote Facebook contests in email and announce the winners in an email newsletter.  Let your email subscribers know what they’re missing out on by not being a fan on Facebook. You can use Facebook pictures to showcase your winners, but always get permission and give the subscriber an opportunity to choose which picture he wants you to use.

• Promote email marketing contests by asking people to provide their email address on your Facebook page.  Again, let people know they’re missing out by participating in only one of your marketing venues. If you intend to add these addresses to your subscriber list, make sure your viewers know that up front or you could end up with disgruntled subscribers.

• Use the same design in both places for continuity between venues.  People shouldn’t wonder whether the email they got was delivered by the same company who created that awesome Facebook page. It’s important to create brand recognition across multiple venues, so make sure your social media and email follow the same basic design structure.

• Recognize the differences between Facebook and email.  Email remains much more personal than Facebook—perhaps even more so since people don’t have to give their email addresses out in order to stay in touch. Most people guard their email addresses much more closely than their Facebook pages and will unsubscribe quickly if you bombard them with unwanted messages. To remain on the nice list, keep emails on point and make sure each one provides something of value.

Email and Facebook can work together to accomplish the same marketing goals as long as you recognize and respect the differences between them. eConnect Email can help you create opt-in forms, manage subscriber preferences, and create custom email templates that will keep your audience engaged, no matter where they encounter your brand.

This question was recently posed in a private online marketing group I belong to called Only Influencers: “If I can tweet five times a day, why can’t I email five times a day?”

Keep in mind Only Influencers is an invitation-only group of highly experienced and savvy digital marketers (most of the industry’s “big names” in email already belong) from established and well-known brands, so they were not flippantly, but seriously, pondering the messaging norms we’ve come to think of as “acceptable” in different online marketing channels.  The question and the depth of discussion around it made me think, Why can’t we? And if we can’t or don’t or won’t, why not?

Here’s my take on the question. I’d love to hear yours too so please share it in comments below.

I’m all for greater email frequency when it’s relevant and useful to recipients at least as much as to marketers.  However, there are obvious fundamental differences between email and social media: the two that relate most to this question are

1) the differences in how people interact with email vs. social media, and 2) their expectations of messaging in each medium.

When it comes to the average inbox, most people still feel compelled to process every email message that arrives in their inbox. This “processing” can be a quick skim of message subject lines in order to decide what to open and read vs. delete. It might also be to check various folders at different intervals, as many inbox owners auto-route different types of email (or email from different senders) to different folders. Whatever the message triage process, every message is at least glanced at and accounted for in the average inbox, even if it’s for a swift move to the junk bin.

Not so with social media.  Twitter and Facebook are point-in-time communication streams much more than email is. I don’t think most people expect to read every wall post from every single friend in Facebook, or every Tweet from those they follow on Twitter.  (Those that try quickly find their eyes glued to a screen sixteen hours a day). Rather, because our eyes need to be other places, like on the road or watching the kids or, say, closed when sleeping, people logically jump in and out of these networks when they have time or are specifically prompted.

The bottom line: there’s a great sense of spontaneity in social media whereas there is still a sense of obligation centered around email.

All of which means it makes perfect sense to have high frequency and even intentional redundancy in your social media messaging because one can safely assume the average social media friend/follower won’t see all – or even close to all – of your status updates, only a fraction of them.  You want to catch people while they’re in the social network interface, knowing that will be different times for different people and that if you don’t catch them while they’re there they likely will not see your previous or subsequent communications ever.

With email on the other hand, repetition and high frequency is much more noticed and if not relevant, HIGHLY irritating, because once people do get around to checking their inbox ALL of your communications are there waiting for them in one place.  They’ll see the entire chronological stream so if you’re repeating messages without relevancy, they won’t understand why because there’s nothing in it for them.

While I recognize there is value in frequency from a brand impression and recall standpoint (meaning even being in the inbox with substantially the same message multiple times can boost brand recognition), if you’re planning on increasing email frequency, at least consider a creative tactic such as a sequence that tells a story or breaks a topic into shorter more frequent messages and relevantly justifies why you’re sending more often.  People enjoy connecting the dots and will follow a series to its conclusion, but don’t appreciate being beat over the head with boring redundant messages repeatedly.

The real question may not be why you can’t email five times a day, but this: What do you have to email that warrants it?

In other words, how do you justify your email frequency? Have you tested it to the point of diminishing returns in response and an increase in unsubscribes? Do you maintain low frequency in fear of complaints or high frequency in the face of them? Is every email you send useful and relevant, or repetitive and self-serving? These are worthy questions deserving exploration. I encourage you to give them serious thought, or put some solid tests into place to prove or disprove your assumptions.

If you’re a business owner, marketer, agency or consultant interested in joining Only Influencers and posing questions and discussions there, tell me in comments below if you’d like to be nominated and why (but first, it pays to read the qualifications for membership here).  If you’re a social media marketer there is currently a free six month trial membership available. The group is invite-only and the membership investment is (a well worth it) $20 per month or $200 a year.

Email Marketing Gone Social by GraphicMail

What you are going to learn:

Social media is the wave of the future. In the US YouTube and Facebook are already
gaining more traffic than Google! If social media is this powerful, imagine what you
can do with the combined performance of email marketing and social media.

Email as a traditional online marketing channel continues to show immeasurable success for businesses as a direct marketing tool. Social sites have now gained momentous popularity as well and have shifted the way people communicate. However, these two platforms are not so much in competition as they pose very different advantages.

Read this WhitePaper and learn about why 2011 has been termed “The Integration Economy” as social media is integrated and used for buildingbusiness.

Topic covered:

• An online marketing evolution
• Email marketing and social sites partner up
• Objectives for integrating Email and Social Media – June 2010
• The benefits of email marketing and social media integration
• Best practices for your social media presence

Publish Date: 2011

Author: Barbara Ulmi

Number of Pages: 18

Editor’s note: It’s a pleasure to welcome social media marketing blogger, Xan Pearson as a guest poster with The eMail Guide! She’s a very creative writer and offers some fantastic insight into social media and social marketing! Let us know what you think!

As a child I used to watch old Western movies on TV with my dad.  I didn’t particularly like movies about cowboys and gunfights, but I enjoyed spending time with my dad, so I watched a lot of them.  In many of the Westerns, there would be a slick traveling salesman, peddling a fake elixir (snake oil) purported to cure all ailments.  The exaggerated character of the “snake oil salesman” was marked by boisterous, obnoxious marketing hype, typically bogus.

Now, as an adult, whenever I see a smooth-talking, insincere person trying to sell something, the image of a snake oil salesman pops into my head.  I see it every day: on infomercials, in business, at the mall, and in social media.  Sometimes the product is great, but the salesperson is too pushy or just comes across as disingenuous.  And therein lies the pitfall for many people and businesses using social media.   Whether you’re a large corporation, small business, or individual trying to drive traffic to a blog, how others perceive you can make or break your brand’s success.  Are you coming across as a social media “snake oil salesman”?  Here are 5 warning signs you may be harming your brand:

1.   You send out a DM to every new follower with a link to your site. Chances are most people will ignore your DM, and you run the risk of being blocked and reported as spam. Would you ask someone you just met face-to-face to do you a favor?  The approach appears pushy and your motives seem insincere.  Instead, start communicating with your followers and build a relationship of mutual respect and trust.  I have many friends in social media who know that I will always RT a new blog post or support them in any way I can.  I welcome their requests, but this came over time, after we had connected and gotten to know each other.

2.   All of your posts are links to your site. This comes across as desperate and, again, spammy.  Social media is not traditional advertising.  If you only want to talk about yourself, buy an ad.  The “social” in social media implies engagement.  Share insightful content with your followers, comment on or retweet their posts, and ask questions.  As people get to know you, they will be more apt to go to your blog or website.

3.  You post random shout outs in stream asking people to follow you, check out a site or RT a post. I see this a lot with newbies on Twitter who think it’s a fast way to drive traffic to a website or accumulate followers.  It’s highly ineffective and most people will ignore you.  It’s the equivalent of the peddler on the street corner shouting at passerbys.  Social media marketing takes time, and you need to put in the effort to establish a social network and loyal following.  If you aren’t willing to do that or don’t have the time, maybe you should reconsider whether social media is the best marketing medium for you.

4.   You use exaggerated claims. These are all over social media and they give the appearance of lack of confidence in the true merits of the products.  “Become the next Donald Trump”; “Earn $3,000 in one week”; “Get 1,000 followers a day”.  This is one of the quickest ways to destroy your reputation/ brand and become labeled a “snake-oil salesman”.   If you want to build trust, be honest.  Tip: If you only have 500 followers on Twitter, don’t post “I got 2,000 followers in one week using *XXXX* site.”  Just sayin’.

5.   You ignore complaints. By ignoring negative comments on your blog or about your product, you fuel negativity rather than mitigate it.  In the Westerns, whenever someone shouted out “Charlatan!”, the snake oil salesman’s accomplice would come along and knock them out with the butt of his gun (all in front of a miraculously oblivious crowd), while the salesman continued to shout the merits of his product as though nothing happened.  In social media, no one is there to stifle your critics (and your audience will not be as oblivious to your lack of response).  Only you can quell negativity, by addressing complaints and detractors with professionalism and sincerity.  This exhibits confidence in your product and respect for your customers/followers.

Takeaway: Whether you are new to social media or wondering why you haven’t been able to drive traffic to your site, take a moment to reflect on your approach and how you may be perceived.  You can have the best product or the most insightful blog, but if you appear too slick or insincere, you will alienate followers.

Agree or disagree? Let us know your thoughts! Drop a comment!

By: Outspoken Media

I have to tell you, when I got this June 15th DM from Lisa, I was intrigued. We traded a few DMs & emails, tossed around some sarcasm, and finished off with some awkward Google+ exchanges. Lisa then announced publicly (gasp!) that I “bathe in awesome.” Add two killer guest posts this week from Ben Cook and Norcross and wow, talk about pressure…

Prior to my recent “career pause”, I included the following sentence in my professional bio:

DJ is known to eat, sleep, breathe, and sometimes dream email marketing.

Drizzle in some social media to that bio and I really get pumped. Seriously, I love email marketing. I love social media. Combine them and … wow. Awesome. But here’s the problem: Most people suck at email marketing. Most people also suck at social media. Suck + Suck (usually) = More Suck. So, before you read any further, be sure your own email marketing does not suck.

For those that made the cut…

Batman (Email Marketing) & Robin (Social Media)

Email marketing is to Batman as social media is to Robin.

Email marketing is the old stalwart. In internet years, email is ancient. BUT, it has a proven ROI ($43.62). Everyone does it. If I had to bet, you’ve checked email at least once this week. You’ve likely even checked it today. It’s possible that you’ve checked it while reading this post. Email is not dead.

When it comes to social media marketing, there are just as many ‘do nots’ as there are ‘dos’. The most effective social media marketing presences are not always those that spend the most time on their social media campaigns, but those that spend the smartest time on their marketing efforts.

There are not that many rules to follow when it comes to social media. Yes, there are guidelines, and there are certainly best practices, but when it comes to pure rules, the world of social media is remarkably self-regulating.

However, this does leave potential problems for businesses and individuals. With the wrong strategy, you could end up alienating a potentially great community.

Sometimes an anti-example is all you need to set a marketing plan into motion.  Here are five anti-tips that are perfect for creating a model of what not to do for your social media marketing:

1. Treat your social media fans like complete idiots

It is such a rudimentary error, but it still affects hundreds of online marketing campaigns. The average consumer takes in hundreds of advertisements on a daily basis, and is distinctly in tune with advertising trends and styles. Marketing to an audience as if they were blissfully unaware of your intentions is ineffective and disrespectful.

Be welcoming, be friendly, and be transparent. The online world thrives on openness, and an open campaign is one that does not judge its audience.

2. Market to your online community directly

The internet can be a great platform for direct response marketing, but more often than not, social media platforms are not the place to do it. When used as a marketing research platform, social media channels thrive. When used as a marketing platform on their own, it is easy to lose a potentially lucrative audience through direct marketing on social media.

3. Monetize your social media efforts right away

There is a belief, particularly amongst businesses that have only recently transitioned to the internet, that services need to be monetized instantly to have any real value. When applied to some marketing campaigns and services, this might sometimes work, but for social media it’s often a mistake.

When you start investing in social media marketing, build up an audience that you can monetize in the future. Of course this does not mean that you don’t have a strategy, KPI’s, metrics and ROI forecasts. Thousands of people will join you when they are not being asked for money, and a great portion will stay once you have built a connection and gradually monetized your efforts.

4. Be on all social media and networks at once

Spreading yourself across multiple social media platforms only segments and splits your fanbase. While you may have a really large fanbase, it is so fragmented and difficult to communicate with that it is essentially valueless.

Focus on one or two different social media platforms and ruthlessly eliminate those that are not effective to your business.

5. Force yourself to do social media marketing and engage your community

Social media marketing should not be stressful. It could be difficult at times; it could be tiring at times; it even could be exhausting at times, but it should never be a stressful activity. When you are building an audience, make it fun for yourself, not just them. Keeping things interesting makes long-term marketing easier for you and your audience.

Takeaway: In social media being subtle and establishing connections is key. Trying too hard or talking too much rather than listening is a sure way to fail.

By: Mashable

Today we acknowledge and celebrate the revolution of media becoming social. A day that honors the technological and societal advancements that have allowed us to have a dialogue, to connect and to engage not only the creators of media, but perhaps more importantly, one another.

It’s a day to celebrate the changes in media that have empowered us to stay connected to information in real time, the tools that have enabled us to communicate from miles apart, and the platforms that have given a voice to the voiceless and victims of protest injustice. It’s a revolution worth celebrating. Today, we celebrate Social Media Day and we hope you’ll join us.

So how do you participate? Being social, of course. You can do this online by tracking the social updates in various ways as listed below, or you can make some connections offline by attending an event near you. There are more than 600+ meetups in 93 countries today with thousands of attendees. As far as we know, there is no official holiday dedicated to social media. We think it deserves a day of it’s own, and what better way to celebrate than to connect with your local social media community?

There are lot’s creative events planned from panels, to charity fundraisers and even sporting tournaments. Below is a message from our very own Pete Cashmore explaining the idea, reasons for and goals behind Social Media Day:

I’m often asked what I believe to be the number one way to connect email and social media marketing.  Last month I tackled that question from the starting point of email.  This month I’m addressing it from the perspective of social media.

Both connecting email to social and using social to strengthen and grow email matter because linking email and social media both ways is important. So if you have a strong or growing presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or more, what’s the best way to leverage it for expanding your email program?

Well, it rather depends on which social network we’re talking about, but in a nutshell, here’s the answer: Invite and entice your social community members to sign-up for your email program! (Duh, right?) Yet it’s not what you do, but how you do it that matters and determines your success rate. Let’s take a closer look at the how’s of inviting email sign-ups and gathering email addresses from friends and followers on the big three social networks:

1) Facebook – the beauty of Facebook is you have a lot of screen real estate to work with, so be sure to develop a custom business page with a visually attractive email opt-in, e-newsletter sign-up, or other form of registration that gathers an email address.  Logically the first response to ask a new Facebook page visitor for is a “Like”, but as soon as they have liked you, you can display a page that explains the benefits they’ll now receive by being connected to you in social media and also invites them to join your email program.

You invite them into email by offering valuable content accessible only when they sign-up, or just explaining the exclusive notices and treatment your email subscribers routinely receive. The point is, don’t just go for the “like” (remember, you don’t “own” your Facebook page – Facebook does!); gather a digital point of contact that is your gateway into longer, more personal messaging.

2) Twitter – Twitter is a little different. You have some real estate to post links or opt-in invitations on your Twitter profile page, but not as much room or depth as on Facebook. So on Twitter, use your tweets themselves to invite, entice and explain the benefits of opting-in to your email. People need to be gently reminded there are multiple ways to get the best deals, exclusive offers and information from you, but don’t over-hype it.

Rather than tweet an invite to sign-up for your email list, tweet a link to the free report, application, widget, game or services trial sitting behind a registration that requires email address. Promote the benefit – what’s in it for them – of your content and services, not what’s in it for you. And do so at least once a day, but not so much that your promotional tweets vastly outnumber your helpful conversational status updates.

3) LinkedIn –LinkedIn offers some powerful and unique features – like groups, discussions and events — for business people that are also great places to promote your content and embed links to your email sign-up and lead capture pages. Of those three I think the most powerful is events. Keep in mind, an “event” can be a webinar, tele-seminar, tele-summit, or other virtual point-in-time gathering that requires minimal investment but is a fantastic list-builder.

Almost anyone registering for a paid or free webinar, tele-class or other virtual gathering knows they must provide their email address as a condition for receiving access information. So, start routinely planning free or low-cost events and promoting them on LinkedIn (as well as Facebook and Twitter) and watch your email list grow throughout the year.

Of course, we’re rarely limited to just a single way of doing anything, although we may have to tackle one way at a time. Those ready to fully leverage and integrate email, social and content marketing are ready for this. If you’re feeling unsure of where to start, I invite you to request a free Emarketing Strategy Session with me.

What else? How do you use social media to strengthen and grow your email or other marketing channels?

If you run an online community, good for you, probably means you like to get closer to your customers! We have one here at VerticalResponse, it’s called the VR Marketing  Lounge, a Cool Spot for Hot Marketing. We have it so that we can interact with our customers and have other customers chime in on everything from email marketing, to how to market their businesses better. We use Ning to power the VR Marketing Lounge, it’s about $30 a month, but there are other solutions available too. Rsitez is another to check out.

So you build a community to get engaged with your customers and want them actively participating in conversations, right? But if you don’t market it, it won’t grow quickly. Here are a few things to do to get it going.

1. Collect email addresses for your online community and make it a separate list from your customer list. With most providers you have to be a member of the community to contribute so you can access that list to email. With some you can include a newsletter opt-in form as well.

2. Include the last 3-4 posts in your weekly or monthly newsletter to your customers asking them to join the online community and participate.

3. Send an email to the community list about what’s happening on the site every few weeks. Include your “Top Posts” based on replies or comments. WebProWorld (below) does a fantastic job at this. It gets people back into the community and active.

4. Send an email to the community if there is a really hot topic going on that you think others will be able to answer. You might even name it “Hot Topic: Whatever The Topic Is”.

Another great reason why email marketing and social media go hand in hand.

Takeaway: Cross promote your online community presence in your newsletters — tell people what they are missing if they are not members or interacting with you on these channels.

Any tips to promote your social media and online communities you would like to share with us?

One of my recent April 2011 posts made the case for opt-in over opt-out marketing.  I realize that’s all well and good until it becomes time to convince people to say yes, right? So this month I want to share four insights into what psychologically motivates people to say yes when given the opportunity to take action:

Invitation

It’s universally human that we would rather be asked than tricked or forced.  Free will is one of the very cornerstones of human nature.  When it’s all said and done, we’d rather be given the chance to make a conscious decision than cornered into unconscious choices we end up inevitably regretting.  So when it comes to asking someone to join your email or social media sphere, don’t fall back on deception and coercion.  You don’t need to sneak them in under the wire. Simply invite them and trust that they can decide for themselves what is in their own best interests.

Everyone loves an invitation, right? Everyone loves to feel special, included, that they belong.  We have a basic drive for community.  We’re social beings.  Hey, it’s in the Maslow pyramid.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Invitations are good, but a masterful opt-in marketer won’t simply invite without also explaining the value of the invitation and explicitly indicating how to accept it.  The best invitations are clear, honest and compelling. While people love to make up their own minds, once they do they want to be told exactly what to do next and not have to figure it out for themselves.  So once  you’ve invited them to join, subscribe or buy, please don’t forget to explain exactly how!

Reciprocation

As social beings, we mirror one another.  Communication studies have proven we are reciprocal in nature, matching moods, gestures, even facial expressions of the person or entity we’re in communication with.  So if you want someone to say yes, use reciprocity to your advantage: say “yes” to them first by giving.

Most people when shown kindness will reciprocate it.  Most people, when given a gift, feel gratitude and seek a way to express it.  When you give value before you ask for a valuable action, you demonstrate trustworthiness, generosity and commitment.  You give yourself a “home field advantage”.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  How do you give first? Offer something of value in exchange for an email sign-up, social media follow, purchase or other form of engagement that brings you value.  This “something of value” can be information, entertainment, education, a chance to win a prize, a free gift or premium, exclusivity, or a solution to a problem.  Content marketing, the practice of giving away something valuable in order to sell or obtain something related, works well for almost all organizations because every business or professional is more an expert in their field than their customers, so we all have helpful, relevant, valuable insight we can share.

Emotion

We are intellectual and emotional beings both.  The two hemisphere of our brain work together and separately in remarkable ways – the left driving analytical and critical thinking, the right being the emotional center.  It’s been said people “buy with emotions and justify with reason”, so if you concentrate only on the steak but not the sizzle, or vice versa, you’re leaving out an important component psychologically necessary for most people to say yes and feel good about it.

Start by making an emotional connection by appealing to basic human motivators  – the desire to be safe, to be loved, to be happy, or to be included.  The more magnetism, personality, transparency and authenticity you bring to your marketing, the more successful you’ll be in creating emotional resonance in the first place.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  People love to buy but hate to feel sold to.  When you bypass an emotional connection by going straight to justifications, analytics, facts and figures, there’s a tendency for people to feel like they are being talking into something rather than deciding for themselves.  On the other hand, when you create an emotional connection that transcends the intellect, you empower your audience to convince themselves of what they want. It’s a fact of life: you can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink.  We all need to choose – anything and everything we do – for ourselves.  The true opt-in marketer realizes the power of this and uses emotion to elicit conscious choice.

Social Proof

Again, we are social beings, pack animals if you will, so we love to see what the majority is doing and saying.  Whether or not it should be, the fact remains that peer pressure is a powerful motivator.  Peer influence and review holds great credibility. In today’s age of social media, there is endless opportunity (and not excuse not to) gather powerful testimonials, ratings and other “social proof” from your community to increase trust and reliability in your invitations, offers, products and services.

Enlightened Emarketing Tip:  Whenever you’re asking someone to respond, support your call to action with positive and real testimonials, ratings, and statistics (4 out of 5 customers buy again!).  Give life to social proof by including pictures or video of the real people behind the names, and by adding graphics and color to stats or survey results.  Allowing your customers to speak for you is far more powerful than speaking for yourself can ever be, so give your raving fans and loyal advocates an opportunity and a place to openly share – whether on social networks, your own hosted communities, your blog or all three.

There are plenty of other psychological tactics marketers have used since the beginning of time to motivate response and many of them prey upon fear, loss, exclusion and other negative motivators.  Obviously I’m not focusing on those.  I say it’s time to take a higher road in marketing, resting in honesty, trust and community. When we do it right and when we do it with integrity, our prospects and customers say “yes” and feel good in the process, and how they feel about their decision speaks volumes later on, translating into either confidence and repeat business or returns and remorse.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be doing business with people choosing to work with me out of love than out of fear. Ultimately, empowering instead of disempowering people to “yes” is a “win-win”, the difference between success and failure both for ourselves and those we serve.

The fear of a bad reputation or negative feedback keeps many businesses from engaging in conversations with customers and prospects on social media. At the basis of this are often miscomprehensions and a lack of strategies to efficiently monitor, analyze and respond to online feedback.

This leads to missed opportunities and often to wrong investments of time, resources and budgets in tools, practices and efforts that provide no business value.

Monitoring and analyzing online sentiment, reputation, trends, influencers and conversations must lead to insights and actions. It must be measured and is a must for businesses that care about what people say and do and about their brand.

Social media are still unknown territory for many businesses. If you have been working with them for a longer time, you know that most of the brand reputation and negative feedback related fears to start with social media marketing, engage in conversations with people and handle online comments are what they are: fears.

However, many businesses do not have this experience yet and are exploring the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and (perceived) threats of social media and public online feedback.

Every day, people and businesses tell me that, regarding social media, they are most of all concerned about a “bad” reputation or criticism. In a way it’s normal: for many businesses the whole social media phenomenon is new and overwhelming. That is all too often forgotten by early adopters and experts.

However, the fear for the extent of possible criticism on social media and Internet is not realistic and a clear illustration that many organizations are not used to really listen to what people say. Business also often fear that they will need to many resources to deal with all criticism.

What they unfortunately fail to see is that social media listening an online feedback offers a huge opportunity to gain business and customer insights, detect trends, optimize their communication and improve the customer experience.

There are crucial misunderstandings regarding social media monitoring, reputation and sentiment:

1. Social media monitoring, sentiment and reputation management are not a matter of constantly being on guard as a watchdog. Brand equity matters but you do not strengthen it by ignoring or silencing online feedback.
2. One doesn’t always have to respond immediately, or even at all, to every form of criticism everywhere all the time. Yes, we live in a world with increasing customer expectations and both positive and negative customer experiences can travel fast. And, yes, customer service and relationship marketing are key but business is still a combination of customer satisfaction, the bottom-line, selling and ROI.
3. Companies that are active in social media often take on a defensive attitude and are prepared with a small army of opinion makers and brand advocates to stamp out the negative buzz as it were. There is no need for that. Some social media consultants even advise companies to pro-actively find people who could, sometimes against payment, make as much ‘positive’ noise as possible so that ‘negative’ reviews disappear.

The question is what happens if you engage in these practices in a misinformed, defensive and even obsessive manner:

• You invest more time and resources than needed
• The ROI of such practices is negative
• You don’t help your clients at all
• Sooner or later opinion deforming practices will see the daylight one way or another
• You don’t focus on your core business and value creation processes
• Fear keeps you away from one of the main information and communication channels your prospects and customers use: social media

Are there threats? Yes, you always have the malcontent former employee, unethical competitor or eternal complainer.

So what do you do?

• You monitor and analyze in a structured and efficient way
• You use the thus gained insights to improve your communication strategy
• You ensure an optimal customer experience
• You define a reputation management plan
• You define the resources and structural needs to put it in place
• You listen to feedback and respond correctly
• You define some guidelines
• You offer people channels to give feedback
• You keep the communication lines open
• You measure and improve
• You don’t just listen, you act
• You use a tool that enables you to act

But most of all: you act, react, interact and focus on the positive instead of the negative.

Takeaway: Negative feedback and reviews are not a threat but an opportunity if you listen and act the right way.

By: CampaignMonitor

We’ve had a couple of enquiries as of late regarding whether it’s possible to set the default title, image or description that appears on a subscriber’s wall when they ‘Like’ an HTML email campaign using our <fblike> links. The good news is that it’s possible with a little code, app hackery, patience and a very understanding group of Facebook friends (it’s called testing, right?).

Note that this technique cannot be used at present in the email template editor. It’s not designed to be used in conjunction with the likeurl="..." attribute either, as you can have multiple instances of likeurl, but can only define one title, description and image. Straight up, this is all a bit of a hack, so please bear with us.

What’s not to Like?

If you’ve tried ‘Liking’ one of your email campaigns, you may have noticed a curious thing. Yes, the campaign will be posted to your Facebook profile, but the title will be the subject line of the email campaign, the description will be the first few lines of text (or not display at all) and the image displayed is randomly picked from whatever images are available in your email campaign. For example:

Subject: The Daily Placekitten Express – April, 2011

For many folks that’s totally cool, but in other instances, the image chosen by Facebook isn’t entirely appropriate. Lets look at how you can take control of how email campaigns are presented on your subscribers’ Facebook walls when they click the Like button.

Using Facebook’s Open Graph protocol

Now, if you’ve done a bit of playing with Facebook Like links on web projects, you may have come across Facebook’s Open Graph protocol. In essence, its a way of turning web pages into ‘graph objects’ that Facebook can parse. Using Facebook-specific metatags, you can define how a graph object (in this case, an email campaign) looks when it’s shared on Facebook – including the image, title and description that displays on Facebook profiles. So far, our fblike tags use Open Graph to define that the Liked title (og:title) is the subject line by default. We leave the rest to Facebook’s intuition.

Back to our kitten example. Say we want to change the title, image and add a description to the shared campaign post. By adding Open Graph metatags to the head section of our HTML email code like so…

MarketingSherpa’s one-day social marketing training
is coming to Toronto on Tuesday, April 19, 2011

MarketingSherpa’s one-day training teaches a practical methodology for marketing with the new social technologies. Proven practices, hands-on exercises, and real success stories assist you to develop your optimum social marketing road-map in one day.

Sergio Balegno and Jen Doyle of MarketingSherpa are coming to Toronto to provide valuable instruction, insights, guidance, and tactics. You will become a better social marketer by using sound research, realistic objectives, tactical planning and execution. Sergio and Jen will show you how.

All attendees also receive the Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook - a $397 value – 184 pages of guidance and implementation strategies for you to take back to your office and use as a reference.

ACT NOW! Want a chance to win a second* ticket valued at $995?

Leave a comment for your chance to win a second* ticket to the Toronto one-day training event. The ticket includes the Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook - a $397 value. We will accept comments until the end of the day on Monday, April 11. The winner will be randomly drawn from all who submitted comments and have purchased a ticket to this event. The winner will be announced here on Tuesday, April 12.

*Second ticket will only be awarded to companies or individuals who have already purchased a ticket to this event.

It’s free to be on foursquare if you are a business. Yes, that’s right: FREE advertising! Perhaps even more important, it’s detrimental to your business to NOT be listed.

First of all, some of you may be asking: Just what is foursquare, anyway? In a nutshell, it is a location-based social media networking application that allows its users to broadcast where they are at any given time. Foursquare also lets other networks (such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) know the user’s location and status. It is available to anyone with a GPS-enabled mobile device such as a smartphone, iPad, or a tablet.

People use it to connect with their friends and to find new things to do in their hometown or other locations they visit. They can check into dental offices, spas, bars, restaurants, hair salons, sports stadiums, and parks, to name a few – virtually any venue that is listed. And if it is not listed, a venue is easy to add with a click of a button. Foursquare users can also see who else has checked in and leave tips about the food or other items of interest at their present location.

Foursquare is something like a game in some respects, since users earn points for each check-in and even badges (Adventurer, Super Star, Far Far Away, I’m on a Boat, Trifecta, NASA Explorer, etc.) based on where or how many times they check in to a particular location.

The ultimate status of any foursquare user is to become a mayor. To do that you must be the top foursquare user of a venue within a 60-day period, such as the person who checks in to Starbucks the most, etc. The cool part about playng foursquare is that many businesses offer discounts or incentives to people who check in and some even offer extra perks to the mayor.

So, why should your business be on foursquare? It is a bigger deal than you may think, and here is why a foursquare listing is important for your business:

1. Don’t miss the boat. You are missing the boat if people are checking into your place and you don’t know about it. As of March, 2011, foursquare reported having 7 million users! The numbers are growing exponentially. Would you prefer to have purposeful access to that growing number of potential customers? Do you want to monitor foursquare users’ critiques and tips about your products and services?
2. It’s your business – control the information. If people are checking into your venue and you are not controlling the information that they access, then erroneous details could be posted about you. Your business name’s spelling could be mistyped, for instance, or there could be other misleading data that would better serve your business goals to be managed correctly. Foursquare data is only as good as the people who contribute it. Make sure you are the one posting your business’s details.
3. Word-of-mouth advertising is the best. When you claim your venue’s listing on foursquare, you can post specials, get ranked, and utilize this popular social tool as a ladder on which you and your customers simultaneously attain more and more status. Some people want to become foursquare’s Superusers and mayors, and they will return and return to become your most active customers. As they attain status by posting all their check-ins, so does your business with all that free advertising – and the best kind of advertising too: word-of-mouth!
4. Location-based advertising is super-relevant. When users look up any business on foursquare, they can find other places in its vicinity that are running specials, so people take advantage of being nearby. This enhances your ability to publicize any promotions you may want to run, and it works synergistically for you and your business neighbors with great “buy local” appeal for users in your area.

In the grand scheme of how you build your social media presence, it is important to be Tweeting and posting regular updates to establish yourself. People don’t follow those who don’t Tweet. If you want to have a social presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you need to be continually posting updates, both relevant and fun. If you don’t post regularly, then no one is going to care who you are.

Takeaway: Foursquare is no different from the other social media sites: active participation is the key. You become a social media superstar by playing the game. If your business is not on foursquare, this one is a no-brainer. It’s time to get listed and take advantage of this free advertising medium.

Find me on foursquare and see The eMail Guide on foursquare.

Come celebrate with us at the 7^th Annual Marketing Hall of Legends Gala to be held at Roy Thomson Hall on April 14, 2011. A networking reception with over 1000 marketers will be followed by an awards show and ceremony and an after party.

The eMailGuide is giving away 8 tickets to the event. Each ticket includes the pre-show reception, with catered food stations and 2 drink tickets, admission to the show and to the after party.

Here is how to win your ticket! Write a comment -200 words or less – telling us which of the Marketing Hall of Legends Inductees or Inductee Companies has inspired you the most and explain why.  The first 8 to write their comments will receive a gala ticket, valued at $75!

The 2011 Inductees to the Marketing Hall of Legends include:

• Frank Buckley of the Buckley Family, Buckley’s Mixture
• Les Mandelbaum of Umbra
• Paul Rowan of Umbra
• Louis Garneau of Louis Garneau Sports Inc.
• David Bloom of Shoppers Drug Mart
• Nancy Volk of Ogilvy & Mather
• Janet Kestin of Ogilvy & Mather
• Jim Barnes of BMAI Strategy, Professor Emeritus at Memorial University

These honoured Inductees will be joining ranks with previous honourees:

• Francois Coutu of the Jean Coutu Group
• Jean Coutu of the Jean Coutu Group
• Chip Wilson of Lululemon Athletica Inc.
• Colleen Moorehead of Signal Hill Equity Partners
• Annette Verschuren of Home Depot Inc.
• Angus Reid of Vision Critical
• Geoffrey Roche of Lowe Roche
• Marlene Hore of Partners and Edell
• Clive Beddoe of Wesjet
• Wayne Sales of Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited
• Kathleen Taylor of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
• Terry O’Reilly, writer and director
• Allen Kazmer, retired
• Murray Koffler of Shoppers Drug Mart
• Isadore Sharp of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
• Peter Elwood of Lever Brothers and Lipton
• Ed Marra of Nestlé Canada
• Tony Chapman of Capital C
• Bill Durnan of Cossette Communication-Marketin
• Peter Zarry of Schulich School of Business, York University
• Ted Rogers of Rogers Communications Inc.
• Andy Brandt of LCBO
• George Cohon of McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada Ltd.
• Jacques Bouchard of BCP
• Terry O’Malley of Vickers and Benson
• Rupert Brendon of the Institute of Communications & Advertising
• James Balsillie of Research in Motion
• Mike Lazaridis of Research in Motion
• David Mirvish of Mirvish Productions
• Ed Mirvish, Theatre Impresario
• Harry Rosen of Harry Rosen Inc.
• John Cassaday of Corus Entertainment Inc.
• Don Triggs of Vincor International
• Francois Duffer of Cossette Communication Group
• Claude Lessard of Cossette Communication Group
• Don Watt of DW + Partners
• Ken Wong of Queen’s School of Business
• Ron Joyce of Tim Horton’s
• Guy Laliberté of Cirque du Soleil
• David Nichol of Dave Nichol & Associates
• Don Green & Michael Budman of Roots Canada
• Christine Magee & Stephen K. Gunn of Sleep Country Canada
• Judy Elder of Microsoft, IBM, and Ogilvy & Mather
• Paul Alofs of Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation
• Frank Palmer of DDB Canada
• Paul Lavoie of Taxi
• Alan Middleton of Schulich School of Business, York University

Meet these legends and many other great marketing minds at this unique gala event.

By: Technorati

It doesn’t seem long since email was first invented, but it already looks like marketing companies are starting to write its obituary. The sudden rise of social media popularity has left me wondering whether websites such as Facebook and Twitter will take over email marketing completely.

I think it is highly possible for social media to take over email, though I do not think it will happen yet. Social media is currently far too dispersed and disjointed for this to happen properly, although we are seeing more sophisticated email systems being created on sites like Facebook.

It is fair to say that social media has reduced the amount of consumer based conversations that occur through email, which has limited it to more private discussions and business communication. This is purely because social media has opened a platform for synchronous, instant and widespread conversation between networks of friends, celebrities and companies.

That doesn’t mean that email marketing has become redundant though – 1.4 billion people still use it! It just means companies who are looking to use email marketing need to develop more sophisticated strategies that integrate social media.

By: Email Yogi

By: iMedia Communications

With social media moving forward at a rapid pace, and more and more companies engaging in social media as part of their overall online PR and marketing campaigns, brands must be quick to respond to changes within the social space as a means to stay ahead and differentiate themselves from their competitors. The new image layout on Facebook pages is just one example of the way companies can present something visually unique to reflect the personality of their brand and present visitors with a much more personalized experience. Companies must be proactive in making the most of new features and opportunities in order to continue to offer visitors something fresh and innovative. In light of this, below are five ways that brands can make the most of the new visual features available via the latest Facebook pages update.

Providing a starting point
By incorporating a customized and well-designed profile header onto their Facebook walls, brands can provide visitors with a visual snapshot of the personality and creativity of the brand. The new layout certainly lends itself to being more of a starting point for visitors, enabling brands to customize this area almost in the same way that a customized landing tab can be — effectively introducing the brand and capturing people’s attention. Interestingly, the new image area could even be utilized to direct new visitors’ attention to the “like” button in the same way that we have seen with customized landing tabs.