The thought of launching social marketing gives us that wonderful, heady feeling of both excitement and dread. By comparison email feels old-school and boring, although there is nothing boring about how much revenue email drives.

No need to take sides. Email and social marketing are inextricable. Consider the most important feature for any peer collaboration tool: The alert system. And that is mostly done via email (with a few notable exception teen services that alert via SMS). If you don’t got that, you don’t got much participation beyond maybe the founder and a few eccentric loyalists. Email is ubiquitous for both consumers and business professionals, and it’s still the best way to connect a social network with the rest of its members’ lives.

That’s the one thing I love about making the social media marketing channel and the email marketing channel work together. It’s a natural bond to create great subscriber experiences based on interactivity.

But I don’t love everything about how these channels work together. Here is one caution, one opportunity and one thing I hate about the ways marketers use these two channels:

One Caution: Social activity can significantly increase the volume of email messages from you to any one subscriber. You know that your marketing newsletter has nothing to do with the service alerts. But the subscriber only knows that they get a lot of messages from your company. That’s why it’s ever more important to synchronize the social aspects of your website with the email marketing program. Be sure not to overwhelm. Give subscribes a choice about the number and cadence of all email marketing – including alerts. Keep reminding them why they are getting alerts at a rapid pace (i.e: “Someone thinks your are smart and/or good looking” or “Remember, you asked for these”).

One Opportunity: Test how social media can actually enhance the value of all your email marketing. If connections are important to your business model or your customers, then certainly launch a blog and invite feedback. Allow readers to subscribe to your feed via email. Create a forum where customers and prospects can interact, post product reviews, and help each other. Allow free flow of information – and engage with participants as moderator, as well as subject matter expert. Encourage honesty, even when it hurts. Use email to follow up on questions and feature forum topics (or even summaries of the threads) in your email newsletter.

One Thing I Hate: Automatic download of my address book into the social network’s invitation widget. Please, don’t do this on your site – it is pretty much guaranteed to produce both a terrible email stream (and get you quickly blacklisted and blocked at the ISPs) and a miserable experience for most of the recipients. Plus, it’s a lousy first impression of your service for your new member, who is sure to get some nasty flames from friend and business associates that no one (lest of all the address book owner!) knew were on that list. I know it SOUNDS like a great way to build a community fast – but it’s at best a risky business move and a worst fatal for all email marketing you want to do in future. Better, wait until you’ve established some value with the new member and then ask her to start telling her friends about it. Or, set a lot of parameters around the “invite a friend” to make sure that everyone who is invited is truly a friend.

What do you love, struggle with and hate (or even get annoyed by) when you combine social media with email?

Stephanie Miller @ www.returnpath.net Twitter @stephanieSAM