Blogs

In an article I wrote for DM News' recently published Essential Guide for Email Marketing, I offered some advice for helping marketers measure the value of integrating social media into email marketing campaigns to drive revenue and capture new customers.

The good news is that if you have a system that can track sharing activity and conversions, you're in good shape for proving social media's value for expanding the reach of effectiveness of your email campaigns.

For more information, check out my article, "New Social Media Metrics for Email Marketing."

A few weeks back, I participated on a panel at the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica. Digital Hollywood sounds like something out of an episode of Entourage, but it's actually a great event for digital marketers to come together and learn what's new across a range of hot topics -- from search to email to display. The quality of discourse is high, the discussions and panels are informative and engaging, and the weather in Santa Monica is always a treat.

Our panel focused on "non-traditional" forms of digital marketing: presumably, anything but banners, email and search. The conference guide was more specific, defining non-traditional advertising as word of mouth, blogs, guerilla marketing, social media experiences and events.

Joining me on the panel was a great cross section of non-traditional media types. Rebecca Weeks Watson, the director of business development for Real Girls Media brought her perspective on innovative ways brands are working with publishers to deliver high-impact, non-traditional campaigns aimed at women. Ted Murphy, founder and CEO of IZEA -- which works with 265,000 bloggers and 25,000 advertisers to develop "sponsored conversations" -- joined the panel as well. Kitty Holding, CEO of House Party, brought her perspective on integrating "house party" events into the marketing mix.

I was there to share my perspective in working with marketers for the last six years in the emerging social media space, and make observations on how social is intersecting with direct response and brand initiatives.

Seems like an eclectic mix of perspectives, right? What was fascinating to hear is that we all felt like something had changed within the last 6-9 months for each of our businesses. Budgets were being allocated beyond search, beyond email, and beyond the banner into much more complex, strategic, and integrated campaigns. Brands were committing real, hard dollars to programs that 12-18 months ago were a tough sell. Microsoft looked to House Party to sponsor tens of thousands of Windows 7 "house parties" across the globe to support the operating system's new release and shift people's attitudes toward the brand. Real Girls Media used StrongMail's Influencer solution to produce "You Propelled?" -- a highly successful, interactive, social, Twitter-like micro-blogging campaign for Pepsi. Disney, American Greetings, Dial, Levi's and other great brands have embraced IZEA's sponsored blogging platform.

Big brands are now incorporating social media elements not only into their sites, but into their cross-media marketing campaigns. They're engaging communities of Twitterers, bloggers, and fans across the web to talk about topics or share ideas that are strategic to their brands. Their comments are compiled, curated, mashed up and fed into streams not only shared with the connections these people keep -- these conversations are repurposed into "feeds" that get pumped into interactive flash elements that can be posted around the Web -- replacing their crusty banner forbears with buzz and opinions straight from the mouths (keyboards) of people you can somehow relate to. Clicks convert into Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and opt-ins that brands can engage over time to create even more content that gets distributed around the Web.

The world of integrated, strategic digital marketing is very different than it was 12 to 18 months ago. Big companies have had a taste, and they're now diving in head first.

Is yours one of them? How is your company integrating social media into your campaigns? Please comment below. I'd love to hear what you're seeing these days -- and if it matches the perception of the folks on our "non-traditional" advertising panel.

So, is Social Media Marketing for real? Do social media channels (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter) really offer marketers extended reach and enhanced program conversion? At StrongMail, we are convinced they do, but only for those marketers that understand how to leverage social media within their marketing mix.

The road is already cluttered with brands that have embarked on failed social marketing strategies. This blog will be dedicated to sharing the proven practices of marketers blazing the trail to social media marketing success. Stay tuned for topics in upcoming posts focusing on such topics as:

• The proper application of social capital
• The proper application of social motivation
• Testing within social influence programs
• Targeting your most likely influencers and the impact on program performance
• Social influencer marketing as a direct marketing opportunity
• How the interdependence of email and social influencer marketing drives conversions
• Understanding the most viral social channels vs. social channels that provide the highest conversion metrics

Each topic will share actual program data that will help you justify the investment in social influence marketing. I look forward to sharing my experiences in the exciting new space. In the meantime, below is some interesting data around social marketing and its growth as a key part of email marketing programs.

Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel at ad:tech New York 2009 titled: Email 3.0. The panel, hosted by Bill McCloskey of Email Data Source, focused on new trends in email marketing with a special emphasis on social Influence marketing and rich media. As it turns out, Email Data Source has exceptional insight into what email marketers are doing within the email campaigns they deploy (check them out at http://www.emaildatasource.com/)

Specifically, if you have been wondering what your competition is doing as it relates to social media and email, consider the following trend data compiled by EDS:

• In Q4 of 2006 there were only about 230 links to social networks within email marketing programs. All of them were to MySpace or Linked-In.
• In Q4 of 2007, MySpace links in email campaigns more than doubled, to just over 500. While links to a new social network site, Facebook, appeared in over 400 programs. Links to a new micro-blogging site, Twitter, begin to appear with…wait for it….100 links from email programs during the quarter.
• In Q4 of 2008, Facebook links in email campaigns take off with over 6,000 appearing during the quarter. What about MySpace? Just over 2,000…And Twitter, about 1,500.
• In Q3 of this year, (are you sitting down?) Facebook links appeared in over 35,000 email campaigns. Twitter links appeared in over 40,000.

So what do we know based on this data? We know that direct marketers (and email marketers in particular) understand the importance of allowing their customers to share their brand message with their “social graph.” What we don’t know is how to optimize this opportunity to drive revenue and brand extension for our businesses. This blog will help demystify social influence optimization. I look forward to sharing our journey with you.