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Social Media and Email – thoughts about coexistance

I recently read an excellent post on the blog:
The Digital Frontier ( http://blogs.mediapost.com/digital_frontier/?p=371) that brought up a number of interesting points on how Social Media and email are de-facto continuing to exist side by side quite peacefully (at least for now)

After I read the article there were a few points that I published there as comments and have copied here as well:

Regarding the basic statement of the article, that both mediums can coexist independently:

I found that I like having separate accounts, and at times separate identities, for my various communications – This has nothing to do with the functionality of the machine, the internet, or any specific site – It is a basic human trait that we compartmentalize and separate our relationships according to relevance, etc. and though a single unifying page would do nothing to harm that I still like the “ritual of passage” that flicking from one medium or site to the other affords me.

Regarding the possibility of a future unified interface:

I think that as social networking sites and tools become more and more evolved, forever bombarding us with new features that we, regretfully, all fall in love with and quickly find indispensable it will be a very tough GUI project to bring together all the various functions on to one screen without either cutting back on features, which will annoy those of us who are attached to something that gets left out, or creating a GUI that will be so messy and complicated, that we won’t understand or enjoy using it.

Regarding my own habits at the moment:

What do I do?
Have my google bookmarks appear as part of my Igoogle home page and access everything from there. It might not be pretty, but it works well, and I’m used to it…

: )

Mike
http://ReaderImpact.com

Information 2.0

I’m a sucker, I really am. I am naïve to the extent of being gullible and readily admit it. Sales people, advertising people, PRs, anyone with a slick tongue, makes short change of me.This is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to specialize in online marketing. The first time I experienced a web-based tracking and analytics tool I was hooked. For the first time I had access to up-to-date, objective, and validated data about my business at the tips of my fingers.

Advertising Campaign Evaluation – What’s the problem?

Monitoring traditional media advertising campaigns poses a number of challenges that nearly all arise from the lack of an accurate method to track the exposure and influence that these campaigns have. The problem is compounded by the fact that advertising campaign monitoring tools that do exist are usually unavailable to small business owners, who are essentially left with only the following monitoring options:

• Believing your agency – You can always choose to believe the numbers your advertising agency is supplying you with. These numbers are not objective by definition (your advertising agency has a vested interest in making things look rosy…).
• Questioning customers – Not all businesses allow for pleasant dialog between sales-people and customers and, although this method might generate wonderful anecdotes for you, it requires a lot of commitment in order to gather substantial amounts of hard data. One should always consider that any data gathered only reflects the opinions of those customers that took the time to answer your survey.
• Coupons – Advertising and tracking the use of various types of coupons is an excellent method to track campaign success however this method only factors customers that actually use coupons and gives literally no indication as to the effects exposure to the campaign may have had.

Online tools for advertising campaign evaluation

Now that we realize what are some of the challenges we face when we wish to monitor the success of an advertising campaign based on traditional media, its time to test what possibilities the online world has to offer us:

Every Click Counts

Although many of us are still unaware of it, every time we click on a link or button on a website or email, we are creating a record. These records can be collected and studied in conjunction with records left by other people clicking on the same links in order to create an accurate, up-to-date, and most importantly, objective report regarding the amount, type, and depth of exposure your messages are getting. Lets look at some great tools for monitoring the performance of your website and email campaigns:

Google Analytics

The really good news is that one of the best and most powerful tools for tracking traffic to your website comes from Google and is absolutely free! Google Analytics puts solid information regarding your visitors , referral sources, and content popularity at the tips of your fingers. Google’s statistics are easy to understand and excellent. The installation process is simple to perform and shouldn’t be any trouble for even rookies to accomplish. Once in place Google analytics will let you know:

• How many visitors are coming on to your site and what are some of their demographic characteristics.
• What sites and what type of search engine queries are referring traffic to your site.
• Which of your content is popular and is responsible for drawing traffic to your site and which of your content is unpopular and is responsible for people leaving your site.

Google Analytics is free and requires only a basic understanding of HTML in order to implement on your site.

The email option. Great even if you don’t have a website!

Email campaigns are a wonderful method to drive traffic to your website or, even directly to your business. I have often advised business owners who had not yet gotten round to putting up a website for their business to do precisely that and use email blasts in order to invite customers to stop by the shop and collect some form of gift or enjoy a “members only” special. ReaderImpact, our email marketing solution, allows businesses to create and manage permission based (see footnote) email marketing campaigns regardless of whether your business has a website or not.

Managing email marketing campaigns on ReaderImpact is easy and requires no technical knowledge whatsoever. All you really need to do is sign up for a free, full feature, 30 day trial account on the ReaderImpact website, and you’re good to go!

ReaderImpact’s tracking and recording manager lets you see:

• How many of the emails you’ve sent reached their recipient.
• How many of you emails were opened by the recipient.
• Whether the recipient clicked on a link within your email.

What’s next?

Online monitoring tools are already having an immense effect on the advertising industry because of their ability to objectively and verifiably monitor an advertising campaign’s success. Better monitoring is already translating into big-buck savings for advertisers and an increasingly steady migration of advertising budgets from traditional media to email and other online campaigns. It definitely seems as if time is in favor of us suckers as ever more efficient and intuitive monitoring tools become available. The days of the shyster advertising salesman are thankfully nearly over.

I ,for one, certainly won’t miss him…

–

Mike Darnell
Creative Director
Oleh Technology and Communications

Footnote: What is permission based email marketing and how is it different from “Spamming”?
Permission based email marketing is email marketing that is sent only to recipients that have given their consent to receive email from your business. Permission based email marketing is the opposite of “spamming”, which is the annoying bombardment of lists of unverified email addresses with marketing messages that the recipients do not want to receive.

I wake up and smell the Pad Thai…

September is vacation time here in Israel.
This year I must admit that I wasn’t really planning on doing anything special. In fact I was quite looking forward to a peaceful holiday whose main entertainments would be home cooked food (my own), my beloved library and seeing if I could beat my dog at freestyle sleeping.

But it was not to be…

A week before the holiday started my best mate, whom I have known since we were both in high school, suggested that we go together on a vacation to Thailand, and although beating my dog at sleeping is a worthwhile endeavor, I figured I could postpone it until my next vacation…

And so, with what is for me a rather uncharacteristic degree of spontaneity, I found myself booking the last two available seats on an airliner headed for Bangkok.
All that remained in order to make our travel plans complete was to book a flight to the islands and prearrange the first few nights at the resort of our choice.
Both tasks easily accomplished online.

Online… now that rings a bell…

It was while I was making my travel arrangements that the realization of the impact the Internet is having in “rural” and “backward” regions hit me like a ripe coconut on the head.

The last time I traveled to Thailand, about five years ago, my travel arrangements were organized by a plethora of middlemen and brokers all ultimately represented to me by my travel agency. This time I was able to make all my travel arrangements directly over the web from the comfort of my home and without anyone’s assistance.

Thanks to a simple set of Google searches I was able to have direct contact with resorts and guesthouses that were invisible to me five years ago. The Internet enabled the service providers and me to communicate directly and completely circumvent the entire structure of the traditional tourism business. The effect of this direct communication was that I was able to avoid the middlemen that traditionally broker tourism services and was thus able to guarantee myself better prices for my holiday needs. The service providers, on the other hand, were able to enjoy higher profit margins for exactly the same reason. A classic win-win situation for everyone (except the brokers, who are now probably just plain broke…).

I was experiencing first hand how, far from the limelight of the “First World’s” media, the power of the Internet is accelerating the economy of regions that were bypassed by both the industrial and the electronic revolution. Broadband Internet connections are enabling the inhabitants of these regions the ability to communicate and trade globally. They are bringing the global economy directly to the doorstep of rural societies around the globe and enabling members of these societies to take an active part in the new economy and improve their financial situation, without requiring that they abandon their traditional lifestyle. This is especially evident in Thailand’s booming tourism industry: Tiny mom and pop guesthouses, virtually unknown five years ago are using email campaigns and websites in order to advertise their services and manage their bookings. Cottage industry artisans once dependant entirely on brokers and dealers to market their wares are now the proud owners of ecommerce sites that put them in direct contact with a global clientele. Other examples abound but I think you get the point…

For me this entire experience was in many respects a bit of a wakeup call.
In my professional life I encounter daily the complexities and difficulties of running a business online and together with my colleagues here at Oleh I spend my days dreaming up ways to streamline and improve these processes.
It was a very empowering experience to realize that even in today’s rather sorry state of affairs the Internet is revolutionizing the global economy. I can hardly imagine what impact the Internet will have once we succeed in realizing our dream of making ecommerce tools trivial, simple and commonplace; or, as we like to say here at Oleh: Integrated, Intuitive and Indispensable.

–

Mike Darnell
Creative Director
Oleh Technology and Communications

http://www.ReaderImpact.com