Email Insider Summit – Day 2: Email as a Social Media Tool
Posted by Mike Ferguson on December 9th, 2008
At the Email Insider Summit today, the day was yet again filled with open, honest, dialogue that spawned or reiterated many insightful observations about where we are and where we’re going in the digital marketing space.
One of my favorite talks today was titled “Email as a Social Media Tool” as it really framed the conversation around the relationship aspect and the overlap between the two mediums.
One of the key points is how the dialogue has shifted: DM/Email -> Push, RSS/Blogs -> Pull, Social Media and User Generated Content (UGC) -> Sideways. While we can all stop and easily acknowledge this at a basic level, the implications there deserve a bit more mulling over as it relates to how we as marketers use those relationships as complementary forces.
Historically, we’ve seen a very myopic knee-jerk reaction when new mediums and technologies emerge — they’re killers. Email was going to kill DM. RSS and SMS were email killers. Social Media will now kill email. Jay Stevens of MySpace said something to the effect of “when people say social media is killing email, I laugh. Social media companies are some of the biggest users of email.”
Any seasoned marketer knows the implications are more akin to shifting the quantities of ingredients in the recipe to strike the right balance for your business and your audience’s palate. Balance can be a tricky thing, however, as it rarely lies directly in the middle.
Some good examples that were discussed in the session also echoed what we heard from the highly effective Obama camp: using social media to identify highly viral brand ambassadors, and targeting them with empowering and rewarding messages/offers, etc. In essence, as Jay expressed, this is trying to find who among self-expressed avids are the most avid, and of those who of them have the biggest networks — identifying biggest influencers — much like they did in the Obama campaign.
As select people become brand ambassadors those viral impressions and word of mouth derivative impressions you get are all gravy. So identifying “High-value sharers”, as they are described, is an important segment of your audience to embrace, but not abuse.
) Rather, they strategically analyzed their data so as to organize them into *meaningful* segments, and approached different people with different messages. One such example included segmenting those who were more likely to be local leaders.
