The Magpies of Email Marketing

Author:

Derek Harding

Source:

The buzz in email marketing today seems to be about everything but email. I'm constantly being asked about social networking and video in email and frankly I'm not very excited about either topic.

Perhaps I'm just being a grumpy old man who wants these other media to get off his email lawn. Perhaps it's the midwinter blues, though here in Seattle there are signs that spring is coming, so I'm not sure that's it.

Whatever the cause, I'm pretty underwhelmed. It seems every presentation and every pundit is talking about these two subjects. I'm told they're both game changers, vital to all marketers, and should be universally adopted immediately. I've seen more lists of steps to success than I can shake my old man's walking stick at. But it feels like fluff, and I'm not getting the substance.

Allow me to explain.

It's clear that social networking marks an evolution in the peer-to-peer use of the Internet for communication. Note that I said evolution not revolution, I will come back to that. What is not clear is who will be the winners in this space or what the impact will be for marketing. Today, Facebook is the leader. Twitter was last year's new hotness and before that MySpace was clearly going to shape the future for us.

The critical advice seems to be: create a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account and then post stuff to each and see what might work for your audience. If you're really sophisticated, try to combine the two with email by enabling consumers to forward your email communications to these media.

Meanwhile, video in email is giving me a serious feeling of ...