Why You Still Need Email Marketing – And Why It’s Not Going Away

Email MarketingWhen Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg predicted the death of email back in November 2011, due to the social networking site’s new instant messaging service, a flurry of reaction articles appeared both lauding and mocking his prediction.

However, the question still remains. With BBM, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Whatsapp and Viber to name but a few ways of communicating, can email really keep up? Do we still need a medium of communication that was developed in 1971, or are we vainly clinging on to technology that is vastly outdated?

Happily, the answer appears to be ‘Email is fine, stop worrying about it.’ Despite these gloomy predictions, email, and email marketing, is still thriving – and here’s why:

“Social media, and the various messaging functions available on it, are seen as a threat, but email can do things that social media can’t,” explains Econsultancy’s Graham Charlton. “It’s reliable, measurable, and provides a demonstrable return on investment. As long as it continues to do this, it will be a relevant channel. It allows brands to build a one-on-one relationship with a consumer in a way that social media cannot, and it can be tested and tweaked to optimise the effectiveness of messaging. The UK email market is alive and well, and continues to grow year on year – it was worth £388m in 2011, up 15% on 2010, and has grown steadily over the last 8 years.”

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Infographics: Pinterest Marketing Heats Up

Pinterest has become social media’s emerging darling, and for good reason. The site that got its roots with midwestern scrapbookers is now attracting a wider demographic and sending a fair amount of traffic to brand sites.

While many marketers are reporting the pinning site generates more traffic to brand sites than LinkedIn or Google+ (but not as much as Facebook), early Pinterest believer Real Simple reports that Pinterest drives more traffic to their site than Facebook.

What does this mean for social media marketers? Sounds like it’s time to get a Pinterest page and start pinning. Here are a few helpful tidbits to keep marketers on point when it comes to pinning.
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Science Explains How to Create the Perfect Tweet

In the mass hysteria and super-charged pace of today’s society, it’s unrealistic to believe everyone will read every single one of your tweets. Instead Twitter users can expect to reach their followers in passing. Even then, a recent research study reported that Twitter users think just 36 percent of the 140 character updates that slide through their stream are even worth reading. How do you push your tweets into that worthwhile minority? Science can answer that too.

Researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech analyzed 43,738 tweets from 1,443 users to discover the exact components that make a worthwhile tweet. As it turns out, the most valuable tweets are informative, funny, and/or conversational. Surprisingly, self-promotional messages also elicited a positive response from Twitter users.

By comparison, the biggest tweet killer is boringness. As it turns out, “boring” was the top cited reason for not valuing a tweet. Other bad practices on the platform include cryptic language, inundating a tweet with hashtags, and the repeating of old news. Users also despise what the researchers call “me now” tweets, aka tweets talking about things like what you are eating for breakfast. Presence maintenance tweets like “Hellllo twitter” or Foursquare location updates are also 1.5 to 2.5 times more despised than the average tweet.

With all that said, here are a few research based pointers to keep your Twitter stream up to snuff in the social media marketplace.

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The Rise of Shorthand in the Connected Era

Quality ContentAs a former journalist I spend a lot of time thinking about words, media models, and the changes in how we communicate. Or maybe that sentence isn’t entirely accurate. I’ve always been attracted to words and what they mean for us as people. I remember thinking as a kid who looked up to my mom that if I wanted to become smart and successful like she was I would have to learn shorthand.

Something about shorthand to me felt magical. It made her fast and invincible in a world where everyone else fell behind in things important like note taking. I decided I would grow up and learn shorthand right off the bat, but instead I grew up earning rewarding characters for typing speeds as early as first grade.

Computers replaced a need for shorthand for awhile, but as we demand more out of our time I’m starting to notice shorthand for the devices that are meant to make us more productive.

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How Businesses Are Using Google+

Earlier this week Joshua D. Brett argued that as Google shows preferential treatment for content posted to their social network, users ignore Google+ at their peril. Google is ready to sell their soul in exchange for a strong social network, and in my opinion they’re working to turn a suite of Google tools into the dashboard for our lives on the Internet.

Google’s effort to push their social network is working from a sheer numbers perspective, but it seems few brands have figured out exactly how Google+ can benefit them.

61 of Interbrand’s Global 100 Brands list have created pages, which is fairly high considering 79 of the Fortune 100 brands are leveraging social media on any platform. From a user perspective Plus has it going on, but the number of companies jumping on the Google+ bandwagon has decelerated quickly. In fact, Simply Measured found that Honda was the only one of Interbrand’s Global 100 to create a brand page in the past month.
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Don’t Like Devoting Social Media Resources to Google+? You May Have No Choice

Google PlusThe following is a guest post from writing and communications expert Joshua D. Brett. The opinions in this post may or may not reflect the views and opinions of the Lauren Proctor 32 community as a whole.

I’m not a big fan of Google+, the web search engine giant’s new Social Media tool. It tries to be an all-encompassing Social Media utility like Facebook while not offering anything unique that I find useful. And the numbers show that I’m not the only one who is reluctant to warm up to Google+: while a BrightEdge Survey in December found that while 61% of the top 100 brands in the United States had Google+ pages, none of those pages have more than the 65,000 fans  of Google’s page. Contrast that with Facebook, where dozens of top brands have more than 1 million fans. Ford has 5 million fans on Facebook compared to only about 27,000 on Google +.

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Internet Marketing & Social Media Statistics – January 2012

The social media landscape is changing rapidly and although I see loads of research, I rarely get an overview of statistics all in one place. I also rarely see time-dependent lines showing how specific statistics evolve over time, so I’ve decided to create that exact resource.

If you have any ideas for a better way to present this data efficiently feel free to chime in.

Social Media Statistics – Jan 2012

Facebook

Facebook is going to serve 4 billion impressions today. – Trada, January 19, 2012

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Jason Fried on Education as Customer Acquisition Strategy

Recent research by the Custom Content Counsel revealed that 61 percent of consumers trust and feel more likely to purchase from brands who deliver consistent content to their consumers. Jason Fried supports that notion in a 20 minute presentation (below) outlining how content changed how he sells to his customers.

In the presentation he explains the power of content marketing like this:

A lot of companies will have customers and the really lucky companies will have fans, but the really fortunate companies will have an audience. And an audience is something that is incredibly magical, especially when you’re a small business that doesn’t have a lot of money to advertise.

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