As reliable and useful a marketing tool as email's proven to be in the past, it'll be better than ever in the future, according to one expert.  The Director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget explained during a session at OMS how things are changing and how marketers can continue to use email to their advantage.

(Coverage of the Online Marketing Summit 2010 continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Joel Book stated that 40 percent of the cell phones in use will be smart phones by 2014.  All marketers need to test their emails for compatibility with mobile formats, then, and retail marketers should think about issuing mobile coupons.

Next, he discussed the concept of creating and cultivating brand advocates using email.  Brand awareness is vital, after all, and Book indicated that 50 percent of all shared content is shared via email.  This means that the social sharing can be a great way of attracting new subscribers.

Indeed, Book said email has far surpassed direct mail as the highest-producing tactic for reaching customers and converting buyers.  And here's an interesting tidbit: sending emails from a person, as opposed to generic email address, can increase open rates by as much as 18 percent.

Finally, marketers must look at meshing email with other tactics.  Use email and CRM for lead nurturing, reseller education, trade show follow-ups, and sales support for dealers, for example.  Email and analytics can be used to make personalized recommendation/> [...]

Tue Feb 23, 2010 13:50 pm

Prior to the July 4th Holiday, reports that Twitter would soon launch a dedicated stream for special and promotions hit the web. Today, Twitter announced that the @earlybird account takes flight and Disney goes along for the maiden voyage.

@earlybirdoffers Twitter-exclusive deals in entertainment, fashion, technology, beauty, travel and more. For a limited time, @earlybird and Disney Pictures will offer Twitter users a special “buy one, get one free” deal on tickets to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a new feature film from Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films that opens in theaters today.

This is the second time Twitter has worked with Disney to launch new advertising initiatives. Last month, the interactive duo introduced the Promoted Trends concept with a Promoted Trend for the Walt Disney Pictures / Pixar Animation film “Toy Story 3.”

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Please consider reading, Engage!: It might just change the way you think about Social Media

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Wed Jul 14, 2010 10:18 am

MOG's $5 all-you-can-eat streaming music subscription service has finally launched. Although we interviewed CEO David Hyman in mid October, the music industry has changed considerably in the last two months. Imeem sold to MySpace for a song, and competitor Spotify is rumored to be delaying a United States launch as it refuses to enter North America with a paid-only version. We spoke to MOG CEO David Hyman to find out his thoughts on the industry and why his service is different from his competitors.

Sponsor

How has Spotify's delay and Imeem's acquisition affected your service?
We've just been watching from the sidelines waiting for the stars to align to launch a service that's sustainable. Anyone in ad-supported music has had a hard time, including free radio. The freemium services have to offer their subscriptions at at least $15 per month to offset the cost of their free service. We're the first personal radio service where you can play radio, jump to an album on demand and offer it all online without client installation.

In the past MOG allowed bloggers to link to music through the blogging network, and you weren't really responsible for that. Now you're taking a more active role. Do you want to comment on that?/> [...]

Wed Dec 02, 2009 10:40 am

Provided Courtesy Of:  

Twitter has been down this morning, which always gets addicts asking themselves two important questions: Whose fault is it? and How long does Twitter have to be down before it prompts a blogpost? (People smarter than me probably have a pre-written story so they can blog it before Twitter comes back up.)

The latest extended outage cast suspicion on Twitter newbie Bill Gates, characterised in last night's blog post as pulling in users like a black hole. But that seems a little unlikely, if only because the idea has been punted by the Daily Telegraph.

Twitter survived the arrival of Oprah, tweeting live on her TV show, and no Seattle nerd ? not even Seattle's richest nerd ? has Oprah's mass-market pulling power. (See my graph.)

Another theory was suggested in comments to TechCrunch's Twitter-is-down story, and posted by John Carnell at TechnicaVita. He wrote:

The last big event around 1 minute before the site failed was that an aftershock in Haiti measuring 6.1 had just struck. I think we might have just seen Twitter overloaded as that single fact was retweeted across the network.

Meanwhile, Twitter itself resorted to blaming innocent marine life*, as usual. Its status update said, simply:

We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales. Our on-call team is working on a fix.

Will we ever know the answer? If so, will anyone care?

The problem is that when Twitter is down, there's not much for some folk to do except write Twitter-is-down blog posts. However, Twitter being down means that there's no way to tweet those Twitter-is-down blog posts, and thus reach the only audience that gives a hoot. Not you, obv.

* See The Story /> [...]

Thu Jan 21, 2010 00:30 am