20 Reasons Why Social Media Won’t Replace Email

Email marketing is still an important tool to your new business program.

The rise in popularity of social media only enhances email. The two can work powerfully together. Two excellent articles, Chris Crums, writer for WebPro News, “10 Reasons Social Media isn’t Replacing Email” and VerticalResponse CEO, Janine Popick, “10 More Reasons Why Social Media Wont Replace Email.” Chris always has great marketing insights. Janine also provides some insightful resources and practices what she preaches for both email marketing and social media. I recommend them both.

Here are their 20 reasons why social media won’t replace email:

1. People still send hand-written letters.
2. Nearly all sites on the web that require registration require an email address.
3. Email notifies you of updates from all social networks.
4. We haven’t seen any evidence yet that Google Wave really will catch on on a large scale.
5. Email is universal, and social networks are not.
6. There are plenty who have no interest in joining social networks.
7. Email is still improving.
8. Even social networks themselves recognize the importance of email.
9. More social media use means more email use.
10. As far as marketing is concerned, email is doing pretty well.
11. Twitter and Facebook are fantastic products and companies; but that’s what they are, companies.
12. Your email recipients are still going to use business email for business purposes.
13. You can’t easily segment your friends and followers to do targeted marketing (through social media).
14. You can’t tell who clicked on a link with some social media outlets.
15. That said, you can’t tell who didn’t click on the link so you can follow up with them with a different message.
16. You cannot personalize your Facebook updates.
17. You cannot size your graphics or use more than one in Facebook.
18. You can’t track how many clicks you got on your links in Facebook.
19. You are limited to 140 characters in Twitter.
20. You almost have to have separate social media accounts for your business and your personal life.

I love it.  Here is a great example of setting the tone for email acquisition even before the customer gets inside the door.  By doing this, you have already set the expectation with the customer that they are going to be asked for their email.  This is good stuff.

Technorati Tags:
email, email marketing, email best practices, email strategy, email acquisition

Been spending the last hour figuring out how to use Live Mail with an account that has a Custom Domain.  It was easy enough if your account was @hotmail.com or @live.com but using one that had a custom domain such @closettechie.com wasn’t so straight forward.  I was expecting Live Mail to give me an answer when I clicked on “Where can I find my e-mail server information?” but it unfortunately led me nowhere. 

So to those who don’t want to take the path to nowhere, here’s an answer for you.  When using a custom domain to setup Live Mail, and you get to the point where it asks you “My incoming mail server is a” where your choices are POP3, IMAP, and HTTP.  Just choose HTTP and voila!

O Mozilla Thunderbird é um dos melhores, senão o melhor leitor de email e news da Fundação Mozilla (mesma criadora do Firefox). Acessa também arquivos XML (RSS Feeds), bloqueia imagens, tem filtro anti-span embutido e um mecanismo que previne golpes por meio das mensagens. (fonte Wikipedia em http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird, acesso em 24/11/2009)

• Clicar em Thunderbird Setup 2.0.0.23

Clicar em <Executar>

Aparece, em seguida a janela de auto-descompactação.

• Clique em <Avançar> ou <Next>

• Aceitar termo de Licença
• Clicar em <Avançar> ou <Next>

• Clique em <Padrão> <Avançar> ou <Standart><Next>

• Clique em <concluir> ou <Finish>

Pronto!

Sean, this is really interesting:

I wonder if over time people will start to appreciate the DS game a little more and see it as a nice handheld companion to its big, console brother.  Will it also boost Mario Kart Wii sales?

Mario 5, like all great entertainment, leaves the audience wanting more. When a show ends, the audience should want more. So to get more, people are checking out NSMB DS.

I believe that gaming requires not customers but passionate customers. A killer app is not just a game that gets someone over the hurdle to purchase the hardware. The killer app creates a passionate customer. This passionate customer then buys games left and right until his or her passion is over. The worse the games, the faster the passion is dowsed.

We saw this on the NES, for example. People would buy it and be enthusiastic for Super Mario Brothers. But they were having so much fun, they wanted to check out other games. So they checked out games like Castlevania or Gradius or Contra or Mega Man. Individually, none of those games would have enough power to bring in consumers over that hardware obstacle. It was SMB that fueled that fire that led customers grasping for more games.

When you finished Mario 5, I bet you thought, “Man oh Man, I want more of this type of fun!” And you likely began to think about NSMB DS or about other 2d type games on the Wii.

Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country had similar effect on the SNES if I recall. Blessed was the gamer who picked up Super Mario Kart or a SNES Final Fantasy. There were tons of licensed games in that time too. Tons of shovelware. I saw them as I see them now as leeches off of those few games that created passionate customers.

I’ve been pretty bored with the Wii and used it only for VC games but Mario 5 has got me more interested in the Wii library. Mario 5 made me interested more in playing games. It reminded me how games are fun.

Speaking of those classics, games like Castlevania and Megaman and Contra also made passionate customers. Like good entertainment, those games left the audience with wanting more. So they made Caslevania 2, Super Contra, and so on. Mega Man 2 is an interesting title because that game, alone, is what creates most passionate Mega Man fans.

It is very interesting to me how one game can create passionate customers while another game, which appears remarkably the same, does not create passionate customers (such a game is described as “OK”).

Believe it or not, the original Zelda also created many passionate customers (who wandered around and ended up exploring the Battle of Olympus or Crystalis or Guardian Legend). However, modern Zelda (and modern Mario) games do not seem to do this anymore which tells me there is a big problem with them somewhere.

Sending just as a curiosity, it’s a small class work:

Thousands of emails and documents were stolen from a prominent climate research center in the UK recently and posted online, firing up a fresh controversy over global warming.

Hackers broke into the e-mail server of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the United Kingdom’s premier climate research institutes, on Friday, stealing more than 1,000 e-mails and more than 3,800 documents. The CRU hack occurred in the weeks prior to a major global climate summit in Denmark slated for December.

The stolen materials cover roughly a decade’s worth of research and also include the names and email addresses of several prominent researchers.

Hackers then posted the e-mails and documents onto an anonymous FTP server in Russia, as well as a link to the 61-MB file on the blog Air Vent, accompanied by a note that read.

The effect of the hack, meanwhile, has been to incite fresh controversy over the science of global warming.

An anonymous request via email:

Please pray for friend Shirley. Pancreatic cancer patient undergoing transfusion.

Palm Pre from Sprint

I have had for 3 weeks now the best smart cell phone I have ever used. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty much perfect and it has the most amazing charging solution that doesn’t involve physically plugging it in at all. The Palm Pre has a slideout keyboard which took a few days to get used to but ultimately it works even though I would move the numbers to the right hand side of the keyboard. It has the most amazingly sharp, bright and sexy screen you have ever seen on a mobile device. The screen is super punchy and at full brightness would light up a dark room with no problem. It displays colors beautifully and makes the device an absolute pleasure to use.

The use of this phone has finally forced me off Microsoft Live/Hotmail which I was really loving. Microsoft had finally got it right with the integration of contact, calendar and mail but alas their proprietariness meant I could not without a lot of major hassle synch it all up with my phone.

So I already had a gmail account and decided to port everything to Google Calendar, Mail, Contacts the lot. It’s wonderful. No more synching with cables as the phone now seamlessly integrates my mail, calendar and contacts so they are always up to date. I can update my contacts via a web browser and they are automatically updated on my phone as it all happens in the cloud. Simply wonderful.

The camra is a 3Megapixel camera which does a pretty good job and it has a flash. It would be a bit better if it had image stabilisation but hey it’s a phone right. It’s just nice to have something on me so that I can take the odd snap for this blog. And capture that moment.

I spent several hours adding photos to all my Gmail Contacts so now when anyone phones me their picture comes up. What a wonderful function. My Gmail Calendar sends me, at the beginning of each day, a list of my appointments for the day and my mail is just well available. This to me is heaven.

A lot of people have complained about battery life which can be a problem. I have turned off automatic mail pulling, i.e. where the phone automatically keeps your inbox up to date with mail as they come in. This is a waste of battery life to be honest and I have made my battery last 2-3 times longer by just having the mail update and show me new mail when I press the update button. No big deal. It also has built in unlimited turn by turn navigation which does work but the phone needs a much louder speaker for it to be any use in a car.

The only down side is that you can wait a couple of seconds for an application to start which does start to irritate after a while If you are in doors or in a WIFI area the phone is faster. It has full WIFI capabilities and blue tooth so in doors it’s mega fast. However, I have popped into the Verizon, Nokia and AT&T shops and I do not think anything touches it. The new Nokia N900 which I wanted to love I didn’t. Too clunky still and the Pre is useable with one hand. It’s swipe and flick mechanisms are so intuitive and primal. TO kill and application you just press a little button and flick the application window off the top of the screen. very brutal. Plus you can do multiple things at once such which is so useful. I mean really really usefull.

I have had an iPhone and always found it horrible to use as a phone. Too flat, thin and clunky. Plus it’s now looking very dated as it hasn’t changed in 3 years. They need to bring out a smaller one, it always was far too big for me to use as a phone.

I also download a few videos onto it of our new house in the UK plus some photos on the 8Gb space on the phone. The videos worked perfectly first time and look great. I think they will be updating the phone soon with the ability to take videos. That I would appreciate so bring it on.

[免費] Photo2Contact：把多張照片寄給某聯絡人的方法之一：壓縮照片成ZIP檔，上傳到該app提供的ftp，然後讓聯絡人去該處下載。

itunes link

**唯一要考量的只有安全性？？

OK – so e-mail has many failings (such as being able to fake the source etc), but I’d like to add this to the feature requests; A BCC message tag.

Essentially it would enable a User to email a recipient, and put a secret message within the email to BCC recipients.

Example; Let’s say we email Joe Bloggs (a client) and BCC some workers, then within the message we could put a special tag (e.g [BCC Message]) that only John Doe (or any bcc recipients) would get.

—–
To: Joe Bloggs
BCC: John Doe, Otto Normalverbraucher
Subject: Re: Amends

Body:

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the feature requests, we’ll start work on the amends asap and get back to you once complete.

[BCC Message]John, Otto – Please can you do the work and let me know once complete[/BCC Message]

Regards.
—–

Some of the benefits of this (over sending a duplicate email) is mailbox space, bandwidth, efficiency etc etc.

Your thoughts?

The armed forces have long talked about how politics often overrides national security in hushed tones but no one has dared to bell the cat publicly while still serving.

But then, Barbora has always been somewhat of a flamboyant character, whether it was undertaking unheard of combat manoeuvres on his MiG-21s in his younger days or declaring as the Western Air Command chief last year that his force was capable of hitting “5,000 targets” in Pakistan after the 26/11 terror attacks.

Coupled with this dash of flamboyance comes the unsettling ability to speak his mind publicly even if it’s politically incorrect or unpalatable. Even as he expressed regret for hurting some sentiments with his candid `personal’ views on why women cannot be inducted as fighter pilots just yet, the IAF vice-chief did some plain speaking yet again on Thursday. Full News…

As I stood at the coffee shop recently waiting for my grande dark roast, I casually gazed down at the counter below. There my eyes found some random sign-up sheet. (Evidently, the coffee shop will notify you via e-mail when they have live entertaiment. You get the idea.) Anyway, that’s not what’s important.

What’s important is to avoid having an e-mail address like the one I saw near the top of the coffee shop sign-up form. There it was in all its glory:

HighHeeledHussy1974 @ blanketyblank dot com

Sure, it was only an email notification service for coffee-shop entertainment. But what if  HHH1974 had been applying for a job, responding to a Help Wanted ad, or listing her contact info on a career site?

Let’s hope that, like many of us, she has multiple e-mail accounts…and that she can keep them straight!

If you are still using some quirky, juvenille or marginally-respectable email identifier, do us all a favor today–right now–and create a respectable email presence like yourfirstname.yourlastname at GMail dot com.

Signed,

BulgingBiceps1966 at PeoplePC dot com

Just joking. Mine’s Skip.Lineberg@gmail.com

The blogosphere is abuzz with news of the latest global warming scandal.  A latter day “Daniel Ellsberg” has released the climate equivalent of the Pentagon Papers onto the web.

In 1971 former Defense Department employee Daniel Ellsberg  turned over  a large collection of Pentagon  Vietnam War related documents   to the New York Times.  Recently an unknown whistler blower released 61 megabytes of  documents along with       emails involving communications between Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and various other scientists who support the claim that humans can raise  air temperatures by  increasing the amount of the magical  atmospheric gas  carbon dioxide (CO2).

Some of the old media are reporting this scandal, but most seem to be ignoring it.

John Delingpole on the London Telegraph site suggests:  “The Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)”

Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun suggests “the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down skeptics.”

Marc Sheppard points out the hypocrisy of Jones, et.al. criticizing the funding of their opponents.    Of the two documents that  mention funding for global warming claims it’s “the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale.  In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of “energy agencies” they might put the bite on.  Three — the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative and the Energy Saving Trust – are UK-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting “new energy” technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth – Renewables North West — is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.”

Bishop Hill has an index of many of the emails for those interested in further reading.   There is also a searchable database.

These revelations aren’t the first that question  claims about global warming.  Lawrence Solomon reported that the Enron Corporation pushed global warming claims  in the 1990’s because of a desire to profit from trading  carbon credits.   Enron also felt it would benefit from encouraging use of  its natural gas holdings  over coal and petroleum.  Former Enron official Jeff Shields  has been associated with Renewables North West.

Will the old media continue to  ignore  evidence  that global warming is a fraud, or will they decide to expose it like they did Watergate and other past scandals?    Have old media reporters been ignoring the scandal because they are being paid to, or are they just too lazy to investigate claims of fraud?

You can forward your existing Exchange email account to external email domain. You must have an administrator account to  be able to do this on your Exchange Server.

1.  Create a contact in your Active Directory pointing to the external email.

2. On the user’s Exchange account, set forwarding to the contact you just created.

Simple as that.

This article appeared in the November issue of Advents, the Direct Marketing Association of Washington’s print magazine.

You are testing everything from the length of your subject line to the time of launch.  You are segmenting (at the very least you are not batching and blasting) and your double opt in list has the kind of permission only a 16 year-old could wish.

You want more.  You are not just satisfied with keeping up.  Like Queen famously sang (more like bellowed), you want it all and you want it now.  While I can’t promise you email marketing dominance (or any of it all for that matter), I can hip-you-to some of the latest trends that will keep you ahead of the curve.

Number one on the short list, Video, is forcing itself into email inboxes everywhere.  The power of the word video in your messaging is enough to raise open rates and increase engagement.  However, the problem with video is that it does not always deliver well and if it does get delivered it might not display properly.  To get around these issues you can use two different strategies:

• Send a message with a still image of your video and then link to it on your site.  This allows you to take advantage of the allure of video and avoid the pitfalls of spam filters and flags.  Sign up to receive emails from BarackObama.com and you can see some of the most extensive use of video in email out there.
• Use animated GIF images to display video to the reader inside of the inbox.  This can work nicely because an animated GIF won’t raise any red flags with spam filters and is generally quick to load and play.  Note that animated GIFs don’t play sound and some email clients won’t play them.   Animated GIFs are used frequently for quick movie trailers and product demos.  See Lexus and Mercedes-Benz campaigns for examples.

The second (and possibly the sexiest) trend is the inclusion of social media sharing options in your message.  Everyone from newborns to grandmothers, seems to have a Facebook page or Twitter account, and you see more messages encouraging readers to – as Greg Cangialosi, President of Blue Sky Factory, calls it –  “Share with your network” or “SWYN” for short.  Greg, a veteran in the email-marketing field, loves this new trend.  He says that with SWYN, “the reach that email marketing has is growing every day, and the possibilities seem to be endless.”

A couple of quick items to note when incorporating SWYN:

• Brainstorm on how you are going to include sharing and what social networks you want to focus on.  Talk to your email service provider about what they are doing to help.
• When you have selected particular social networks, I encourage you to use the branded images supplied by each.  It helps the reader recognize where they are clicking to and adds to the legitimacy of your message.

The third and final trend has emailers saying less and encouraging more action from the reader.   This pushes the engagement paradigm from just click thrus and open rates to more fulfilling actions like direct customer-to-customer interactions or even discussing topics in real time with the sender.  Rick Christ, VP of Online Fundraising at NPA/Amergent, is doing that very thing by “working with emails that invite the recipient to DO something.” It’s not uncommon to see short (sometimes text only) email communications that quickly ask the reader to respond.  Rick adds, “People don’t read web pages. They prefer to DO them, or at least watch them. So we include surveys, videos, and other engagement techniques in our emails.”

Remember to test any new addition to your program to make sure that these trends (or any for that matter) work with your particular audience – can they help increase your engagement and even your overall reader satisfaction?  At the very least, these new additions can help your campaigns stay fresh and interesting.

Host: Vertical Response
Date: 2/12/10
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m, PST

Summary:

It’s more important than ever to leverage video when marketing your business. If you’ve capture a video clip of one of your customers talking about you, or your product it’s a great way to potentially boost response. Join Andrew Lock, host of Help My Business Sucks weekly online TV Show, and VerticalResponse as we discuss how to easily leverage videos to drive business.

Learn:

• The basis of creating video clips for your business
• Tips to make video a snap with your limited schedule
• Best practices of business videos
• How to integrate email and video to make them work together
• Example of successful business videos

Register for this webinar

Host: Vertical Response
Date: 2/26/10
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m, PST

Summary:

Social Media has become a very important part of business. It can no longer be something you have heard of and needs to be something you are doing for you business. Join Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse as we discuss how to make social media and email marketing work together.

Learn:

• An overview of social media
• Best practices for social media
• How to get more followers and email subscribers by using email and social media together
• How to make sure all audience receive and read your messages
• Example of businesses that have successfully integrated social media and email marketing

Register for this webinar