It’s the kind of database blunder that must give marketing directors nightmares.

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The Wall Street Journal recently published the story, Why Email No Longer Rules. The writer, Jessica E. Vascellaro, talks a lot about the increasing number of people jumping on the social media bandwagon, and how that could have a negative effect on the way people use email today.

Are people jumping on the social media bandwagon? You betcha! And why not? It’s free, easy to use, and you can communicate to the masses. But are they using email less? Nielsen doesn’t seem to think so in some recent research they’ve done.

Read 10 Reasons why email isn’t going away

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There are a ton of ways to get people to sign up for your email marketing offers. I’ve put together a list for you to read, so you know all of the ways you can be growing your list.

Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
Tradeshows - Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
Send an opt-in email to your address book asking them to join your list.
Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.
Host your own event - Art galleries, software companies (one here has a party every quarter and invites the neighboring businesses), retail shops, consultants (lunch & learn) can all host an event and request attendees to sign up.
Offer a birthday club where you give something special to people who sign up.
Incentivize your employees - Give them $ for collecting VALID email addresses.
Giving something for free like a PDF? Make visitors sign up to your opt-in form before you let them download it.
Referrals - Ask you customers to refer you, and in exchange you’ll give them a discount.
Bouncebacks – Get them back! - Send a postcard or call them asking for their updated email address.
Trade newsletter space with a neighboring business, include a link for their opt-in form and ask them to include yours in their newsletter.
SEO - Make sure you optimize your site for your keywords. You need to be at the top of the natural search when people are looking for your products or services.
Giveaways - Send people something physical and ask for their email address as well as their postal address.
Do you have a postal list without emails? Send them a direct mail offer they can only get if they sign up to your email list.
Include opt-in forms on every page on your site.
Popup windows - When someone attempts to leave your site, pop up a window and ask for the email address.
Include a forward-to-a-friend link in your emails just in case your recipient wants to forward your content to someone they think will find it interesting.
Include a forward-to-a-friend on every page of your site.
Offer a community - Use Ning as your easy-to-set-up community and have your visitors interact and sign up for your newsletter.
Offer “Email only” discounts and don’t use those offers anywhere but email.
Telemarketing - If you’ve got people on the phone, don’t hang up until you ask if you can add them to your newsletter.
Put a fishbowl on your counter and do a weekly prize giveaway of your product - then announce it to your newsletter. Add everyone who put their card in on to your newsletter list.
Include an opt-in form inside your emails for those people who get your email forwarded to them.
Tradeshows - Collect business cards and scan them into a spreadsheet. Make sure you ask permission to send email to them, then mark the card.
Use Facebook - Host your own group and invite people to it, then post new links often. From time to time, post a link to sign up for your newsletter.
Use Facebook - Post the hosted link from your newsletter into Linked Items to spread the word.
Use Facebook - Include an opt-in form on your Facebook Fan page.
Use Twitter - Twitter the hosted link of your email campaign every time you launch.
If you’ve got any additional ideas, let’s hear them!

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Online advertising less influential
Word-of-mouth is a major force in the video game industry, according to data from The NPD Group.

The research firm’s “Gaming Device Profiles” series of reports found that 41% of video gamers relied on word-of-mouth to obtain information on games. More than three in 10 learned about video games by playing them in person at a friend or relative’s home. Advertising in magazines and online, along with coupons and social networking sites, were not as influential.

NPD also noted that the Nintendo Wii, credited with appeal to a range of players, is the most widely owned of current-generation consoles, by 32% of all gamers. Further, the Wii is most likely to be owned in addition to another console—42% of PlayStation 3 owners and Xbox 360 owners also had a Wii in their household.

Console gamers bought more than 21 million Wiis in the US in the first half of 2009, according to eMarketer calculations based on The NPD Group figures. That far outpaced sales of the Xbox 360, at 15.8 million, and PlayStation 3, at 8.2 million.

Users of the three current-generation consoles are 56% male and 44% female. Broken down by age, the largest group of players is 2-to-12-year-olds, who make up 24% of the total. One-fifth of gamers are ages 25 to 34, while 17% are 35-to-44-year-olds.

NPD’s “Kids & Cross-Entertainment Behaviors” report found that households with children ages 12 and under account for 45% of all video game industry revenues.

“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 53.4 million [kids] ages 12 and under in the U.S., accounting for 17 percent of the population. Yet for many industries, games included, they account for a much larger portion of total sales,” said Anita Frazier, industry analyst at The NPD Group. “Tweens in particular are a highly involved group of consumers as 75 percent of this age group play video games and 81 percent are on the computer for non-homework related activities.”

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Microsoft wants marketers to see it in a different light — not only as an ad seller but as a smart company full of geeks who can help it solve business problems. And the tech giant is using social media to prove it can do so.

Today Microsoft is taking the wraps off a new platform called Looking Glass, a social-media aggregator and monitoring tool that’s still in “proof of concept” stage, meaning it’s not yet in the market and will be open to a very small group of testers next month.

The idea is to connect social-media-monitoring tools to the rest of a marketer’s organization — customer databases, work orders, customer-service centers and sales data. Looking Glass will pull in a variety of feeds from platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr and work with third-party data sources as well (the folks behind it have already talked to some firms such as Meteor Solutions and Telligent). All of the data collected will connect into Microsoft’s enterprise platforms, such as Outlook and Sharepoint.

Making social media actionable
What this also means for marketers is how all that social-media information they’re drowning in becomes more actionable.

Here’s how: A marketing manager can get an e-mail alert when there’s a sudden surge of chatter about his or her brand on Twitter or Facebook, along with the sentiment of that chatter and the influence level of those blogging. That information can then be connected to a customer-relationship-management system to decide whether customer service or PR should respond. Or a cable operator’s customer service rep could monitor Twitter for outage reports and send off a repair request straight from the tool. And Looking Glass will hook up to existing customer databases, so a pharmaceutical brand manager would be able to figure out if a person throwing a hissy fit on his blog is an influential doctor or current customer.

“Social isn’t a web destination, it’s an attribute and an application on some level,” said Jamey Tisdale, group product marketing manager for Microsoft’s platform strategy group, a small team that serves as a sort of intra-Microsoft incubator for ideas such as Looking Glass. He describes the product as a “bridge between IT and the marketing organization.”

It also logs all activity within the tool so, for example, companies can keep track of who posts to their own Twitter feeds.

One of the best uses for Looking Glass, said Marty Taylor Collins, who heads social-media marketing for the Windows 7 team, is to catch a mini web crisis before ity erupts into full-scale disaster. She cites one of her first experiences with Looking Glass as an example.

In January, Windows 7 was opened up for beta testing. The Windows team and put in place a load-balancing plan, meant to control the number of downloads that could happen at a time so the system wouldn’t crash, and opened up the beta-testing download period on a Friday at 9 a.m. By 9:30 a.m. a popular tech blogger had posted a way to bypass the load-balancing system and the operating system crashed under the weight.

Tweeting to the angst-ridden
“By monitoring the conversation we realized because we said there would be limited downloads, it created this angst,” Ms. Collins said. Microsoft reached out to the angst-ridden beta testers, asking them to to watch its Twitter feed, and by Saturday morning it had alerted them the system was back up. Within 30 minutes it got another tweet — that that download wasn’t compatible with a certain browser. From Looking Glass Ms. Collins’ team used the tweet to file a high-priority bug and it was fixed within the hour.

“There are so many stories that could have happened [during the beta launch],” said Ms. Collins. “And this was best story that never did.”

While the tool is meant to be open and work with a variety for third-party social-media vendors and platforms, it’s still meant to tie into and drive sales for Microsoft’s Enterprise Group, meaning that its use could be limited for companies that don’t use a suite of Microsoft products. As Mr. Tisdale explained, it purposely built something that requires multiple Microsoft teams — ad sales and enterprise sales — to do. “It’s the only way for us to win,” he said.

It also gives Microsoft ad sales reps something more to talk about than banner and search ads.

“We want to change the expectation advertisers have of Microsoft,” said Mr. Tisdale. “We can do more than sell you advertising. We can help your business problems — we’re a bunch of geeks, let’s see what the geeks can do.”

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