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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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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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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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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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“We are getting, basically, targeted friends and fans who are saying, ‘Yes, I want information on this,’” Hill said in a phone interview, adding that friends and fans can always change their minds and sever ties whenever they want.
He said businesses are interested in his service because they are realizing that social media Web sites can help generate buzz more quickly, cheaply and effectively than online ads and more traditional types of advertising.
Hill said friends are all gathered manually.
USocial logs in to a client’s Facebook profile or creates a new one. It seeks out people who would be a good fit - like car buffs if uSocial is trying to promote a specialty auto-parts company - and sends them friends requests tailored to that business. The requests don’t mention that uSocial is working on behalf of the business.
The process for getting fans is similar, except uSocial does not need to log in to a client’s profile.
Because all that is done manually, Hill doesn’t consider it spamming. He also said potential friends aren’t getting anything in return for adding a client - he wants people interested in the company rather than a freebie.
Hill said that as far as he could tell, he’s not violating Facebook’s terms of service - something with which Facebook disagrees.
Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said that giving anyone else access to your Facebook account goes against the site’s policies, as it makes Facebook less secure. Sending out friend requests on behalf of others is also unacceptable, he said.
Beyond that, Schnitt said uSocial detracts from Facebook’s efforts to foster a culture of authenticity.
“Buying and selling of actions that are supposed to be taken by a user are certainly, we would argue, not authentic,” Schnitt said.
Palo Alto-based Facebook is investigating uSocial’s practices, and Schnitt said any Facebook users found sharing their passwords with third parties could have their accounts permanently disabled.
This is not the first time uSocial has tried to help businesses up their visibility on social Web sites. Four months ago, it began offering a similar service on the online-messaging site Twitter, which did not respond to multiple e-mail requests from The Associated Press for comment.
Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at research firm eMarketer, said uSocial’s practices seem part shady, part effective for companies to increase their social-media presence very quickly.
But she warns uSocial’s tactics could irritate a lot of Facebook users - and a company’s potential customers - if the targeting isn’t done properly.
Hill started uSocial in December 2008 by selling votes on news aggregator site Digg.com. For nearly $100, uSocial would vote 100 times on Digg’s site for any story chosen by the client, raising its position on the site and gaining exposure. Clients could pay up to about $700 for 1,000 votes, Hill said.
In this case, uSocial was using software to vote, Hill said.
He said Digg ultimately ordered him to stop, saying uSocial was breaching the site’s policies. He halted the Digg service a few months later, saying he had too many clients to keep up with demand. He said he will eventually relaunch it with better software for automated voting. Digg declined comment.
Hill would not name any clients currently using uSocial on Facebook or Twitter, but said Korea’s tourism department used its Digg services, as did a Mormon organization he couldn’t immediately name. A spokeswoman for the Korean consulate’s office in San Francisco had no immediate comment, while Morman church officials in Salt Lake City said they were not involved.
“I do understand that there are people that have a problem with what I’m doing,” he said.
But he justified the service by saying, “we’re really only doing for our clients what they could do in their own time if they put their minds to it.”

Source wn.com

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This question has been on my mind this past week as I worked with one of our banking clients on a new project. What entered my mind was not what they were doing, but what others deem the difference to be.

Now my understanding, and I would love your thoughts, is that a transactional email is one that:

1. Confirms an order or action that you need a confirmation email

2. An alert in a change in status or account

3. A change in relationship, privacy policy or access

Now there is a fine line in transactional emails where you can (using best practices) allocate 20% of the message to allow a marketing message. Apple does this well with iTunes transactional email receipts. They do not lead with it, nor does it interfere with the transactional email message. Subject lines are clear, copy is clear and the message can be easily scanned to know what is occurring.

But then this weekend I got this email from Technorati. I had to pause to understand if this was a transactional email OR a marketing email. My first thought was that it was alerting me to changes at Technorati in regard to features and my account. But as I read through it more, it seemed to be a straight marketing message.

So then why would they not add CAN SPAM compliance to this message? No unsubscribe, no address footer, nothing. I was a a total failure. The subject line was deceiving to me in that it made me think that it was a service message about Publishing Content on Technorati. Take a look and tell me your thoughts.

It was not unsolicited as I have an account and opted in, but the lack of Can Spam compliance leaves me wondering who was asleep at the wheel over there.

Messages like this make me question what is transactional and what is just plain old email marketing. You should consider this as you prepare messages for your users/subscribers.

Should all emails have a way to unsubscribe? Is it a best practice only in regard to transactional messages? Or is it just a good thing to do to always allow people to have a preference to the emails they get?

Back on the path of banking, I had to think it through this week about the transactional emails that they send about account notices, bank cards, or the alert of a possible account compromise. You would think that you would always want to get notices like these, but what if you don’t? Spam is in the end in the eyes of the receiver.

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I think that I have this discussion in some manner each and every week. The question is either should we personalize our emails and if so does personalization work? Well I can go either way on this depending on what you choose to do with personalization. At times personalization with a name seems almost spam-ish when it is done poorly or used as an afterthought of throwing it into a sentence or the greeting of an email.

But the examples I have to share actually do work IMHO. Now notice that these two email creatives are exactly the same. There is only ONE difference that I can find between the two and this is the subject line. As they arrived in my inbox back to back, the subject lines stood out. They did not use my name but they use eROI in the subject line and wrote the copy differently. They got me. It stopped me and made me want to open it more. It felt not personalized, but relevant. And I think that the discussion around personalization should actually be changed to one of relevance.

When data, copy or images are personalized in some manner that stands out and grabs your attention it is not a true factor of personalization but actually one of relevance with the subscriber. This leads me to challenge you to change the conversation you might be having with your team, vendors and in the end your email subscribers. Think about how you can use subtle changes to data to make an impact. Think about what you can do to make them stop, of only for a moment, in a cluttered inbox to take that next step of opening and clicking through to learn more about your offers.

It is time to change the questions in everything we have known this far in email and time to start talking to people in a way that will make them think about your emails.

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5 Ways to Engage Customers In Recession

1.        Remove your customers fears. Right now your customers are watching way too many recession news stories filled with doom. They’re hearing about giants of industry going under, or coming close, they’re afraid they may be next…. How do you encourage them to lift their head and help them understand that change is a constant in life—and this economic melt-down will pass.

2.       Confirm their suspicions. Your customers see danger everywhere they look, and they wonder who is really there to watch over and protect their best interests, and who is there to fleece them of their shrinking income. Don’t deny the reality your customers perceive…. Recognise that the quickest way to bond and, most importantly, become an advocate on behalf of your customers is to first accept and validate (within reasonable limits) their viewpoint.

3.       Justify their failures. Don’t make your customers feel like losers. If they’ve yet to reach their goals, pat them on the back and then show them why. Show them that many factors, often beyond their control, contributed to their failure. Show them how you can decrease the number of failures they will face, and how you will increase their odds of success.

4.       Throw rocks at their obstacles. Identify the immediate threat or obstacle confronting your customer’s well-being, happiness and success. Join them in a justifiable hate fest. Heap scorn, ridicule and bad intentions on the perceived roadblock. And then quickly move on. Don’t wallow in that shallow pool, but splash there just long enough to gain your customer’s attention and confidence.

5.        Encourage their dreams. The product or service you sell are not made of metal, wood, plastic, bits and bytes or some intangible service, they are dream-makers. Do not deceive your customer into believing they can accomplish the impossible, or that the impossible is achievable. But if your product or service can indeed make your customer’s intentions come true, do not hide the truth.

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