L’annuncio risale ad alcuni giorni fa ed è di quelli che lasciano a bocca aperta per le cifre tirate in ballo. Secondo quanto riportato dal Wall Street Journal, JP Morgan ha dichiarato di voler investire una somma tra i $500-750 milioni di dollari in un fondo destinato alle internet e digital-media company tra cui Facebook e Twitter.

Sono cifre impressionanti che portano inevitabilmente a riflettere sulla distorta percezione del valore delle società legate alla Internet economy (per fare un confronto, il costo di una missione di uno Shuttle si aggira in media intorno ai 450 milioni di dollari).

Le Internet company come Facebook e Twitter sono nient’altro che piattaforme di condivisione di informazioni. Non erogano servizi a valore aggiunto e non forniscono prodotti che generano direttamente ricchezza. Il principale indicatore che ad oggi determina il loro valore monetario è il numero di utenti e la loro distribuzione geografica a livello globale.

Nel giro di un biennio è realistico aspettarsi che il tasso di crescita dei più famosi social network subirà una drastica frenata raggiungendo un fisiologico livello di saturazione. L’andamento della loro popolazione tenderà ad assestarsi attorno ad un valore limite e, in mancanza di altre leve significative, una crescita ridotta in termini di utenti sarà percepita dagli investitori come un fattore di recessione.

Facebook, Twitter e, in via più generale, tutte le internet company sopravvivono prevalentemente grazie all’adozione di un modello di business basato sui ricavi pubblicitari. È un modello che da sempre funziona ma è altrettanto debole nei momenti in cui il mercato mostra segni di incertezza. Le internet company non hanno leve per condizionare il mercato (come ad esempio il lancio di un nuovo prodotto) ma lo subiscono passivamente nei cicli periodici di boom e recessione. Spesso però a rapide scalate corrispondono violente cadute altrettanto dolorose.

Dalle cifre in ballo sembra di assistere di nuovo a quel momento d’isteria collettiva che si respirava nel periodo del boom di internet alla fine degli anni Novanta. Di lì a poco la bolla speculativa della dot economy sarebbe esplosa con un fragore assordante.

La storia, evidentemente, non insegna nulla.

L’annuncio risale ad alcuni giorni fa ed è di quelli che lasciano a bocca aperta per le cifre tirate in ballo. Secondo quanto riportato dal Wall Street Journal, JP Morgan ha dichiarato di voler investire una somma tra i $500-750 milioni di dollari in un fondo destinato alle internet e digital-media company tra cui Facebook e Twitter.

Sono cifre impressionanti che portano inevitabilmente a riflettere sulla distorta percezione del valore delle società legate alla Internet economy (per fare un confronto, il costo di una missione di uno Shuttle si aggira in media intorno ai 450 milioni di dollari).

Le Internet company come Facebook e Twitter sono nient’altro che piattaforme di condivisione di informazioni. Non erogano servizi a valore aggiunto e non forniscono prodotti che generano direttamente ricchezza. Il principale indicatore che ad oggi determina il loro valore monetario è il numero di utenti e la loro distribuzione geografica a livello globale.

Nel giro di un biennio è realistico aspettarsi che il tasso di crescita dei più famosi social network subirà una drastica frenata raggiungendo un fisiologico livello di saturazione. L’andamento della loro popolazione tenderà ad assestarsi attorno ad un valore limite e, in mancanza di altre leve significative, una crescita ridotta in termini di utenti sarà percepita dagli investitori come un fattore di recessione.

Facebook, Twitter e, in via più generale, tutte le internet company sopravvivono prevalentemente grazie all’adozione di un modello di business basato sui ricavi pubblicitari. È un modello che da sempre funziona ma è altrettanto debole nei momenti in cui il mercato mostra segni di incertezza. Le internet company non hanno leve per condizionare il mercato (come ad esempio il lancio di un nuovo prodotto) ma lo subiscono passivamente nei cicli periodici di boom e recessione. Spesso però a rapide scalate corrispondono violente cadute altrettanto dolorose.

Dalle cifre in ballo sembra di assistere di nuovo a quel momento d’isteria collettiva che si respirava nel periodo del boom di internet alla fine degli anni Novanta. Di lì a poco la bolla speculativa della dot economy sarebbe esplosa con un fragore assordante.

La storia, evidentemente, non insegna nulla.

The rest is here:
/a>

L’annuncio risale ad alcuni giorni fa ed è di quelli che lasciano a bocca aperta per le cifre tirate in ballo. Secondo quanto riportato dal Wall Street Journal, JP Morgan ha dichiarato di voler investire una somma tra i $500-750 milioni di dollari in un fondo destinato alle internet e digital-media company tra cui Facebook e Twitter.

Sono cifre impressionanti che portano inevitabilmente a riflettere sulla distorta percezione del valore delle società legate alla Internet economy (per fare un confronto, il costo di una missione di uno Shuttle si aggira in media intorno ai 450 milioni di dollari).

Le Internet company come Facebook e Twitter sono nient’altro che piattaforme di condivisione di informazioni. Non erogano servizi a valore aggiunto e non forniscono prodotti che generano direttamente ricchezza. Il principale indicatore che ad oggi determina il loro valore monetario è il numero di utenti e la loro distribuzione geografica a livello globale.

Nel giro di un biennio è realistico aspettarsi che il tasso di crescita dei più famosi social network subirà una drastica frenata raggiungendo un fisiologico livello di saturazione. L’andamento della loro popolazione tenderà ad assestarsi attorno ad un valore limite e, in mancanza di altre leve significative, una crescita ridotta in termini di utenti sarà percepita dagli investitori come un fattore di recessione.

Facebook, Twitter e, in via più generale, tutte le internet company sopravvivono prevalentemente grazie all’adozione di un modello di business basato sui ricavi pubblicitari. È un modello che da sempre funziona ma è altrettanto debole nei momenti in cui il mercato mostra segni di incertezza. Le internet company non hanno leve per condizionare il mercato (come ad esempio il lancio di un nuovo prodotto) ma lo subiscono passivamente nei cicli periodici di boom e recessione. Spesso però a rapide scalate corrispondono violente cadute altrettanto dolorose.

Dalle cifre in ballo sembra di assistere di nuovo a quel momento d’isteria collettiva che si respirava nel periodo del boom di internet alla fine degli anni Novanta. Di lì a poco la bolla speculativa della dot economy sarebbe esplosa con un fragore assordante.

La storia, evidentemente, non insegna nulla.

L’annuncio risale ad alcuni giorni fa ed è di quelli che lasciano a bocca aperta per le cifre tirate in ballo. Secondo quanto riportato dal Wall Street Journal, JP Morgan ha dichiarato di voler investire una somma tra i $500-750 milioni di dollari in un fondo destinato alle internet e digital-media company tra cui Facebook e Twitter.

Sono cifre impressionanti che portano inevitabilmente a riflettere sulla distorta percezione del valore delle società legate alla Internet economy (per fare un confronto, il costo di una missione di uno Shuttle si aggira in media intorno ai 450 milioni di dollari).

Le Internet company come Facebook e Twitter sono nient’altro che piattaforme di condivisione di informazioni. Non erogano servizi a valore aggiunto e non forniscono prodotti che generano direttamente ricchezza. Il principale indicatore che ad oggi determina il loro valore monetario è il numero di utenti e la loro distribuzione geografica a livello globale.

Nel giro di un biennio è realistico aspettarsi che il tasso di crescita dei più famosi social network subirà una drastica frenata raggiungendo un fisiologico livello di saturazione. L’andamento della loro popolazione tenderà ad assestarsi attorno ad un valore limite e, in mancanza di altre leve significative, una crescita ridotta in termini di utenti sarà percepita dagli investitori come un fattore di recessione.

Facebook, Twitter e, in via più generale, tutte le internet company sopravvivono prevalentemente grazie all’adozione di un modello di business basato sui ricavi pubblicitari. È un modello che da sempre funziona ma è altrettanto debole nei momenti in cui il mercato mostra segni di incertezza. Le internet company non hanno leve per condizionare il mercato (come ad esempio il lancio di un nuovo prodotto) ma lo subiscono passivamente nei cicli periodici di boom e recessione. Spesso però a rapide scalate corrispondono violente cadute altrettanto dolorose.

Dalle cifre in ballo sembra di assistere di nuovo a quel momento d’isteria collettiva che si respirava nel periodo del boom di internet alla fine degli anni Novanta. Di lì a poco la bolla speculativa della dot economy sarebbe esplosa con un fragore assordante.

La storia, evidentemente, non insegna nulla.

Originally posted here:
/a>

img class=”alignright” style=”margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px;” src=”http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5257/5484838921_7bdb760fcc_m.jpg” alt=”Kristin Hersant” width=”204″ height=”240″ /> As a long time and trusted marketing agency, TopRank Online Marketing gets to work with some amazing B2B technology and SaaS companies. One of those companies is /a>.  Today Kristin Hersant, VP of Corporate Communications joins an esteemed group of marketers and thought leaders ranging from Guy Kawasaki to David Meerman Scott interviewed here at /a>.

Kristin is a firecracker of smarts and energy towards online marketing. Her company StrongMail is the leader in an array of email marketing and social media marketing services. Read on to learn more about the future of Email Marketing and its intersection with Social Media:

Please share a bit about your marketing background and StrongMail. What types of companies do you serve?

I have held a variety of B2B Corporate Marketing positions spanning from program management to event marketing, PR and marketing communications. The industries I’ve worked in include internet advertising, online marketing, desktop software, enterprise software and magazine publishing, which have all contributed in one form or another to my position here at StrongMail. I joined StrongMail in 2004 and have loved every minute of our explosive growth since then.

/a> provides email marketing and social media solutions to some of the world’s biggest brands including InterContinental Hotels Group, Travelocity, Viacom, T. Rowe Price and Zappos. Our solutions offer the highest ROI of any enterprise email service provider, which means that we make a lot of sense for B2C companies sending over 1 million messages per month and offer exceptional ROI for companies who send over 5 million messages per month.

How did StrongMail get into the social media business?

StrongMail became a social media marketing provider in 2009 through a series of strategic acquisitions. First we acquired PopularMedia, a Sequoia Capital backed company with a suite of social media products that we integrated into our platform. We currently offer Social Studio, a suite of social media marketing tools that is comprised of a referral marketing platform (StrongMail Influencer), a content sharing tool (Social Notes) and a social media management tool (Social Direct.)

Last year, we also announced the acquisition of two NY-based web firms that we combined to form StrongMail’s new boutique email and social CRM agency. This compliments our suite of technology tools with the strategy and creative expertise that brands need to effectively leverage the channel. All of our social offerings are available either in conjunction with or separately from our email platform, and our social media clients include Castrol, Mint.com and Discover Card.

A big challenge for many email marketers is deliverability. What are some of the common issues companies are facing?

Controlling spam has become a major problem for ISPs worldwide. On average, 90% of all email sent is categorized as “unsolicited commercial email” or spam.

When you narrow that down to look at the burden on one ISP, of the 8 billion email messages that Hotmail receives globally each month, 5.5 billion are blocked at the gateway and 1 billion are marked as junk. That’s a lot of unwanted email… and unfortunately not all of that is sent from the Nigerian fraudsters and prescription drug pushers that we traditionally think of when we think of spam. A fair percentage of what ISPs classify as “unwanted email” comes from legitimate senders, including many of the brands that we know and trust.

In an effort to improve the Inbox user experience for their customers in 2011, the four major ISPs (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and AOL) have all announced plans to change the way that they block and filter email this year. Among other things – including adding social functionality to the Inbox – they have announced that they are going to start factoring engagement into their filtering algorithms.

What this means is that it’s now going to be critically important that your subscribers not only open and click on your emails, but that they do so on a regular basis. If they don’t, it could potentially affect your overall email deliverability and negatively impact revenue driven from the email channel.

To manage through this shift, StrongMail recommends employing a combination of two things:

1)     Carefully scrubbing your list to either remove or attempt to re-engage non-responders after 6 months of inactivity.

2)     Implementing marketing tactics to increase subscriber engagement as soon as possible.

If you’re interested in learning more about how the Inbox experience is changing in 2011, I encourage you to download our December whitepaper on the subject, “/a>”.

Except the intersection with social media, (I’ll ask about that shortly) what’s the most important change in email marketing over the past year? Any surprises?

In addition to what I mention above, there appears to be a migration from batch email marketing towards triggered email marketing automation. Marketers have been talking about it for years, but we’re finally seeing a shift towards more wide-spread adoption. This is a result of technology advances that put easy-to-use workflow-building functionality into the hands of marketers and a drive for enterprises to generate a single view of their customer across all channels.

We recently published a great case study on this with /a> that I recommend reading if you’re looking at a similar program.

Many companies are implementing Email and Social Media Marketing solutions independently but you’re a strong advocate of a synergy between them. What are your recommendations for companies looking for best practices and an approach to making their email marketing more social?

When social media first started gaining momentum, many industry pundits were saying that it signaled the death of email. Neilsen set out to prove that hypothesis, and fielded a study that broke internet users in to four groups – three focused on varying levels of social media usage and a fourth group did not use social media at all.

Then they overlayed email usage on top of those segments and discovered that their hypothesis was wrong. In fact, the more engaged a person was with social media, the more heavily they consumed email.

/a>

This intersection of highly engaged email and social media users tend to be more active online – generating reviews, recommendations and comments in forums. In many cases, this segment also contains your most influential brand advocates.

The good news for email marketers is that, these influencers are already in your email database. The most successful socialized email marketing programs target these influencers with something of value that incentivizes them to spread the word about your product or service. We’ve seen brands drive as much as six figures in additional revenue off of one socialized email program that was targeted in this fashion. Another was able to generate 8,500 new subscribers off of one email campaign using a similar strategy.

The key is to be thoughtful with your email and social media strategy. Provide your influencers with genuine, true value in your campaigns, and if you can make them look like a hero by providing them with something of value to share with their networks, even better.

Simply integrating passive social sharing is good, but it will yield a much lower lift in click-throughs.

Companies that have been involved with social media publishing, sharing and networking for a while often find themselves overwhelmed and looking for efficiencies through tools. What types of social media tools do you recommend? Is there a process for evaluation that you’d recommend?

Every smart social media strategy starts with listening, so your first investment should be in a listening platform like Radian 6, Attenisty or Alterian’s SM2. In addition, you need a social media management console to schedule, track and respond to your mentions across social channels. StrongMail has one called Social Direct, but other popular ones include HootSuite or even Tweetdeck, which is free. If you’re a large enterprise that has a team of people tweeting on behalf of your brand in a customer service capacity, you should look at Co-Tweet.

Additional technology investments could include a community platform like Jive or Lithium (if you determine that’s right for your business), or a referral marketing platform like StrongMail Influencer.

But to be honest, most enterprise level social media marketers are still investing in internal education and training. I heard a great quote last week… “Social media is too young to be a science. It’s still an art.”  This means that the right strategy and set of tools is going to be different for every brand. The good news is – like email marketing – there is a wealth of free information out there for you to help devise your social media strategy if you’re budget strapped. However if you don’t have time, there are also plenty of agencies to help you quickly build a strategy that makes sense for your business.

“Social Media” is the darling topic for many business publications, blogs (including this one) and even mainstream media. Do you think at some point there will be a social media bubble? If so, when do you think it will pop?

That’s a great question… Gartner’s hype-cycle shows that every new, promising technology will enter the trough of disillusionment before it enters the plateau of productivity. By that theory, we are absolutely headed for a bubble-burst, but it’s not certain when that will happen. I suspect that it will have something to do with a consumer privacy backlash. Social media is free for a reason… Mark Zuckerberg might not think consumers will ever care about how their information is shared, but I think they eventually will. Companies should make sure that their data management practices and privacy policies are above board and clearly articulated in their privacy policies in preparation for this.

In the recent StrongMail webinar, strong>2011 Social Marketing Business Forecast, Jeremiah Owyang talked about social media budget allocation for the coming year. What are some of the shifts in priority that you’re seeing with companies that are maturing in their social media programs?

Mature social media marketers are starting to shift their limited budget dollars from traditional agencies (that maybe handled their PR or advertising campaigns) to boutique agencies that specialize in social media marketing. This enables them to generate significantly higher returns from their social media marketing programs. /a> is doing some groundbreaking, data-based Social CRM Marketing work in this area that is producing incredible results for our clients.

ROI is a big topic when it comes to social media marketing. How does email marketing help facilitate or achieve greater business value from social participation?

I just spoke at OpenDialogue’s Social Media Marketing Conference in Toronto and 2/3 of the audience came from a marketing background, whereas less than 5 people in the audience came from a PR background. That is a significant shift from who owned social media a few years ago. Marketers are taking over… which signals a shift towards needing to prove ROI. In PR, that’s a fuzzy metric.

Email marketing is a direct marketing discipline, which by nature means that everything needs to be tracked and measured. Social media metrics are more engagement focused, however smart marketers need to start analyzing those metrics in conjunction with their email marketing metrics, purchase metrics, customer lifetime value metrics to build a holistic picture of each consumer’s value to your company. This is the holy grail of social media marketing ROI, however I don’t think it’s that far off for companies with the right organizational structure and integrated technology infrastructure.

What are some of the biggest myths, misconceptions or outright misinformation you’ve been seeing about email, social or a convergence of the two?

Probably that social media is going to kill email, which I alluded to earlier. Social media is just another channel to add to the marketing mix. Did television kill the phone? No. Did Email kill the phone? No. Did Email kill print? A little bit… but I don’t think social media can be compared in the same way. Email is literally an electronic version of mail… so of course it’s going to affect the usage of print. But it’s never going to kill it completely. And social media is most certainly *not* going to kill email.

What are you most optimistic about for online marketing in 2011?

The move towards engagement filtering by the top ISPs is driving increased pressure for email marketers to up their game. As any marketer who has ever been blocked by a major ISP know will tell you… once you’re blocked, it can be quite a challenge to get unblocked.

The four major ISPs aren’t making the specifics of their algorithms public, nor have they announced exactly when they will start junking emails based on lack of subscriber engagement. However by taking steps to increase subscriber engagement now, you will not only protect yourself from being negatively impacted by this change – you will have the added bonus of improving the performance of your email marketing programs.

Email marketers are paying attention. According to a recent StrongMail survey of just under 1000 global email marketing executives, 52% cited increasing subscriber engagement as one of their top priorities in 2011. This makes it the #1 initiative for email marketers in 2011 – followed by improving segmentation and targeting and integrating social media with their email marketing programs.

In my opinion, this is awesome news for everyone. Its forcing email marketers to evolve and start paying attention to engagement metrics on an ongoing basis – not to mention keep their lists clean – if they want to continue to have their email delivered. This is going to hurt lazy email marketers and spammers, but that’s the point. But if you’re on top of this change, it will only create a win-win situation for consumers, ISPs and brands alike.

For in-depth examples of how brands are successfully increasing subscriber engagement, I recommend downloading our whitepaper on the topic, “/a>.”

Thank you Kristin!  For more insights and to connect with Kristin on the social web, visit her on /a> or her /a> on the StrongMail website.

img src=”http://24c.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/fd8f5350e9l-feed.png.png” alt=”Email Newsletter” width=”48″ height=”37″ border=”0″ align=”left” style=”margin-right:10px;” />
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img class=”alignright” style=”margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px;” src=”http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5257/5484838921_7bdb760fcc_m.jpg” alt=”Kristin Hersant” width=”204″ height=”240″ /> As a long time and trusted marketing agency, TopRank Online Marketing gets to work with some amazing B2B technology and SaaS companies. One of those companies is /a>.  Today Kristin Hersant, VP of Corporate Communications joins an esteemed group of marketers and thought leaders ranging from Guy Kawasaki to David Meerman Scott interviewed here at /a>.

Kristin is a firecracker of smarts and energy towards online marketing. Her company StrongMail is the leader in an array of email marketing and social media marketing services. Read on to learn more about the future of Email Marketing and its intersection with Social Media:

Please share a bit about your marketing background and StrongMail. What types of companies do you serve?

I have held a variety of B2B Corporate Marketing positions spanning from program management to event marketing, PR and marketing communications. The industries I’ve worked in include internet advertising, online marketing, desktop software, enterprise software and magazine publishing, which have all contributed in one form or another to my position here at StrongMail. I joined StrongMail in 2004 and have loved every minute of our explosive growth since then.

/a> provides email marketing and social media solutions to some of the world’s biggest brands including InterContinental Hotels Group, Travelocity, Viacom, T. Rowe Price and Zappos. Our solutions offer the highest ROI of any enterprise email service provider, which means that we make a lot of sense for B2C companies sending over 1 million messages per month and offer exceptional ROI for companies who send over 5 million messages per month.

How did StrongMail get into the social media business?

StrongMail became a social media marketing provider in 2009 through a series of strategic acquisitions. First we acquired PopularMedia, a Sequoia Capital backed company with a suite of social media products that we integrated into our platform. We currently offer Social Studio, a suite of social media marketing tools that is comprised of a referral marketing platform (StrongMail Influencer), a content sharing tool (Social Notes) and a social media management tool (Social Direct.)

Last year, we also announced the acquisition of two NY-based web firms that we combined to form StrongMail’s new boutique email and social CRM agency. This compliments our suite of technology tools with the strategy and creative expertise that brands need to effectively leverage the channel. All of our social offerings are available either in conjunction with or separately from our email platform, and our social media clients include Castrol, Mint.com and Discover Card.

A big challenge for many email marketers is deliverability. What are some of the common issues companies are facing?

Controlling spam has become a major problem for ISPs worldwide. On average, 90% of all email sent is categorized as “unsolicited commercial email” or spam.

When you narrow that down to look at the burden on one ISP, of the 8 billion email messages that Hotmail receives globally each month, 5.5 billion are blocked at the gateway and 1 billion are marked as junk. That’s a lot of unwanted email… and unfortunately not all of that is sent from the Nigerian fraudsters and prescription drug pushers that we traditionally think of when we think of spam. A fair percentage of what ISPs classify as “unwanted email” comes from legitimate senders, including many of the brands that we know and trust.

In an effort to improve the Inbox user experience for their customers in 2011, the four major ISPs (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and AOL) have all announced plans to change the way that they block and filter email this year. Among other things – including adding social functionality to the Inbox – they have announced that they are going to start factoring engagement into their filtering algorithms.

What this means is that it’s now going to be critically important that your subscribers not only open and click on your emails, but that they do so on a regular basis. If they don’t, it could potentially affect your overall email deliverability and negatively impact revenue driven from the email channel.

To manage through this shift, StrongMail recommends employing a combination of two things:

1)     Carefully scrubbing your list to either remove or attempt to re-engage non-responders after 6 months of inactivity.

2)     Implementing marketing tactics to increase subscriber engagement as soon as possible.

If you’re interested in learning more about how the Inbox experience is changing in 2011, I encourage you to download our December whitepaper on the subject, “/a>”.

Except the intersection with social media, (I’ll ask about that shortly) what’s the most important change in email marketing over the past year? Any surprises?

In addition to what I mention above, there appears to be a migration from batch email marketing towards triggered email marketing automation. Marketers have been talking about it for years, but we’re finally seeing a shift towards more wide-spread adoption. This is a result of technology advances that put easy-to-use workflow-building functionality into the hands of marketers and a drive for enterprises to generate a single view of their customer across all channels.

We recently published a great case study on this with /a> that I recommend reading if you’re looking at a similar program.

Many companies are implementing Email and Social Media Marketing solutions independently but you’re a strong advocate of a synergy between them. What are your recommendations for companies looking for best practices and an approach to making their email marketing more social?

When social media first started gaining momentum, many industry pundits were saying that it signaled the death of email. Neilsen set out to prove that hypothesis, and fielded a study that broke internet users in to four groups – three focused on varying levels of social media usage and a fourth group did not use social media at all.

Then they overlayed email usage on top of those segments and discovered that their hypothesis was wrong. In fact, the more engaged a person was with social media, the more heavily they consumed email.

/a>

This intersection of highly engaged email and social media users tend to be more active online – generating reviews, recommendations and comments in forums. In many cases, this segment also contains your most influential brand advocates.

The good news for email marketers is that, these influencers are already in your email database. The most successful socialized email marketing programs target these influencers with something of value that incentivizes them to spread the word about your product or service. We’ve seen brands drive as much as six figures in additional revenue off of one socialized email program that was targeted in this fashion. Another was able to generate 8,500 new subscribers off of one email campaign using a similar strategy.

The key is to be thoughtful with your email and social media strategy. Provide your influencers with genuine, true value in your campaigns, and if you can make them look like a hero by providing them with something of value to share with their networks, even better.

Simply integrating passive social sharing is good, but it will yield a much lower lift in click-throughs.

Companies that have been involved with social media publishing, sharing and networking for a while often find themselves overwhelmed and looking for efficiencies through tools. What types of social media tools do you recommend? Is there a process for evaluation that you’d recommend?

Every smart social media strategy starts with listening, so your first investment should be in a listening platform like Radian 6, Attenisty or Alterian’s SM2. In addition, you need a social media management console to schedule, track and respond to your mentions across social channels. StrongMail has one called Social Direct, but other popular ones include HootSuite or even Tweetdeck, which is free. If you’re a large enterprise that has a team of people tweeting on behalf of your brand in a customer service capacity, you should look at Co-Tweet.

Additional technology investments could include a community platform like Jive or Lithium (if you determine that’s right for your business), or a referral marketing platform like StrongMail Influencer.

But to be honest, most enterprise level social media marketers are still investing in internal education and training. I heard a great quote last week… “Social media is too young to be a science. It’s still an art.”  This means that the right strategy and set of tools is going to be different for every brand. The good news is – like email marketing – there is a wealth of free information out there for you to help devise your social media strategy if you’re budget strapped. However if you don’t have time, there are also plenty of agencies to help you quickly build a strategy that makes sense for your business.

“Social Media” is the darling topic for many business publications, blogs (including this one) and even mainstream media. Do you think at some point there will be a social media bubble? If so, when do you think it will pop?

That’s a great question… Gartner’s hype-cycle shows that every new, promising technology will enter the trough of disillusionment before it enters the plateau of productivity. By that theory, we are absolutely headed for a bubble-burst, but it’s not certain when that will happen. I suspect that it will have something to do with a consumer privacy backlash. Social media is free for a reason… Mark Zuckerberg might not think consumers will ever care about how their information is shared, but I think they eventually will. Companies should make sure that their data management practices and privacy policies are above board and clearly articulated in their privacy policies in preparation for this.

In the recent StrongMail webinar, strong>2011 Social Marketing Business Forecast, Jeremiah Owyang talked about social media budget allocation for the coming year. What are some of the shifts in priority that you’re seeing with companies that are maturing in their social media programs?

Mature social media marketers are starting to shift their limited budget dollars from traditional agencies (that maybe handled their PR or advertising campaigns) to boutique agencies that specialize in social media marketing. This enables them to generate significantly higher returns from their social media marketing programs. /a> is doing some groundbreaking, data-based Social CRM Marketing work in this area that is producing incredible results for our clients.

ROI is a big topic when it comes to social media marketing. How does email marketing help facilitate or achieve greater business value from social participation?

I just spoke at OpenDialogue’s Social Media Marketing Conference in Toronto and 2/3 of the audience came from a marketing background, whereas less than 5 people in the audience came from a PR background. That is a significant shift from who owned social media a few years ago. Marketers are taking over… which signals a shift towards needing to prove ROI. In PR, that’s a fuzzy metric.

Email marketing is a direct marketing discipline, which by nature means that everything needs to be tracked and measured. Social media metrics are more engagement focused, however smart marketers need to start analyzing those metrics in conjunction with their email marketing metrics, purchase metrics, customer lifetime value metrics to build a holistic picture of each consumer’s value to your company. This is the holy grail of social media marketing ROI, however I don’t think it’s that far off for companies with the right organizational structure and integrated technology infrastructure.

What are some of the biggest myths, misconceptions or outright misinformation you’ve been seeing about email, social or a convergence of the two?

Probably that social media is going to kill email, which I alluded to earlier. Social media is just another channel to add to the marketing mix. Did television kill the phone? No. Did Email kill the phone? No. Did Email kill print? A little bit… but I don’t think social media can be compared in the same way. Email is literally an electronic version of mail… so of course it’s going to affect the usage of print. But it’s never going to kill it completely. And social media is most certainly *not* going to kill email.

What are you most optimistic about for online marketing in 2011?

The move towards engagement filtering by the top ISPs is driving increased pressure for email marketers to up their game. As any marketer who has ever been blocked by a major ISP know will tell you… once you’re blocked, it can be quite a challenge to get unblocked.

The four major ISPs aren’t making the specifics of their algorithms public, nor have they announced exactly when they will start junking emails based on lack of subscriber engagement. However by taking steps to increase subscriber engagement now, you will not only protect yourself from being negatively impacted by this change – you will have the added bonus of improving the performance of your email marketing programs.

Email marketers are paying attention. According to a recent StrongMail survey of just under 1000 global email marketing executives, 52% cited increasing subscriber engagement as one of their top priorities in 2011. This makes it the #1 initiative for email marketers in 2011 – followed by improving segmentation and targeting and integrating social media with their email marketing programs.

In my opinion, this is awesome news for everyone. Its forcing email marketers to evolve and start paying attention to engagement metrics on an ongoing basis – not to mention keep their lists clean – if they want to continue to have their email delivered. This is going to hurt lazy email marketers and spammers, but that’s the point. But if you’re on top of this change, it will only create a win-win situation for consumers, ISPs and brands alike.

For in-depth examples of how brands are successfully increasing subscriber engagement, I recommend downloading our whitepaper on the topic, “/a>.”

Thank you Kristin!  For more insights and to connect with Kristin on the social web, visit her on /a> or her /a> on the StrongMail website.

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img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1834″ title=”the-joneses” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/the-joneses.jpg” alt=”" width=”600″ height=”400″ />

A few days ago I’ve watched a very intriguing movie called strong>The Joneses. It’s about a seemingly happy family who is moving to a new city. Their main motive is to sell products though. How do they do it? They meet a lot of people and they sell by example, they use the newest gadgets they have to advertise and simple talk about them.

The stealth marketing of the Joneses reminded me of large parts of the blogosphere these days.

It’s not the just the obvious parallel I mean here. Yes, there are lots of bloggers who sell you the one and only WordPress theme, a web hosting package they use and some software you have to use. Indeed I almost made the mistake to behave like this as well. A few scattered affiliate links can still be found in the archives here.

No, I mean the bigger picture. In the movie it’s about keeping up with the Joneses money-wise. They don’t have to pay for the latest sports cars, flat-screen tv sets or smartphones. Everybody else has to though. On the Web it’s also about time. Web celebs like Robert Scoble or SEO industry icons like Rand Fishkin always use and write about the latest social site you have to be on (/a>), they visit lots of expensive conferences all over the place or better speak there.

I have spoken at the local SES twice as well but second time was awful.

Two speakers were scheduled, me and a guy from Mister Wong, but then the organizer decided to add three more speakers beacuse he thought we’re not attractive enough probably. So when finally my presentation came there was no time left and he interrupted me after a few minutes so that I couldn’t finish it. I was quite angry an decided not to speak at SES ever again but they haven’t invited me anyways a year later as it’s their policy not to invite people who need too long for their presentation.

So you see it’s not all glamour in the shiny SEO world. You get treated without respect even by people you work for without pay.

It’s not just the conferences though. It’s the latest hype as well you have to invest your time in. People who earn 500$ or even 1000$ an hour and have dozens of wage slaves who do their low level work can afford to spend half the day to hang out on the latest no ROI yet but in two years probably social sites.

Can you keep up with them? No, of course not. You can’t keep with the Joneses. You don’t have to. Why? Let me come back to the get rich quick make money bloggers again. They are the worst kind of bloggers I have mentioned at the beginning of this post.

There were several projects out there that sounded quite similar so I can’t even remember their domain right. They were called the million dollar blog project or the likes. They wanted to make a six figure income from blogging in one year etc.

You know what? I’ve recently started to monitor my broken links more closely. What did I find? Hundreds of comment links were broken. I checked many of them manually to find out what happened and amazingly many sites and blogs have disappeared. Some blogs after just a few months. Several of the million dollar blogs were among them while most of the lay low solid SEO blogs were still there.

So unlike the movie were the the neighbor who can’t keep up with the Joneses finally commits suicide on the Web the Joneses disappear much faster. Not only you don’t have to keep up with the Joneses you shouldn’t even try! Look at me instead. I make a quite modest income by blogging but I’m almost a full time blogger for a few years by now. I have to do some SEO consulting or other SEO work as well but my dream of business blogging for a living has come true and it lasts.

I don’t mean to tell you that you can’t become a millionaire by blogging. There were cases where blogs have been sold for millions of dollars and I don’t even mean the sell out of Huffington Post to AOL.

You don’t have to everywhere and follow the latest hype. You don’t have to spend hours and hours on social sites nobody outside of the Web geek circles even knows.

I’ve learned the hard way in some cases. I wasted time on a few sites where I either got banned, where they vanished or got sold out and abandoned by most of the cool kids.

Make small steps that makes sense, earn enough money and don’t try to get rich quick or even rich at all. This way you may be around next year as well. Don’ try to keep up with the Joneses of Web.

You can even blog less to succeed.

Most of my blogs don’t need more than two posts per week and they earn money anyways. Here on SEO 2.0 I don’t even need to earn money with the blog directly unlike other SEO bloggers who remove blog comments and substitute them with ads.

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>
3. /a>

img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1834″ title=”the-joneses” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/the-joneses.jpg” alt=”" width=”600″ height=”400″ />

A few days ago I’ve watched a very intriguing movie called strong>The Joneses. It’s about a seemingly happy family who is moving to a new city. Their main motive is to sell products though. How do they do it? They meet a lot of people and they sell by example, they use the newest gadgets they have to advertise and simple talk about them.

The stealth marketing of the Joneses reminded me of large parts of the blogosphere these days.

It’s not the just the obvious parallel I mean here. Yes, there are lots of bloggers who sell you the one and only WordPress theme, a web hosting package they use and some software you have to use. Indeed I almost made the mistake to behave like this as well. A few scattered affiliate links can still be found in the archives here.

No, I mean the bigger picture. In the movie it’s about keeping up with the Joneses money-wise. They don’t have to pay for the latest sports cars, flat-screen tv sets or smartphones. Everybody else has to though. On the Web it’s also about time. Web celebs like Robert Scoble or SEO industry icons like Rand Fishkin always use and write about the latest social site you have to be on (/a>), they visit lots of expensive conferences all over the place or better speak there.

I have spoken at the local SES twice as well but second time was awful.

Two speakers were scheduled, me and a guy from Mister Wong, but then the organizer decided to add three more speakers beacuse he thought we’re not attractive enough probably. So when finally my presentation came there was no time left and he interrupted me after a few minutes so that I couldn’t finish it. I was quite angry an decided not to speak at SES ever again but they haven’t invited me anyways a year later as it’s their policy not to invite people who need too long for their presentation.

So you see it’s not all glamour in the shiny SEO world. You get treated without respect even by people you work for without pay.

It’s not just the conferences though. It’s the latest hype as well you have to invest your time in. People who earn 500$ or even 1000$ an hour and have dozens of wage slaves who do their low level work can afford to spend half the day to hang out on the latest no ROI yet but in two years probably social sites.

Can you keep up with them? No, of course not. You can’t keep with the Joneses. You don’t have to. Why? Let me come back to the get rich quick make money bloggers again. They are the worst kind of bloggers I have mentioned at the beginning of this post.

There were several projects out there that sounded quite similar so I can’t even remember their domain right. They were called the million dollar blog project or the likes. They wanted to make a six figure income from blogging in one year etc.

You know what? I’ve recently started to monitor my broken links more closely. What did I find? Hundreds of comment links were broken. I checked many of them manually to find out what happened and amazingly many sites and blogs have disappeared. Some blogs after just a few months. Several of the million dollar blogs were among them while most of the lay low solid SEO blogs were still there.

So unlike the movie were the the neighbor who can’t keep up with the Joneses finally commits suicide on the Web the Joneses disappear much faster. Not only you don’t have to keep up with the Joneses you shouldn’t even try! Look at me instead. I make a quite modest income by blogging but I’m almost a full time blogger for a few years by now. I have to do some SEO consulting or other SEO work as well but my dream of business blogging for a living has come true and it lasts.

I don’t mean to tell you that you can’t become a millionaire by blogging. There were cases where blogs have been sold for millions of dollars and I don’t even mean the sell out of Huffington Post to AOL.

You don’t have to everywhere and follow the latest hype. You don’t have to spend hours and hours on social sites nobody outside of the Web geek circles even knows.

I’ve learned the hard way in some cases. I wasted time on a few sites where I either got banned, where they vanished or got sold out and abandoned by most of the cool kids.

Make small steps that makes sense, earn enough money and don’t try to get rich quick or even rich at all. This way you may be around next year as well. Don’ try to keep up with the Joneses of Web.

You can even blog less to succeed.

Most of my blogs don’t need more than two posts per week and they earn money anyways. Here on SEO 2.0 I don’t even need to earn money with the blog directly unlike other SEO bloggers who remove blog comments and substitute them with ads.

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>
3. /a>

See the rest here:
/a>

img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1834″ title=”the-joneses” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/the-joneses.jpg” alt=”" width=”600″ height=”400″ />

A few days ago I’ve watched a very intriguing movie called strong>The Joneses. It’s about a seemingly happy family who is moving to a new city. Their main motive is to sell products though. How do they do it? They meet a lot of people and they sell by example, they use the newest gadgets they have to advertise and simple talk about them.

The stealth marketing of the Joneses reminded me of large parts of the blogosphere these days.

It’s not the just the obvious parallel I mean here. Yes, there are lots of bloggers who sell you the one and only WordPress theme, a web hosting package they use and some software you have to use. Indeed I almost made the mistake to behave like this as well. A few scattered affiliate links can still be found in the archives here.

No, I mean the bigger picture. In the movie it’s about keeping up with the Joneses money-wise. They don’t have to pay for the latest sports cars, flat-screen tv sets or smartphones. Everybody else has to though. On the Web it’s also about time. Web celebs like Robert Scoble or SEO industry icons like Rand Fishkin always use and write about the latest social site you have to be on (/a>), they visit lots of expensive conferences all over the place or better speak there.

I have spoken at the local SES twice as well but second time was awful.

Two speakers were scheduled, me and a guy from Mister Wong, but then the organizer decided to add three more speakers beacuse he thought we’re not attractive enough probably. So when finally my presentation came there was no time left and he interrupted me after a few minutes so that I couldn’t finish it. I was quite angry an decided not to speak at SES ever again but they haven’t invited me anyways a year later as it’s their policy not to invite people who need too long for their presentation.

So you see it’s not all glamour in the shiny SEO world. You get treated without respect even by people you work for without pay.

It’s not just the conferences though. It’s the latest hype as well you have to invest your time in. People who earn 500$ or even 1000$ an hour and have dozens of wage slaves who do their low level work can afford to spend half the day to hang out on the latest no ROI yet but in two years probably social sites.

Can you keep up with them? No, of course not. You can’t keep with the Joneses. You don’t have to. Why? Let me come back to the get rich quick make money bloggers again. They are the worst kind of bloggers I have mentioned at the beginning of this post.

There were several projects out there that sounded quite similar so I can’t even remember their domain right. They were called the million dollar blog project or the likes. They wanted to make a six figure income from blogging in one year etc.

You know what? I’ve recently started to monitor my broken links more closely. What did I find? Hundreds of comment links were broken. I checked many of them manually to find out what happened and amazingly many sites and blogs have disappeared. Some blogs after just a few months. Several of the million dollar blogs were among them while most of the lay low solid SEO blogs were still there.

So unlike the movie were the the neighbor who can’t keep up with the Joneses finally commits suicide on the Web the Joneses disappear much faster. Not only you don’t have to keep up with the Joneses you shouldn’t even try! Look at me instead. I make a quite modest income by blogging but I’m almost a full time blogger for a few years by now. I have to do some SEO consulting or other SEO work as well but my dream of business blogging for a living has come true and it lasts.

I don’t mean to tell you that you can’t become a millionaire by blogging. There were cases where blogs have been sold for millions of dollars and I don’t even mean the sell out of Huffington Post to AOL.

You don’t have to everywhere and follow the latest hype. You don’t have to spend hours and hours on social sites nobody outside of the Web geek circles even knows.

I’ve learned the hard way in some cases. I wasted time on a few sites where I either got banned, where they vanished or got sold out and abandoned by most of the cool kids.

Make small steps that makes sense, earn enough money and don’t try to get rich quick or even rich at all. This way you may be around next year as well. Don’ try to keep up with the Joneses of Web.

You can even blog less to succeed.

Most of my blogs don’t need more than two posts per week and they earn money anyways. Here on SEO 2.0 I don’t even need to earn money with the blog directly unlike other SEO bloggers who remove blog comments and substitute them with ads.

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>
3. /a>

img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1834″ title=”the-joneses” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/the-joneses.jpg” alt=”" width=”600″ height=”400″ />

A few days ago I’ve watched a very intriguing movie called strong>The Joneses. It’s about a seemingly happy family who is moving to a new city. Their main motive is to sell products though. How do they do it? They meet a lot of people and they sell by example, they use the newest gadgets they have to advertise and simple talk about them.

The stealth marketing of the Joneses reminded me of large parts of the blogosphere these days.

It’s not the just the obvious parallel I mean here. Yes, there are lots of bloggers who sell you the one and only WordPress theme, a web hosting package they use and some software you have to use. Indeed I almost made the mistake to behave like this as well. A few scattered affiliate links can still be found in the archives here.

No, I mean the bigger picture. In the movie it’s about keeping up with the Joneses money-wise. They don’t have to pay for the latest sports cars, flat-screen tv sets or smartphones. Everybody else has to though. On the Web it’s also about time. Web celebs like Robert Scoble or SEO industry icons like Rand Fishkin always use and write about the latest social site you have to be on (/a>), they visit lots of expensive conferences all over the place or better speak there.

I have spoken at the local SES twice as well but second time was awful.

Two speakers were scheduled, me and a guy from Mister Wong, but then the organizer decided to add three more speakers beacuse he thought we’re not attractive enough probably. So when finally my presentation came there was no time left and he interrupted me after a few minutes so that I couldn’t finish it. I was quite angry an decided not to speak at SES ever again but they haven’t invited me anyways a year later as it’s their policy not to invite people who need too long for their presentation.

So you see it’s not all glamour in the shiny SEO world. You get treated without respect even by people you work for without pay.

It’s not just the conferences though. It’s the latest hype as well you have to invest your time in. People who earn 500$ or even 1000$ an hour and have dozens of wage slaves who do their low level work can afford to spend half the day to hang out on the latest no ROI yet but in two years probably social sites.

Can you keep up with them? No, of course not. You can’t keep with the Joneses. You don’t have to. Why? Let me come back to the get rich quick make money bloggers again. They are the worst kind of bloggers I have mentioned at the beginning of this post.

There were several projects out there that sounded quite similar so I can’t even remember their domain right. They were called the million dollar blog project or the likes. They wanted to make a six figure income from blogging in one year etc.

You know what? I’ve recently started to monitor my broken links more closely. What did I find? Hundreds of comment links were broken. I checked many of them manually to find out what happened and amazingly many sites and blogs have disappeared. Some blogs after just a few months. Several of the million dollar blogs were among them while most of the lay low solid SEO blogs were still there.

So unlike the movie were the the neighbor who can’t keep up with the Joneses finally commits suicide on the Web the Joneses disappear much faster. Not only you don’t have to keep up with the Joneses you shouldn’t even try! Look at me instead. I make a quite modest income by blogging but I’m almost a full time blogger for a few years by now. I have to do some SEO consulting or other SEO work as well but my dream of business blogging for a living has come true and it lasts.

I don’t mean to tell you that you can’t become a millionaire by blogging. There were cases where blogs have been sold for millions of dollars and I don’t even mean the sell out of Huffington Post to AOL.

You don’t have to everywhere and follow the latest hype. You don’t have to spend hours and hours on social sites nobody outside of the Web geek circles even knows.

I’ve learned the hard way in some cases. I wasted time on a few sites where I either got banned, where they vanished or got sold out and abandoned by most of the cool kids.

Make small steps that makes sense, earn enough money and don’t try to get rich quick or even rich at all. This way you may be around next year as well. Don’ try to keep up with the Joneses of Web.

You can even blog less to succeed.

Most of my blogs don’t need more than two posts per week and they earn money anyways. Here on SEO 2.0 I don’t even need to earn money with the blog directly unlike other SEO bloggers who remove blog comments and substitute them with ads.

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>
3. /a>

See more here:
/a>