Making Email Relevant

There's an up and coming "digital" company out of Baltimore called Blue Sky Factory. They have a fantastic email marketing engine called "Publicaster". It's been around for a few years. They recently launched a new feature-set of Publicaster that is very interesting. Not from a technical mind-set, but more from a social networking point of view. The feature, called Share With Your Network (SWYN), allows email subscribers to share email content with their social networks. Using a code snippet, email marketers can choose to give their social community the option to share their email message with friends on a variety of popular social media engines, including: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and MySpace.

Up until now, stand alone email engines have not really played in the same sandbox as social networking. SWYN changes all of that. I'm curious as to what the next "angle" Blue Sky Factory is going to launch into the websphere. I'm sure it will be productive and very cool.

Definition of Cross-Media in the Marketing World

I just returned from the Graph Expo show at McCormick Place in Chicago. First of all, you wouldn't know that the economy is "suffering". The place was packed. Not sure if anyone was buying anything, but it was packed nonetheless.

Anyhow, the big buzz at the show was cross-media solutions. I visited many of the vendors and sat in on a seminar on the subject. What I found out was that cross-media is being defined as the integration of direct mail, email and PURLs (personalized URL's) into one application solution. You create the direct mail piece and the email header with the same look and feel. You then publish PURLs to the content of those two media and send the recipient to a personalized landing page (otherwise known as a micro-site). All of this is tracked and triggered based upon logical steps determined by the recipients action. The end-game report gives the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) some datapoints to sink his/her teeth into to determine next steps in the strategic marketing picture.

OK...sounds pretty cool and all that. However, these so-called cross-media application solutions are missing quite a few other media. I think the software developer that can integrate more than just the "big three" media will be onto something extremely big.

How would you define Cross-Media Solutions? I'd like to hear your comments...