Social Media Strategy - A Practical Guide for Marketers

Found this great presentation regarding Social Media Strategy courtesy of Spur Interactive. Excellent food for thought!

Is Social Media just a fad? I think not...

Take a look at this quick but extremely informative video. Everything is changing so fast. I'm sure there will be some gyrations in Social Media over the next few months, but I feel it's here to stay.

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.

MOD and Social Media - Like Red Wine and Steak!

The other evening I asked my 15 year old daughter to check her Gmail account as I was going to send her something to read. She replied, "I use FaceBook for email now." My 17 year old son tells me, "No one uses email anymore. Everyone just sends a text message."

Email among teens now lags behind Social Media sites such as FaceBook, Twitter and MySpace. With regards to FaceBook, check out the global growth graph on the left. The age group with the greatest growth is 35-49 year old males! Social Media and networking is booming in the business world with companies launching their own FaceBook sites and Twitter "follow-me" feeds.

This move to Social Media adds another exciting medium to the whole Marketing On-Demand engine. Companies better start understanding this medium and put their Social Media campaigns together real quick! Time flies, doesn't it?