Last week, I spent a few days in Calgary with my clients at AdFarm, the largest agriculture-focused communications agency in North America. In addition to the single best room I have ever spoken in (see photo), I learned a lot from the good folks at AdFarm.

Every Company Will Be Social

Every company, regardless of type or size, will be social at some point in the future. Some are already social. Some are just starting to embrace it. For others, it may take a while. But eventually, every company is going to have to participate, because that’s what customers will demand of them.

Lack of Chatter Doesn’t Mean Lack of Opportunity

At AdFarm, most of their clients aren’t “natural” candidates for social media adoption. They are large agriculture companies that manufacture pesticides, and cattle dewormers, and tractors. Social media monitoring for these companies and categories typically yields very little online chatter.

But, that doesn’t mean social media isn’t appropriate or possible.

If people aren’t talking about your brand online, why don’t you give people something to talk about?

Be Chatter-Worthy

If your company or category aren’t being talked about, you need to move from a responsive/defensive posture in social media, to a proactive/offensive posture. Create content that gives your customers and prospective customers insight into what type of company you really are, and the great people that make your company roll.

(Remember, companies are made up of great people. Social media lets you prove it).

Create a blog. Create a Linkedin group (there’s one that’s only open to people that sell farm equipment). Create videos (the US Department of Agriculture has a pretty damn good video program). Create a Facebook page (here’s a great example from Liberty Swine Farms). Create a killer email newsletter.

If people aren’t talking about you in social media, maybe it’s because they don’t know you’re out there, and maybe it’s because you haven’t given them anything interesting to react to. You can and should fix that.

And it doesn’t matter whether you’re Burger King or a a tractor company. Customers want to know more about the companies with which they do business. Are you making that viable? If not, why not?

If you’re in public relations or social media (preferably both), and you aren’t following the thinking of Dave Fleet, you’re resource-deficient.

A Brit living in Toronto and working as an Account Director at social PR powerhouse agency Thornley Fallis, Dave takes a lucid, common-sense approach to the upheaval that social media has brought to the shores of public relations.

Despite his growing, deserved notoriety in social media and PR circles, Dave spends a lot of time on the social Web discovering and promoting new bloggers and helping PR pros work through tough issues like disclosure, authenticity and measurement.

I interviewed Dave live on Twitter on November 4, 2009 where he waxed specific on social media, PR, and listening. Enjoy!

1. @jaybaer: What’s been the greatest impact of social media on public relations?

• @davefleet: Enabling organizations to engage in dialogue with their audiences. Previously one-way, through the media. Removes the filter.
• Also lets companies observe issues and feedback in real time. Provides a real lens into what people are saying about your brand.

2. @jaybaer: Is PR’s future then in content creation or content advice, rather than intermediary wrangling?

• @davefleet: Intermediaries aren’t going away; mainstream media still command vast audiences. The definition of “mainstream” is changing though.
• Content creation or advice (depending on situation) are playing an increasing role in PR as content moves online.

3. @jaybaer: Does social media’s always-on nature change staffing patterns for PR firms? Should it?

• @davefleet: Certainly has resource implications, but I think organizations should set expectations with consumers re: response times.
• Social media is 24/7, but that just doesn’t make business sense for most organizations. Slower outside business hours/weekend.

4. @jaybaer: What’s a better approach for agencies? Social media specialists, or making sure all staff understands social media?

• @davefleet: The lines between social and traditional media are blurring, so we aim for all our staff to have a broad understanding.
• Can’t expect everyone to know everything though, so there will still be specialists within that. Same with media relations.

5. @jaybaer: What social media responsibilities are better handled by the client, rather than the PR firm?

• @davefleet: Depends on the client. Ideally, clients handle the direct interaction but in reality not all are ready or have the resources.
• We know we’ve done our job well when the client turns and says they’re ready, or staffs-up for direct engagement.
• Agencies are still well placed to help clients with strategy, ideation, monitoring, dev, policies & counsel on interaction.

6. @jaybaer: What do you think about social media crises? Is having a specific social media crisis plan required? A best practice?

• @davefleet: Crisis plan is certainly helpful – it fits in with other processes companies should put in place for engagement.
• Decision tree (like the one the Air Force produced) and decision-making tree are very useful as issues can blow up quickly.

7. @jaybaer: Are good social media practitioners trained, or born? Is the “social” part inherent?

• @davefleet: This isn’t rocket science. You can learn the tools and the norms.

8. @jaybaer: Your agency (http://thornleyfallis.com) has many employees with their own blogs, instead of a group blog. Why?

• @davefleet: Depends on how you look at it. Our company website aggregates all of our blogs into one place – you can subscribe to one feed.
• On the flip side, we all own our own sites – we maintain them ourselves, under our own steam, with our own take on things.

9. @jaybaer: You recently redesigned your own blog http://davefleet.com (a must read). Why? What makes for a good blog design?

• @davefleet: I thought it was about time my site started to look professional. My 76design colleagues did a great job – hope you agree.
• My main objectives were focusing the site more on conversation, and making it easier for people to connect with me.

10. @jaybaer: You write about blogger pitching.  What’s the difference between blogger pitching & reporter pitching?

• @davefleet: Most of the principles are the same: research; know your audience; tailor your approach; don’t spam.
• Good media relations folks should be able to transition to blogger relations fairly easily. Bad ones will get outed more.

11. @jaybaer: But for a long time, “spam” PR worked (at least sometimes). Isn’t a news wire just organized spam?

• @davefleet: I wrote a post a while back about why spam won’t go away – it often works, in the short term. Not so much long-term though.
• Great relationships won’t get a non-story published, but they may get you a chance to explain why there’s a story.

12. @jaybaer: Will all companies eventually have some sort of social media program, even if it’s just social CRM/customer service?

• @davefleet: I think companies are foolish if they’re not listening, even at this point. However, communications isn’t a one-size fits all thing.
• Basic communications – look at your audiences, where they reside & your objectives and find the best way to marry the two.
• Social media changes many things about PR, but it doesn’t change the basics of communications strategy & planning.

13. @jaybaer: You published a great ebook on social media policies. What’s the guiding principle for sound policy?

• @davefleet: Common sense. For many organizations, the scary bits (re: confidentiality, leaking info) are already in employee agreements.
• Policies can actually enable as well as constrain – they remove uncertainty for employees and show the boundaries.
• Policies can also set expectations outside the organization – conversations you’ll engage in; when you’re around to respond.

14. @jaybaer: Is that your 1st step in social media strategy? Find what’s being said about a company, and where? How do you do that?

• @davefleet: First step is researching until you feel you know the client almost as well as they know themselves.
• Listening is key. Tools depend on the client- could be free Google Alerts, Twitter Search etc; could be Radian6 or similar.

15. @jaybaer: Many social media success stories feature an employee that’s the “face” of the brand in social media. Good tactic?

• @davefleet: I think multiple faces are a better solution – you avoid the “all eggs in one basket” risk. Molson does it well.

16. @jaybaer: How has your own usage of social media changed this year?

• @davefleet: I’ve become more selective in the tools I use. Less shiny new toys; more evaluation of the ones worth using.
• I’m also gravitating to mobile apps, which I think will be an ongoing trend over the next couple of years.

17. @jaybaer: You’re in Toronto. Any differences in U.S. vs. Canadian social media usage or trends?

• @davefleet: There are some differences. Canada adopted Facebook more quickly than the US, where MySpace dominated for quite a while.
• Canadians also can’t access some US-based tools. Broadly speaking, though, many overall trends are the same.

18. @jaybaer: You’ve written about the power of online video yet don’t do much video blogging yourself. Why? (chicks dig the accent)

• @davefleet: I did a fair bit of video blogging for my now-mothballed running blog but realized that I look awful.

19. @jaybaer: What’s the biggest misconception about social media in most companies?

• @davefleet: Biggest social media misconception is that if you ignore what people are saying, they’re not really saying it.

20. @jaybaer: Curiously, you were on the badminton team at University of Bath. How has that helped your PR/social media success?

• @davefleet: It made me realize that I was awful at badminton… which eventually led me to a career in social media..

Wow. Dave was really on the mark in this interview. Took a lot of complex subjects and boiled them down for easy comprehension and consumption. Not easy in 1-2 tweets. Of the 20+ Twitter interviews I’ve done, this quote is one of my favorites:

Biggest social media misconception is that if you ignore what people are saying, they’re not really saying it.

How about you? What did you learn from Dave Fleet? Who should I interview on Twitter next?

(photo by Rannie Turingan)

A long time ago, you could get Web pages ranked in search engines solely based on how many times a keyword was present on the page. This of course resulted in the laughably loathsome practice of keyword stuffing, where Web pages were purposefully written with “discount Easter baskets for sale” 30 times in a row.

This era was mercifully short-lived, as Google (followed by other engines) added a relevancy layer to search results, centered primarily around the number and strength (”authority”) of other Web pages linking to the page in question.

This forced Web site owners to create better content that would earn links from other sites based on the merits of that content.

That algorithmic determination of relevancy has now washed up on the shores of Facebook and email marketing, and it will massively change the success formula for both.

Content Isn’t King. Relevant Content is King

Facebook and email are more similar than they are different. Both intend to develop a relevant dialog between company and consumer, nudging incremental action and advocacy via interesting, contextually appropriate messages.

Historically, the quantity and quality of your Facebook and email messaging had very little negative consequences, unless you really stepped over the line and your fans/subscribers decided to sever the relationship with your brand.

But now, the quality and context of every Facebook and email communication will directly impact your success. Are you ready?

Facebook Emphasizes Content Interactions

On Sunday, Facebook unveiled a revamped News feed, whereby consumers see pieces of content based on a Facebook algorithm that is based on presumed relevancy.

If other Facebook members (especially your friends) have interacted with a piece of content, you are much more likely to have that communication served up to your news feed. Thus, banal flotsam and jetsam that does not draw interactions and engagement will be seen by significantly fewer people on Facebook. In fact, application developers are reporting that their Facebook views are down by as much as 75% in some cases, presumably because few people “like” or comment on the breaking news that you’ve reached level 7 of Mafia Wars.

To date, frequency of updates was a Facebook best practice, as keeping your brand top-of-mind with fans and prospective fans was paramount. The revised news feed, however, values relevancy and engagement over frequency, making interesting, contextual content the key commodity.

Pay attention to your content engagement scores in your Facebook Insights metrics, and start honing (and testing) your editorial approach to deliver content that will draw likes and comments and sharing.

Spam In The Eye of the Beholder

The same principle is now unfolding in email marketing. Historically, email delivery has been rooted in the percentage of your subscribers that mark your email as spam. If you are a good email citizen, and send what people have asked for, using a reputable email service provider, chances are good that your emails will be delivered to recipients’ inbox, rather than the spam folder.

Not anymore.

All of the major Internet service providers are moving swiftly toward subscriber-level deliverability based on individual engagement. This means that whether or not you have opened or clicked on an email from a company in the past will directly impact whether you will receive that email in your inbox or spam folder in the future.

The argument for personalization, testing, and other relevancy-boosting email considerations has always been that the post-delivery metrics like click-through and conversion rate would improve (and they do). But now, if your emails aren’t interesting and engaging to members of your audience, the subscribers you worked so hard to get will just stop receiving your messages. Poof! You’re off the radar and forgotten faster than the freak voted off Project Runway in week one.

This should scare you. And it should free up some budget and willpower for rigorous testing (especially subject line and time of day), and hard core dynamic content. Maybe even the use of analytics to create emails derived from your subscribers’ Web site behavior.

Getting past batch and blast email – where everyone on your list receives the same info at the same time – has officially moved from important, to required.

(Note: my friends at Pivotal Veracity recently rolled out some mind-blowing tracking tools called Mailbox IQ to help you determine email engagement at the subscriber level. Very useful.)

You Might Want to Take That Excel Class

Our online behavior is tracked in infinite ways that not so long ago would have been unfathomable and disturbing. Yet, the future of all digital marketing is based on personalization. You’ll see different Google results, Facebook news feed, ratings and reviews, and email content than I will, based on your friends, preferences, and prior behavior.

As a consumer, this universal drive toward relevancy is a welcome relief, as the algorithm separates on our behalf the digital worthy from the less worthy like a robotic USDA meat inspector.

As marketers, however, we must now accept the fact that routine and ongoing testing and optimization of all facets of our digital communication is needed to maximize reach and effectiveness.

The Mad Men of the very near future will be masters of math, not martinis.

(photo by Bruce Turner)

Knowing which of your blog posts are most successful, and in what way, is invaluable in the never-ending process of honing your blog’s content approach and community
orientation. Bloggers have always been challenged by on one hand having both a surplus of potential success metrics, and a scarcity of data aggregation tools.

The new PostRank Analytics (in public beta) changes that, and is a most welcome development in blog tracking and measurement.

Just $9/month with a 30-day free trial, PostRank Analytics provides comprehensive success metrics for every one of your blog posts, including page views, average time spent reading, number of comments, tweets, and mentions in social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon. All of this data is presented in one, easy-to-understand layout that allows you to quickly compare your posts to see patterns of success.

PostRank Analytics also includes an aggregated “engagement score”, numerical shorthand for how each post fared. The engagement score is created using an algorithm that takes into account the other metrics such as comments, tweets, etc. It’s not dissimilar from Facebook’s engagement score mechanism on fan pages.

5 Minute Hook Up with Google Analytics

To utilize PostRank Analytics on your blog, just create and account and configure your Google Analytics account to sync with PostRank Analytics. This requires you logging in to your Google account and enabling this connection, a 5-minute procedure with no technical skills required. You do, however, have to have a Google Analytics account for PostRank Analytics to provide sufficient value.

One of the other useful features of PostRank Analytics is that you can get your daily metrics, including your engagement score, emailed to you in a tidy, easy-to-understand format. Perfect for distributing to all of your team members in a group blogging situation.

Additionally, PostRank Analytics lets you see who is engaging with each of your posts, providing a tidy list of tweets, diggs, comments, etc. all in one place. You can also see trend data that charts how frequently people engage with your content over time in each social outpost.

There are still some kinks to work out (on occasion, links do not work, etc.) and the methodology and context behind “engagement points” calculation is still a bit mysterious (PostRank claims they are working on a more detailed explanation), but for serious bloggers, I recommend you give PostRank Analytics a try. It’s an elegant way to chart your progress and refine your content. The daily email reports alone are worth the two lattes per month fee.

Have you tried Postrank Analytics?

Does social media make you more comfortable, or less comfortable? For me, it’s both.

As my friend Amber Naslund said when I interviewed her on Twitter, social media enables her to have friends that are not dictated by geography or circumstance. And to me, the ability to find people with whom you have a kinship, regardless of where they live is an extraordinary opportunity.

They say it takes a village to raise a child (or an adult), and the relationships I’ve developed via the social Web are incalculably helpful to me personally and in business. Some of those relationships transcend the Web, as I’ve been fortunate enough to put names to avatars with many of the people I’ve come to know and respect online.

My online community cares about me, supports me, and laughs at my jokes. And that’s a comfort. (and I’m thankful for you every day)

But none of that works until or unless you’re ready to get out of your comfort zone online.

You vs. The Real You

The question I’m most often asked when working with corporations and business owners on social media strategy is “how do I balance my personal and professional life online?”

“Surely, no one wants to know what I’m doing on the weekend.”

Actually, they do. They really do. You’ve probably heard the saying that people don’t hire companies, they hire people. It’s why “chemistry” with the client is so critical in professional services firms. Why would you not want to pre-establish chemistry and commonality with your prospective friends and clients online?

The fact is, your personal and professional lives are colliding and blending like a 99 cent frozen margarita on Cinco de Mayo – and that trend will march onward, not backward.

Social media is rooted culturally in showing your real, whole self. Pondering whether someone wants to read a tweet about your Sunday camping trip is no different than wondering why someone cares what you think about a hotel in Akron, via your TripAdvisor review. But somehow (especially on Twitter) incredibly smart businesspeople clam up like Mob bosses pledging fealty to Omerta.

The fundamental truth is that your personal life is almost undoubtedly more interesting than your business life. Period. And, associating some sort of noteworthy character trait to your personal brand makes you more memorable in social media. The fact that you run a PR firm? Meh. The fact that run a PR firm, but also grow prize-winning roses? I’ll remember that.

Show Me Something

Now, there’s of course a difference between personal and banal. The stock criticism of Twitter being filled with updates on what you had for lunch is overblown, but the underlying principle is not. When tweeting or blogging or status updating about your personal life, it should be something that actually reveals a dimension of your life, or character, or belief system.

“I ate at Subway today” is not valid. “Went to Subway today. Had the veggie sub. On day 23 of vegetarian conversion” is valid.

In a socially connected world, where countless opinions and options are just a finger swipe on a mobile device away, differentiation is harder than ever. You have to build some hooks for yourself than transcend the office. That’s why I make it a point to emphasize that I live in a forest. And review restaurants. And have a bottle opener as a business card.

Your personal life? Your professional life? One and the same. I know that’s often uncomfortable. But it’s the truth.

What’s interesting about you outside the office?

(photo by popofatticus)

Just finished up the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Chicago. Another great event filled with excellent content and smart attendees.

I was a Mixologist for the event, along with Stephanie Miller from Return Path, Michael Brito from Intel, and Beth Harte from MarketingProfs. Our job was to attend conference sessions, take notes, and then wrap up the event with summarized key points.

Our Mixologist Report included 33 digital marketing tips, and 8 memorable quotes from the event:

From the Marketing Must Knows sessions

1. Build credibility before you sell via social media
2. Allow open (but governed) access for employees to Twitter and blogging
3. Broadcast emails are not effective. Create relevancy and be helpful
4. Use your Facebook fan page to promote key content of your email newsletter
5. Join the right conversations and the right time
6. Think about your Web site’s “front page” as a collection of pages, not one home page
7. Improve search spending ROI by using down-funnel data
8. Invest in social media. It’s not free.

From the Integrating Marketing Programs sessions

9. Test the unusual
10. Clean up your landing pages
11. Keep your troops informed
12. Insert retweet buttons into PDF files
13. Remove gates in front of your content
14. Use your brand community for market research
15. Engage in online communities as a person first, as a marketer second
16. Use Google keyword tool to learn how customers describe your products/services
17. Optimize all your content for search

From the Engaging with Customers sessions

18. Build relationships with fire starters
19. Build community first, monetize later
20. Offer value on Twitter, don’t self promote
21. Have passion and jump on every possible situation you can on the social Web
22. Build relationships with customers to create a memorable brand experience
23. Set goals, measure, and iterate
24. Social media guidelines for your company should be short and succinct
25. Be organized internally to effectively manage social media externally

From the Peer to Peer sessions

26. Blog about how your products/services fit into your customer’s lives
27. Humanize your blog
28. Get your legal counsel talking to other companies that have successfully implemented social media
29. Have conversations with senior management to determine their appetite for social media
30. Provide your community something that is personally beneficial to them
31. Let your members decide how they want to use “their” community
32. In online video, be mindful of people’s time, attention and surroundings
33. Use trackable links to measure success

8 Killer Social Media and Digital Marketing Quotes

Best quotes heard at the Digital Marketing Mixer:

“Content Doesn’t Win. Optimized Content Wins” – Li Evans
“People Don’t Expect Your Company to be Perfect. They Expect You to Provide Solutions” – Debra Ellis
“Don’t Train. Simplify” – Dr. BJ Fogg
“Measurement is Like Laundry. It Piles Up the Longer You Wait to Do It” – Amber Naslund
“Your Customers Are Listening in Social Media. And So Are Search Engines” – Li Evans
“Many crummy trials beats the big thinking” – Dr. BJ Fogg
“The Art of Twitter is in the Retweet. You Must be Interesting” – Peter Shankman
“Tactics Without a Strategy is Worse Than Doing Nothing at All” – Li Evans

What’s your favorite idea or quote from the Digital Marketing Mixer? Leave a comment, and let’s chat.

(Disclosure: MarketingProfs is a client of Convince & Convert)

Microsoft announced recently that they are launching their own social media listening software tool (currently in closed beta), called Looking Glass, which will according to Microsoft “make social media actionable for business.” Pricing for LookingGlass has not been established.

Impacts of Big Boys on Social Media Monitoring

Microsoft’s entrance into the social media monitoring software category will have two mid-term consequences. First, the percentage of companies using some sort of social media listening software – LookingGlass or otherwise – will skyrocket. This pattern is as familiar to long-time Web watchers as the Cowboys choking in the playoffs. Small start-up companies innovate and create categories, and then the big guys jump on board and expand the user base.

Pay-per-click search engine advertising was pioneered by GoTo, and took off once Yahoo! bought it. The concept was later perfected by Google, which has built a company the size of a modest European nation based on it. Web site tracking was first popularized by WebTrends and a six pack of other, smaller companies. But widespread adoption of Web analytics occurred only after Google bought Urchin and created Google Analytics.

Similarly, Google made Web testing and optimization de rigeur when it rolled out Google Optimizer, broadening the market for multi-variate testing first developed by Optimost and Offermatica. Microsoft’s creation of Hotmail dramatically increased the total number of email boxes, making it routine for people to have more than a single account.

The big guys find a pond, and make it an ocean.

Social Media Monitoring Bargains Ahead

The second scenario that will unfold is that the cost of social media monitoring software will fall to zero. LookingGlass will eventually be free, and Google most assuredly will have their own system eventually – possibly including Google Analytics, Google Sidewiki, and Google Wave data. Neither of these companies have any illusions (or need) to make a ton of cash on social media monitoring software. Rather, they’ll use the collected data to improve ad serving, or to develop complementary products that can make money.

The concern is will this intrusion into the market spell doom for current providers like Radian6, Spiral16 and Scoutlabs or for Collective Intellect and their brethren at the high end.

No.

While the entrance of Microsoft will force the current providers to continue innovating, it should not collapse the market. Instead, it will put a greater premium on customer service and support, fortunately an area that most companies in this area (especially Radian6 and Spiral16 in my personal experience) already excel.

Pressure Makes the Strong Survive

Google Analytics didn’t put WebTrends or Omniture or Hitbox out of business. In fact, Omniture was just purchased by Adobe for $1.8 billion. Instead, it created a striation in the marketplace that actually helped the legacy providers focus their efforts.

The casual, small and medium size company will use the free social media listening tool. The larger companies that have more chatter and want custom features and solid support, will continue paying for that level of professionalism.

Further, the entrance of a major company – and presumably marketing dollars – will grow awareness of monitoring overall, resulting in net growth for the best of the current crop of players. I suspect that the best source of business for Omniture these days are companies that started with Google Analytics because it was free and easy, and then realized that they needed more detailed reporting and customization.

Competition will Continue

So, the social media monitoring software business will not be owned by one company, in my estimation. But, a shakeup is definitely on the way, and since you can’t swing a cat by the tail (don’t try this at home) without hitting a social media monitoring company, it’s a shakeup that’s healthy and perhaps overdue.

Who are you betting on to emerge as a leader in social media monitoring?

(photo by flattop341)

How can you catch more fish? By using more poles.

If you’re going to create social media content to establish or perpetuate thought leadership for you, your company, or your clients, you can’t silo your ideas.

The old method of thought leadership was to create a white paper. A carefully crafted, highly edited, incredibly boring, 18-page tree killer that you provided for download on your Web site.

Guess what? In a 140-character world, a white paper feels like reading Moby Dick. Backwards. While covered in maple syrup.

Mmmmm. Info Snacks

Don’t put all your thought leadership eggs in that one, large basket. Like a salad at a fancy restaurant, deconstruct that white paper and instead create an array of info snacks that you can sprinkle across the Web.

Each of those snacks will be consumed by a slightly different audience, and perhaps more importantly each will be indexed by search engines, multiplying your inbound marketing opportunities geometrically.

Let’s think about how this might work in practice. Let’s say your core concept is that Blue Cross/Blue Shield in your state is helping improve the health of the citizenry through community health initiatives like immunization, exercise classes, and so forth.

Sure, you could create a report and a press release that talks about the good works of BCBS. You could probably even get a reporter to write about it in the local paper, or the TV station to grab some footage of the line for flu shots. But that’s not “atomizing” content (in the words of Todd Defren from Shift Communications). That’s siloing content.

Instead, you could create:

• A blog post about how immunizations work, and whether there’s a danger of injecting people with live virus.
• A blog post about the effectiveness of immunizations in controlling infectious disease.
• A blog post about the history of immunization.
• A blog post that compares the impacts and benefits of various types of exercise (aerobic vs. anaerobic, etc.)
• A blog post that reviews equipment you might need in BCBS exercise classes like fitness balls, yoga mats, steps.
• A “biggest loser” style contest in major cities in your state, including weekly blog posts, Facebook page, and videos of weigh-ins.
• A video blog post (also on YouTube) interviewing an immunization nurse and discussing the craziest/funniest things he/she has seen (good for humanization).
• A video blog post (also on YouTube) showing scenes from an exercise class, and interviewing participants.
• A weekly podcast that features discussions with fitness instructors about easy fitness tips that consumers can do at home.
• A Powerpoint or Keynote presentation (uploaded to Slideshare) that covers the history of immunization and its importance in modern public health.

This doesn’t even begin to exhaust the options, and doesn’t include content on Wikipedia, Google Knol, Hunch, Squidoo, or blog comments.

Thought leadership via social media content is about thinking big. And then thinking small.

Are you ready to fish?

(photo by Laszlo-Photo)

Email and social media are a lot more similar than they are different. Both are used to drive brand affinity and brand preference. Both are best when rooted in 1:1, relevant communication, rather than one-to-many, megaphone-style shouting.

Based on these similarities, I believe the people responsible for social media in your company, should also be the people in charge of email, and vice versa. Why are we segmenting and separating our customer communication methods?

@kissingcousins

You’re already seeing this convergence at the tactical level, with email service providers enabling active social sharing in emails using Share This and other tools. It’s like Forward to a Friend 2.0. Not life-changing, but it’s a start down the path toward channel agnosticism, where we can communicate with customers and prospects in the time, method, and style of THEIR choosing, not ours as marketers.

I was on a panel about email and social media at the recently completed ExactTarget Connections 09 Conference in Indianapolis. Tim Schigel, CEO of Share This, and Bill McCloskey, Chairman of Email Datasource joined me on the panel, which was moderated by the always-great Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget.

Tim and Bill talked about sharing via email, and the history, mechanics and predictions for that capability. I focused on other ways (beyond sharing) that email and social media can work together.

I’ve included my slides below, as well as a summary of my main points.

11 Steps Toward Social Media and Email Convergence

1. Good email and good social media are similar.
2. Bad email and bad social media are similar.
3. Best practice for both is relevancy.
4. Email and social media should be managed by the same group in your company.
5. Socially enabling your email is great, but you need to socially enable your landing pages too, using Facebook Fanbox, RSS subscription options, Share This and other tools.
6. You must activate your customers, not just collect them
7. Old marketing was like archery. New marketing is like ping pong.
8. “Special” doesn’t always have to be followed by “Offer”. You can and should engage with customers in ways that transcend coupons and discounts.
9. You typically will interact with customers more frequently in social media than you will in email. Thus, you can use social media content and results to inform your email program. Use Facebook Analytics, PageRank and other tools to find your best social media content.
10. You can segment your database using social media, too. Track subscriptions to your email program coming from social media, for example.
11. Consider collecting social data (Facebook account, Twitter handle, etc.) on your subscription forms.

(disclosure: ExactTarget is a Convince & Convert client. I attended this conference for free. I drank a lot of their booze)