Is Email Dying of Old Age? Part 2 - The Social Media Takeover

1. What is so different about social media?

In part 1 of this article we analyzed email. We detected its flaws and inefficiencies. We also concluded that it is still the "only game in town". In other words, although social media represents the new way of communicating, it is not ready yet!

So, what is so different about social media that makes it the natural successor of email?

No, it's not MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or any other tool currently out there trying to take (and keep) a place under the sun. It's the concept! What is really new about social media can be described with a single phrase:

The power of deciding who you want to communicate with before any communication takes place!

That's it. That's the revolution. Oh, wait... that's the big deal?! Yes, that's huge!

Think about it. With the concept of selecting communication partners comes the concept of community. When you chose the people that you want to communicate with (and they accept!), you can group them into communities: "Friends", "Business", "Tennis players", etc. You can now send private messages (emails?!) to any person in any community or post messages/information to a whole community. Bear in mind that you can make one person a member of as many communities as you want. A tennis player can also be your friend as well as a coworker in your business.

Marketers will now have to create communities of people that may be interested in their products and, one way or another, entice them to join in so they can communicate their product promotion messages (subject for another article!).

And spam is over! People trying to promote brides from some exotic country will now have to build a community of people that are actually interested in that kind of romance.

Risk of viruses and malware spread is greatly reduced. Remember, you can always trace the source of your messages since you had to formally accept the sender prior to any communication. Of course, if you accept just about anybody into your communities...

Spoof is basically impossible. I just got recently a message from "Facebook" telling me that they had to "reset my password" and "I had 24 hours to login and reinstate all my private information". It was a spoof message that looked like it was sent by Facebook. This is not possible in the social media world where, if I want to receive messages from Facebook, I will have to join the Facebook community. Any other Facebook look-alike community cannot send me messages because I didn't join them!

Information overload is easier to manage. Of course that under this new way of communicating you will still be flooded with information. But now, private messages are separate from the "broadcast" ones and they will all be neatly organized by communities. You may build a community for your company, send private messages to any of your coworkers while, as a manager, you can post a memo for the whole company.

2. So what is the problem with Social Media?

Most (if not all!) the articles that I read about social media (and I try to read as many as I can) make the same mistake: They criticize the tools!

"Social media is bad because Facebook this or MySpace that..." In general, the toughest social media critics focus on two major areas:

Lack of privacy

Within a community, anybody can post anything for the whole community to read. There are horror stories about people that have been fired or relationships that ended after incriminating photos were posted on social media.

There are two ways that this can happen: (1) Somebody posts a compromising photo of another community member with malicious intents. Well, don't blame social media. This could also have been done via an email with the photo attached or by posting it on a popular web site. (2) A photo was posted with your name as a "tag" (search word). The social media tool (e.g. Facebook) picks up the tag and publishes it on all communities that you belong to. But this can only happen if you allow it. If you set Facebook (e.g.) to show tagged photos only to yourself, that's what is going to happen.

Another privacy issue is the fact that Google is more and more picking up social media postings and showing them on the search engine. The correct tools will also allow you to stay away from Google...

Most of the people that I communicate with are not on social media

Right! That is the problem.

More, they may be on social media but not on the tools that I subscribe.

I am personally on Facebook and Twitter and I have to admit that 80% of the people that I communicate with may be on Linkedin, MySpace or nowhere else but certainly not on "my sites". So what do I do?

Email, of course! But that is how we started this conversation wasn't it? Email is still the "only game in town" because email is still the only universal communications tool available.

That leads us to the real problem with social media:

The concept is right but the tools are not ready yet

3. The future of social media

Every emerging technology has confusing debuts.

In 1878, a well known communications company internal memo stated that "This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

Throughout history, the same happened with cars, computers, televisions and it will keep on happening with anything new and truly revolutionary that comes out; when it comes out.

Social media is no different.

Today, social media is at its birth. It exists in a highly fragmented environment (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Meetup, Tagged and many, many others) where multiple players change their dominance impact almost every month while new players test the waters to see if there is any niche that can still be successfully explored.

In the current environment, you may have to resort to different tools to achieve different objectives and, in the process, repeat yourself endlessly since the integration between the existing tools is primitive at best.

While this is happening, the "web owners" (large organizations such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo...) are watching, learning and getting ready to play.

In its beta versions, Microsoft Vine and Google Wave have been advertised by its publishers as the next thing to watch in the social media world.

The reality is that the market requires a more integrated and robust environment dominated by companies that have the clout and the power to establish industry standards. Before that happens, we will be watching a series of short lived experiments.

But the concept of social media as a community based communications engine is here to stay and I believe it will end up integrating the "postal" type solution that email represents.

And email, as we know it, will be dead.

4. Should we wait?

On a personal side, it's a personal decision. In a business point of view there is never any value in being the last one to arrive anywhere and there is already a lot that can be accomplished with what is available.

According to a Deloitte study, 30% of American companies use social media as part of business and operational strategy.

The bottom line is simple: People are out there talking to each other and, if you are not part of it, they are not listening to you!

Start now! Using 15 minutes per day of your time you can build a Twitter community, exchange industry information and establish contacts that, in time, will prove invaluable to your business.

Because if you always wait for the next best thing, you will wait forever.

Pedro Machado is an Information Technology and Internet Marketing professional with over 25 years of experience. Prior to the year 2000 Pedro worked and lived in Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, South Africa, Mexico and USA taking responsibilities as Director and VP of IT for companies such as SKF, Ryder System and TMM.

For the last decade, Pedro founded Lusitech Co., ( http://www.lusitech.net ) a company dedicated to help clients develop a profitable presence on the Web with special incidence in Internet Marketing.

Lusitech Co. is also responsible for the development of an Internet based enterprise system that supports sales and operations of auto parts recycling companies.

In 2005, Pedro Machado wrote and published the book "Making Money on eBay Motors".

Pedro studied Electronics Engineering in the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal and Business Management at the University of South Africa. He currently lives in Miami, Florida.

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ExactTarget Review: Going Beyond Email Marketing

Although we don’t mind a good email marketing review around these parts, ExactTarget is a bit of a unique entity. In attempting to go beyond the traditional email marketing platform and produce more marketing services for its customers, it also requires a bird’s-eye view of a review.

And don’t think I’m not serious simply because I’m rhyming. ExactTarget promises a lot up front, as noted in its tagline: “Email. Mobile. Social. Sites.” That’s a lot of ground to cover, and it means that this review will also have to cover that terrain. Watch out, email marketers of the world: we’re not in Kansas anymore.

So does the ExactTarget system really deliver on its promises? Ah; that’s what you’re going to have to read to find out. Unless, of course, you already noticed our rating up top. But keep reading this ExactTarget review anyway, because you’ll learn what went into that rating and how we came to the conclusion we did.

The Proof Is in the Hubbing

ExactTarget promises a lot. Here it is in its own words:

ExactTarget is a global Software as a Service (SaaS) leader that powers all types of interactive marketing messages – from targeted email marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, and landing page marketing – through a single Interactive Marketing Hub. It’s our mission to deliver business results for clients – from small businesses to large enterprises.

Since I don’t like having a lot of services from one company unless they can be simplified into one single source for me, I like the idea of this “Interactive Marketing Hub.” Something tells me that if ExactTarget is going to pull off its high ambitions successfully, that success will rest on the quality of said hub.

As it turns out, this hub is actually quite successful at doing that. What does the “hub” accomplish? Well, you can access the data related to your brand as it relates to the following:

• Social media like Facebook and Twitter


• Your email accounts


• Mobile marketing

These all come with live reports that don’t require refreshing or running specialized reports, which means you save on a lot of time simply by signing into your ExactTarget hub. The prospect of all of this coming together into a single account is attractive, especially if you’re a one-man operation who needs to add marketing prowress without the extra work.

Of course, this is an email marketing service we’re talking about here, which means these features don’t really mean a whole lot for our purposes unless they can also deliver on some pretty quality email campaign management.

As it turns out, ExactTarget is so dead-set that you pay for all of their services that it’s difficult to separate their email campaign management from their marketing management in general. The aforementioned hub is part of the equation, and while ExactTarget hardly qualifies as a dedicated email campaign manager, it at least delivers the goods on all of the other parts of the equation.

Running an email campaign with ExactTarget is not your cup of tea if you’re looking for email campaign management exclusively. If that’s the tree you’re barking up here, you’ll probably want to – heck, you’ll want to switch forests. That’s just not ExactTarget’s bag.

Does ExactTarget Succeed At Its Own Game?

The attractiveness of ExactTarget is closely related to the way it does things, however. Sure, it’s not a dedicated email campaign manager, but if you’re in the market for some quality Interet marketing services in general, you should be open to the idea of this total integration via ExactTarget hub. You might have never thought about social media or mobile marketing before but now that you’ve got it in front of you, the prospect seems simpler and even a little appealing, doesn’t it?

ExactTarget does deliver a lot of a time, remember. And if the price is right, this definitely makes for a more intriguing offer than any run-of-the-mill email campaign manager. But speaking of price, where does ExactTarget exactly figure in to the whole email campaign industry?

Unfortunately, finding the prices at ExactTarget is a labyrinth with no end. And it’s no surprise that this is the case, given that ExactTarget actually doesn’t have a “canned” pricing structure, as one sales associate informed me. After me pressing the issue to find out any number to quote you, my fine Clickfire audience, I was still told that because they don’t have “canned” pricing.

But that not being enough for me still, I was finally told that the “bare minimum” many clients start out at is $1,500 per year, or about $125 per month. They were quoting me for a subscriber list of 1,000, which will yield a significantly lower price at other email marketing services. Clearly ExactTarget is an instance of an otherwise attractive service being ruined by an unfair, unclear, and expensive pricing structure.

Oh, wait, sorry about that. There is no structure.

Conclusions

If you’re looking for a way your small business can measure a lot of things in a lot of places while delivering the information and control to a central hub, ExactTarget is an attractive prospect. But many people don’t necessarily fall into that category. Heck, you might not have the money as a sole proprietorship to shell out ExactTarget kinda dough, no matter how much you want access to that hub.

My advice is that you find an email campaign manager that is much cheaper and where the pricing structure is much more stable and predictable. In fact, some email campaign managers will allow you to use their service for free up until a certain amount of subscribers every month – essentially becoming the opposite of ExactTarget’s price smugness.

But it’s hard to discount the fact that ExactTarget does provide very interesting services that will be very attractive to a lot of people running businesses with a significant online brand. If you’re a small business, handling all of these services for a paltry $125 a month won’t sound too bad. The problem is that some of us aren’t just small businesses; we’re very small businesses. And we need cheaper marketing services.

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Building an Email List the Cute Way with Emma

As a frequent reviewer here at Clickfire, I like having more than one option for recommendations. For example, if someone asks me about the best web conferencing software, I can recommend Skype for personal chats and GoToMeeting for more professional settings. In the case of email marketing platforms, I’ve also got a favorite or two that I can keep neatly tucked away.

Emma, believe it or not, is one of them. They’ve been able to find and exploit a neat little niche not simply by offering email marketing solutions, but by crafting these solutions around a specific type of customer: someone who wants their email campaigns to, well, look cute.

I know the name Emma just sounds cute, but that’s just effective branding on their part: everything about the service is warm, from the stylish, customized-to-your-brand email templates to the way they package all of their features and pricing into a neat PDF for all to enjoy.

So if anyone asks me for an email marketing solution with which they can market their chocolate truffle or teddy bear business, I’ve got the answer for them. And despite a few complaints you’ll read about in this Emma review, I like that.

Looking Good, Emma

Why the love for Emma in particular? Certainly there’s no shortage of email managers that offer design help for your email templates. But if you’re going with Emma as your email manager, I imagine that it’s because this is specifically what you’re looking for, rather than icing on the cake.

That’s because Emma’s designs are among the best I’ve been able to review and not only that, but Emma makes it simple to procure these services. (Sure, simple costs a bit of money, but that’s not what we’re talking about right this instant, you overzealous follower of frugality). In fact, Emma actually recommends starting off with a custom design in order to kick-start your email list building services, which might sound like it comes off a bit scammy but is actually done in a rather elegant way. Emma brings me in and actually makes me want to have something cool for them to design a template around.

Okay, why not talk about price? The basic structure you’ll see for the upfront designs are as follows:

• $99 for “Studio Design,” some of the most attractive-looking template designs I’ve seen.


• $249 for “Concierge Design,” pairing you with a designer whose job it is to make your emails look good.


• $399 for the “Design Suite,” which expands on the Concierge design with a number of varying templates.

It might sound like a lot to pay upfront, but when you consider all of the value you can get out of some of these headers and templates – you can even incorporate them into your website as a whole, or use elements of your website to incorporate into your emails – there’s a lot of value packed in here.

And, of course, the price comes this way because you don’t go to Emma for some ordinary run-of-the-mill email marketing campaign. You’ve got to have a specific kind of brand situated in a specific kind of niche for this to make sense. And if you can nail that niche, Emma really helps you to nail the emails.

Technical Details: When Cute Just Isn’t Enough to Satisfy

All of this cuteness abounding in the world of Emma isn’t enough to override certain technical concerns, of course. Email marketing is by its very nature a technological endeavor, and even if your emails look good on the back end that doesn’t mean things always look good from your control room.

Luckily, Emma doesn’t disappoint with its features list, providing many of the same services you should expect from any vertical response platform. Creating surveys, real-time analytics, member management, autoresponders – all of the basics are covered which guarantees your email marketing program won’t have you looking like you’re wearing a well-tailored suit while working at McDonald’s. In other words, the features rise to meet the assertiveness of the strong Emma templates and designs.

A bit of a complaint here, however, is the pricing of these basic features. In the previous section I was okay with shelling out a little dough for a design – I mean, heck, you’re paying to work personally with a designer for a very reasonable price. But when it comes to the email management side of things, the pricing should be a little flatter.

Consider: a monthly volume of 1,000 means you’ll be paying $30, around twice what I’ve seen from other email campaign managers. The prices as they go up the list remain relatively high even after you’ve paid for the customized designs. If Emma’s main appeal are said designs, why do they seem to want to make so much money on the back end?

This isn’t enough to make me reconsider recommending Emma to certain businesses and certain people. But it would mean Emma’s recommendation comes with a caveat: “it can be a little pricey.” Hey, you get what you pay for.

Who Might Like Emma?

And thus we come back to the central theme of this review: what kind of customer is Emma best suited for? I think it’s someone with a particular niche, generally a business that falls in the “online shopping” category. People like their online shops to be warm and inviting. Heck, even if you’re selling an information product like an Ebook, having a well-tailored email will give you an air of professionalism and therefore trust that you can’t simply manufacture.

Emma’s specialty is in tailoring – not manufacturing – that professionalism. It can be a very important thing in the Internet world, and certainly can mean the difference between making a sale and almost making a sale.

If that’s the kind of touch you’re looking for with your emails, you’ll definitely want to consider Emma as a potential vehicle for your vertical response efforts. If it’s not, then heck, why did you bother reading this review this far? Go visit the other Clickfire reviews for something down your alley.

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