The future of email marketing

I was just over at Brian Solis’ blog, and his latest entry Email Marketing Goes Social: Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook states that email is a necessary part of most people’s lives:

For better or for worse, we are tethered to our inbox and continue to send messages and respond to those individuals and organizations to which we’re tied or vested.

It’s true. If you’re anyway online as part of your professional or personal life, it’s highly likely you spend a significant amount of your time with email. Solis brings in some charts that state businesses are using email more and more to raise awareness for their presence in social networks…but can email itself become a social network or a social medium?

I’m picturing a future in which I get an email that has comments and quotes from my friends who have received it before me – like a continuation of one message that reaches (and influences) certain people first and then branches out from there. That sounds like social email, or at least a device to carry a piece of social with it. Solis’ future of email is personalized and opt-in, but can we call email social just because it has buttons that take you to a SNS such as Twitter or Facebook?

Furthermore, what do you think of the evolution of “connective technology” (such as automated emails) to replace people? I like to think of social media as the people’s media. So if we took the people out of the media, and just had automated (but sharable) emails coming to us, could we really call them social emails? And would it really be social media or just an evolved form of direct mail? And, does making something sharable inherently make it social? It facilitates a social action if the person wants to have one, but is the availability of a share button enough to motivate the person to share?

Much to discuss and think about.

What’s worth sharing

I’ll tell you what is. This post from Brian Solis on The State and Future of Twitter 2010: Part Two. Lots of goodness from Twitter’s conference Chirp in San Francisco just last week.

Brian promotes Twitter as a game changer for advertising. Their business model for the new Promoted Tweets will eventually be based on ROI, not CPM. Yeah, read that again: ROI, the good stuff, the results! Actually, they refer to the measurement as Resonance:

We call these collective indicators “Resonance” and believe that over time a pricing model based on Resonance will be better tuned to the actual value of promoting a Tweet than simple cost per click or dollars per friend, fan or follower models.

You get the idea. It seems to say that social media is best measured in a way that combines the value your product (or content) has to someone with the action they take as a result. So with a Promoted Tweet, it’s a combination of someone saying this is worth something to me (newsworthy, funny, interesting, inspiring, etc), and because it’s worth something to me, I’m going to share it to others. Bingo, social media!

The power really is with the people now. Advertisers – listen up.

We decide whose worthy following.

We choose which links are worthy of clicking.

We determine what’s worth reading.

And more importantly, as Brian says, we promote what’s worth sharing.

Think about it.

Then work your hardest to do it right. Go!