Email newsletters have been separate marketing channels from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. This week, MailChimp has taken a great stride forward by adding Facebook Like buttons and other integration of social media into email campaigns. For example, you can use their Facebook application to integrate email signups with your Facebook fan page.

Their new Social Pro plugin syncs your email list with the Facebook social graph. It shows what social networks subscribers are on, who’s following you on twitter, rank subscribers by influence, and more. These additions help marketers understand their audiences better so they can refine their offers and drive conversions and sales.

Integration of email newsletters, which still yields significant customer actions relative to other forms of marketing, with social media, which yields significant details about the demographics and preferences of customers, is a huge win for marketers. However, the audience is limited to people who feel comfortable enough with Facebook privacy controls to expose their personal data. MailChimp goes as far as you can go to connect the email marketing and social media marketing channels.

The MailChimp blog has the details. They also have a guide to their social media capabilities. And it’s all done with the usual MailChimp tongue in cheek style (although hopefully their monkey has not been fired: they’ve moved more towards a 1950s design aesthetic and away from cute mouthy spokesmonkeys).

URLs

a href=”http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-v5-2-is-coming/” target=”_blank”>http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-v5-2-is-coming/
http://downloads.mailchimp.com/guides/MailChimp_LetsGetSocialGuide.pdf

“Harrison Tang cares about his privacy and takes elaborate steps to protect it. Your privacy is another matter.

Tang, 27, is co-founder of a “people search” website called Spokeo, which serves up extraordinarily detailed profiles of pretty much everyone — including you — gleaned from online directories, databases and social networks.

Don’t take my word for it. Do a search for your name at Spokeo’s website (www.spokeo.com).”

From the LA Times. You can remove your listing from their service by using the Spokeo Privacy page. What is most disturbing is that they charge money to aggregate data about individuals. It’s one thing to have to search to find information about people. It’s another to pull that data into one place then charge money. But it’s also not unexpected when, in the US, at least, there are few rules about online privacy when it comes to businesses harvesting personal data.

URLs

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fiw-lazarus-20100608,0,7917251,full.column
http://www.spokeo.com
http://www.spokeo.com/privacy

“No single visual element has more effect on a viewer than color. Color gets attention, sets a mood, sends a message. But what colors are the right ones? The key is that color is relational. Colors don’t exist in a vacuum but are always seen with other colors. Because of this, you can design a color-coordinated document based on the colors in any element on the page. Here’s how.”

From Before & After magazine. It’s part of their process to collect email addresses so you have to provide an email address to get the document. However, I find their monthly how-to emails often interesting, not pushy.

This article shows a series of basic steps you can follow to take a photograph and extract many different possible color palettes. Picking colors can be hard, especially for business people on a budget. Even with a budget, it helps to know the color picking process if you manage or hire designers. In this case, their article shows how to use colors in one element of a document, a photograph, to then extract palettes from a color wheel. It’s a very good primer on that process.

UPDATE: This document on how to pick colors that work together also works great with an online color wheel to pick analogs, tetrads, and so on. Color Scheme Designer, for example, lets you define an RGB color value (to the lower right of the circle on the left side of their page) and then all its different color relations. Color Scheme Designer also lets you see how your color choices look to color-impaired people. You still have to pick your colors and ensure they work together in a palette, but an online color wheel can make the process faster and easier.

“We’re living in a social media world, and, like it or not, our avatar is often the first impression others get about us as we interact virtually on social networks, blogs, microblogs and other online communities. Our avatars are a representation of our brands — our personal brand or our company’s or organization’s brand. But how many of us are thinking strategically about our avatars?”

From Salon. If you have not figured it out already, the avatar, the small thumbnail sized picture you use on Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places, can say alot about you. This blog post describes six different issues to consider as you pick and change avatars.

“Many of us in this room have had our lives transformed by technology. Some of us have grown up with tech while others have embraced it as adults. Many of us have become enamored with tech and its transformative potential. And because of this, many of us have become technology advocates. We’ve worked our way into different institutions, preaching about new opportunities introduced because of the internet. Furthermore, many in this room have been active in transforming politics through technology. We’ve leveraged technology for fundraising and getting out the vote. We could go on and on about political events that have been shaped by technology, from the Obama Campaign to the post-election Iranian protests.

All of this is brilliant and powerful, exciting and motivating. But I’m also worried. I’m worried about the rhetoric we use when we talk about technology. Given what we’ve experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren’t true?”

From “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, a presentation by danah boyd. Found through a NYTimes.com Blogwise item, Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?.

Both the presentation and the NYTimes.com post are important to read. However, the research points up something that should be rather obvious: people associate online with the same people they associate with offline. The class divisions in any society will be carried into the online world. Technology is neutral. If social equality is the goal, and I would sign up for that goal, perhaps technology needs to expand to make connections online that might be impossible in the real world.

These items also point up the flip side of some technology policies, for example, Facebook’s invitation only model. Building a service on invitation naturally reinforces the carryover of our offline social networks online. But it also makes it difficult to break out and identify and connect with people who share our interests but would not connect with offline. Facebook groups help break the walled garden dynamic. But you have to find a group, join, and then participate actively to make friends outside your real world friends.

Perhaps humans also should create technology that passively suggests connections based upon participation (e.g. key words in posts, group affiliations) and level of activity (e.g. suggesting only people who are active online). People could choose to not connect. But they also could choose to connect with confidence there was sufficient basis for connection based on interests.

What disturbed me were the disparaging comments about people who use the other service, in this case, MySpace, made by the teenagers boyd interviewed. While it is human to engage in us versus them thinking, teachers and parents should work to balance that way of thinking with the equally real notion that we live in a big world with lots of people who are very different from us, that we are indeed equal at the human level, that we should be open to others even if they are not like us or even disagree with what we think and do.

We humans prefer to be addressed in our right ear and are more likely to perform a task when we receive the request in our right ear rather than our left. In a series of three studies, looking at ear preference in communication between humans, Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University “Gabriele d’Annunzio” in Chieti, Italy, show that a natural side bias, depending on hemispheric asymmetry in the brain, manifests itself in everyday human behavior.

From Need Something? Talk To My Right Ear in Science Daily. Found through HiveLogic.

Best part is that the tests were done in a noisy nightclub asking people for cigarettes. Probably the worst place to have a conversation. This research suggests that when you pitch your clients, you should always directly face their right ear.

“There are numerous ways for brands to leverage Facebook but the overall branded experience is becoming increasingly integrated into a single offering as the new Pages product highlights. So what are the primary benefits and changes for the new branded pages?”

From AllFacebook. This article nicely describes how to take advantage of Facebook for your business. It is extremely comprehensive, an excellent how-to and checklist for your pages.

In reading this, however, it struck me that Facebook does (or soon will do) everything a good corporate website must. A Facebook business page is a second website. Only it has better tools to connect with customers and a platform to expose your business to many more people than a search engine (see also John Battelle’s Searchblog article, The Conversation is Shifting).

“If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late. We’ve seen a lot of excellent activity here from the likes of Dell and National Instruments (both won Forrester Groundswell awards) but a lot of the blogs, communities, and other social outreach from business to business companies is less than mature, to say the least. This is your chance to stand out. Take this report and show it to your boss to convince her that it’s time to get started.”

From the Groundswell blog at Forrester Research. While the topline is “Social Media isn’t just for teenagers,” it is striking how many business people currently read and participate in social media, from blogs to Facebook to Twitter, to connect with other businesses to do business. Social media has become mainstream.

“A personal portfolio website is all about promoting you. You are a brand, and your name is a brand name. No one is going to know about your brand unless you get it out there; and if you’re a Web designer, developer, writer, gamer or any other type of creative, then it’s essential that you have a good portfolio website.”

From Smashing Magazine. A basic but thorough list of what should be in a portfolio website. Includes links to articles about creating an online portfolio and examples of excellent online portfolios. Basically this is a great article that covers a range of issues related to creating an effective portfolio website: what’s included, how to create one, and examples to inspire and give you ideas for your site.

“Twitter is part of my overall online personal brand, but like one of the sections of a great orchestra, it’s only one of the parts. It serves a specific, yet important role. I use all the tools and when done in a collective way, they achieve more than they would individually. While blogs are great for long-form content and are easily found by search engines, Twitter is a more immediate and realtime communications tool. Facebook is great for allowing my community to self-support each other and videos are great for sharing concepts and ideas. The one thing that makes Twitter unique, is that while it’s real-time, the interaction is far faster than any of the other tools.”

From Global Neighbourhoods. This is a fascinating interview with Jeremiah Owyang, currently at social media analyst at Forrester. For one, Owyang has built his job and online following in three short years, starting as a minion at Hitachi, developing small social media projects based on clear business goals, projects that were shut down when he left.

Also, Owyang points out that his online brand follows him from job to job; it is an asset his current and future employers get by hiring him. This is an excellent way to describe one mostly hidden aspect of social media: for some people, developing an online brand is as important as the more obvious professional skills they have, for example, as a programmer or marketer.

I also like very much his comment that his real goal is to help businesses connect with their customers online, something I strive for professionally and through this blog. As a guy with six brothers and sisters, from the beginning my life has been about connecting with people.

“To its true believers at small businesses, it is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.”

From the New York Times (free registration required; stories available free for short time).  Part of this article is typical feel-good roundup. But it also highlights the key reasons smaller businesses should set up a blog, especially if one or more people in the company like to write. I slightly disagree with one of their sources who says companies with a product have less of a reason to blog. In fact, many people who use products are very interested in how a particular product is created, how it evolves, how it is maintained. More important, blogs allow customers and prospects to comment and engage the business. That’s always valuable.

“A SEO log that includes notes on all changes made to a Web site can be absolutely invaluable. One of the best reasons for this is that it can give you an idea as to the cause and effect of SEO, at least as it relates to your specific site.

At its root, SEO is an inexact science. It’s a world where we follow best practices and use our best judgment to make decisions on what to do next. This is one reason why the SEO community is very open, with experienced SEOs regularly sharing their knowledge on their own blogs or on sites like Search Engine Watch.”

From Search Engine Watch. This is excellent advice and he goes into some detail about how an SEO log might work. Certainly there is a lot of detail that can be captured as you tweak all the different elements of a website, as well as PPC campaigns and the rest.

“At first blush, one could conclude that site owners suffer from either arrogance or ignorance. Marketers either believe they don’t need analytics because they are smart enough to trust their gut (arrogance), or they don’t know what to do with them (ignorance). The Web analytics community has been split on this issue. Eric T. Peterson, Web analytics consultant, argues Web analytics is hard, while Google’s analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik argues Web analytics isn’t hard. This still doesn’t sufficiently explain why more than 50 percent of marketing professionals fail to integrate analytics into their marketing efforts.”

From GrokDotCom. This is a really excellent discussion about the possible reasons businesses rely on instinct rather than hard data to make business decisions.

I believe it is culture: people start and run businesses based upon interacting directly with customers, in person and on the phone and by email. The quantitative skills required for optimization and testing typically are found in the accounting department and possibly a marketing research department. Most staffers don’t have an analytic background and so don’t necessarily think in terms of data and testing for marketing materials. They get that through customer contacts. The quantitative research function, if it exists at all, is part of business planning, not necessarily day to day marketing, which is what this article argues is needed.

From my client experience, aside from the cultural issues, the big problem is what to measure. I tell clients to start first with what they want to accomplish. It can be a small goal, for example, to get a site visitor to click on a button or signup for email. Or retweet their tweets. That tells you what to measure. And also to limit what you measure to one or two things to start. And to keep some sort of log file so you can measure results, recheck your assumptions and goals, and all the good stuff that comes from tracking your online marketing.

But this process does not have to be terribly complex. Indeed, complexity in measuring online marketing is the kiss of death. The best results come from incremental changes and optimization based on testing different ways to incent and motivate people to interact with your marketing.

Photo courtesy of Jon Clark’s Flickr stream.

“When launching a brand new website in a competitive marketplace you have a lot of network effects working against you. Your competition has years of conversion data, an older trusted site, tons of content, and thousands of organic inbound links. Try to beat them right from the start for the most potent high-value keywords and you will likely fail.”

From SEOBook. (If you don’t know, ‘longtail’ refers to less frequently used key words and phrases used to search online.) This is a fairly quick discussion about how to improve the search rankings for a new website when competitor sites obviously rank highter. But it also works for long time websites, as well. The trick is to provide many paths into your site, not just the obvious paths from ranking high (or trying to rank high) with obvious search terms.

“Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.”

From HubSpot. This looks mostly like a way for HubSpot to find clients. But anything that generates useful data helps. It’s a fresh way to look at your website by itself and in relation to competitor websites.

Photo from katecat.