Two ways, the first of which is by using Social Media. Your brands Facebook and Twitter pages work as a direct line to your audience. Use that community that you've grown over time and tap into them. Run promotions that require the audience to get involved, and this will spread among their friends and followers, garnering you more eyes on your campaign. Your consumer base is more likely to enter contests around this time of year because it's been hardwired into our society to think of giving and gifts, so design your contest to look the part.

Check back next week for part 2, where we will discuss email marketing!

As marketers find opportunities to build audiences, conversation and conversions with clever cross-promotion between the two mediums, e-mail and social media tactics are becoming increasingly popular and intertwined.

Incentives Drive Clicks and Conversions

Dingo, a pet food company in Ohio, created a promotion that rewarded customers with a $20 coupon if they signed up for the company’s newsletter and “Liked” its Facebook Page, with the catch being that the page needed to get to 5,000 fans (from a base of around 300) for the promotion to kick in. Mike Halloran, the owner of Dingo, says it reached its goal within three days, as pet owners found out about in the Dingo newsletter and forwarded it to their friends and “liked” Dingo on Facebook.

Of all channels, e-mail marketing and social media go hand in hand better than any other, getting your customers to share your message with friends is the most effective way to grow your business.

 

The company’s e-mail newsletter — which has more than 100,000 subscribers – recently featured a promotion to win a free bike, helmet and messenger bag to fans of the company’s Facebook Page. So far, the opportunity has driven more than 6,500 clickthroughs to the giveaway, versus just nine clicks (yes, nine) to the company’s prompt that encourages e-mail subscribers to become Facebook fans.

 

Promotion Works Both Ways

These promotions can also work the other way, however. Shoe retailer Crocs not only promotes social media through its e-mail newsletter, but also promotes its e-mail newsletter through social media. For example, the company will inform its Twitter followers or Facebook fans about a special offer that’s only available to newsletter subscribers. The company also lets Facebook fans sign up for its e-mail newsletter from an app that’s built into its page, something that Andrea Stow, senior global eMarketing manager for Crocs, says has resulted in a “gigantic leap in our e-mail subscribers.”

 

Stow continues, “Our strategy is understanding and knowing that there might be duplicates [subscribers to multiple mediums] — but the more customer touch points, the better conversion we’ll have.”

That reach, says Stow, gives Crocs the ability to stay in touch with customers year round — important for a company that only expects its average customer to buy new shoes two or three times per year at most.

E-mail Will Only Get More Social

Although companies like Crocs, Timbuk2 and Dingo are still relatively early movers in the integration of e-mail and social media.

Concludes Schmulen, who was also a co-founder of NushellMail, “What we’re seeing today [is the] social call to action [becoming] the primary call to action inside of newsletters.” Expect that trend to continue as marketers start to realize the benefits of doing so and technology providers continue to integrate e-mail and social tools into one package.

You need a smartphone to get started, but once you download the app you are all set to go. The social navigation app gets smarter with each new driver who passively or actively reports data from the road in real time. Waze has evolved to become an essential everyday utility for millions of drivers, CEO Naom Bardin says. But can Waze replace the traffic report as we know it? Bardin says yes — eventually. “It will take a while to replace … but what we’re providing is much more granular.”

However, social media offers a lot more than just discounts and deals when it comes to food and beverage. Restaurants and bars are giving social media users a backstage pass to the food and the people who make it. Chefs and restaurateurs are using social media to reveal how their dishes are made, generate familiarity with chefs and provide a means for diners to share feedback.

Revealing How A Dish Is Made

You can blame it on the rise of celebrity chefs or the success of The Food Network and shows like Top Chef, but now more than ever, people want to live vicariously through others who cook. Many restaurants, including Chicago’s Piccolo Sogno and The Bristol, are posting videos to YouTube or Vimeo of new dishes being prepared. “The general idea is to pull the curtain back,” says Phillip Walters of The Bristol. “Allow people at home to feel more involved and engaged with that you are trying to deliver.”

Getting To Know The Chefs

Instead of attracting customers with deals, many restaurants strive to use social media for a tailored, personal experience. “People love to go into a restaurant or bar and know the owner or the chef,” O’Keefe says. Think of it as instantly becoming a regular.

That’s why chefs like Joanne Chang of Boston’s Myers and Chang and Flour Bakery personally tweet photos of the kitchen staff at work. “If you’re in a PR firm, you’re not going to get the same feel,” O’Keefe says. “It’s her and you know that it’s her.”

Grant Achatz, the man behind Chicago’s Alinea — named best restaurant in America in 2006 by Gourmet — also does his own tweeting. “Who would you rather hear from?” he asks. “Me directly or some weird person I paid to represent me?” When Achatz is not in the restaurant, he continues to tweet — from where he’s eating in Chicago to where he’s visiting in Japan. It lets people get to know him better and maintains a base, he says. “I’m not a celebrity, but I have a following.”

Achatz’s approach to helping his audience learn more about him is spot on. “Who we are” is the primary message of any effective marketing campaign, says Syeed Mansur, CEO of Sentrana, a firm that uses mathematical models to determine the most effective marketing strategies for companies.

Do you follow your favorite chefs or restaurants? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Yahoo purchased Geocities in 1999 for 3.5 billion dollars, and then 10 years later, shut the site down. But before they pulled the plug, a group known as the Archive Team made a backup to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

Head to their site and watch the video. Internet history seems so long ago compared to natural history, we are already unearthing the past from just a mere decade ago. Do you think in another decade we will be doing the same with Facebook or Twitter?

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Facebook isn't going to let this all go on and not retaliate though. So they roll out their new video chat feature supported by their new partnership with Skype. This ads a whole new layer to Facebook's "chat" feature. (Click here to see how to set it up for yourself).

This competition will hopefully push the two powerhouses into a very interesting game of innovation for their respective platforms. And in that case, we all will end up being the winners.

In this age of social media and news aggregators, it has become almost impossible not to be bombarded by information daily. So how can we as marketers sift through it all to make a better consumer experience? Listen and organize.

The advent of social media and other services has allowed marketers to listen and respond to data being created by consumers like never before. A few years back most companies would kill to have this avenue of communication with their consumers. Now that the connection is built, we must make sure to use it correctly, because it is a very powerful channel. While you can gain knowledge about your audience in a way previously impossible, you can also barge into the conversation blindly and destroy your image. This information combined with site analytics from your webpage can help define the personas that are interested in your brand.

What can you do with this data? You must first stop thinking that everyone views your brands message the same. Things like your homepage and website should be tailor made for a variety of market segments. Whether they get different navigation, different search data or look is up to you and your designers. One thing is for sure though, the days of mass impersonal messaging in advertising and marketing are long gone.

Also! This is a great way to use QR codes, not just for finding a job but for interactive advertising. The only limit to what you can do is your own creativity.

While this seems to suggest everyone should target their messages to the end of the week, that also isn't always the case. If you are a B2B company, this would be a terrible time to reach out to your audience since they're no longer thinking of work. Now if you're a B2C company, then go ahead and reach out and get some good conversations going with your audience.

One thing is for sure for every company though, Monday is the WORST day to reach out to users. It's the "noisiest" day on social networks so your message will probably be lost in the static.