If you read yesterday’s blog, you’re up to speed with the “social revolution”!  (If you’ve missed the hype watch this Socialnomics YouTube video to see just how powerful social media has become.)

As the internet’s “word of mouth” social media is a must-have marketing, branding and networking tool.  Being an email marketer, you’re probably aware that email has long been the top performing direct and online marketing channel – now I don’t know about you, but something tells me that combining these two channels (email and social media) should have quite a powerful effect.

So, as promised, we’ve release a brand new way of complementing your email campaigns with your social media presence. 

It’s called social share.

This tool enables you to publish your email newsletter straight to your Twitter account.  The newsletter title with a link to your full newsletter will then automatically appear as a tweet – without you having to log into your account to manually tweet about your newsletter. 
Our developers have even included an added gadget: GMtiny, our very own URL abbreviator.  As Twitter limits you to 140 characters per tweet, GMtiny will automatically shorten the link to your newsletter, cutting down that lengthy, unsightly URL to only a few characters.  (I’m sure you’ve seen bit.ly links in tweets before? It’s basically the same thing.)  Handy, isn’t it?

And this is only the beginning - we’re already working on extending this feature to enable you to publish across more social networks.  Next up, Facebook!  Keep watching this space, I’ll let you know when you can take your social sharing even further.

Enhance your brand presence online, increase your audience and subscribers and boost your sales by engaging more fully with potential clients – all with our new social share tool.

(While you’re at it, don’t forget that GraphicMail is also on both Facebook and Twitter, so let’s befriend and follow.  I always enjoy seeing what our followers get up to!)

Don’t forget:  GraphicMail also offers the tools to insert social widgets in your footer – for which we also provide social widget statistics in your reports.

I’ve used the phrase “social media is the new buzz word for 2010” (or some derivative thereof) countless times recently, but something tells me there are many of you out there who either don’t know what I’m talking about, or simply aren’t convinced - which is why I was so excited to read Chris Moerdyk of Bizcommunity’s article yesterday. 

He reviews Socialnomics, a book by Erik Qualman, and summarises some of the important facts about the development of social media.  Moerdyk lists 41 interesting tidbits from Qualman’s book – and some of these made me think:

If Facebook gets more traffic on a weekly basis than Google in the US and YouTube has become the second largest online search engine, then your customers are more likely to find your product on a social site like Facebook or YouTube than on Google. So what happens if they can’t find your product in their social media searches?

Social media is the online version of what is traditionally referred to as “word of mouth”: Qualman states that “78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14% trust advertisements”. So what happens when their peers aren’t recommending you through word of mouth (social media)?

Social search has become the new online phenomenon: Search engines now give preference to companies based on their social mentions.  (Our Head of Marketing wrote a very interesting article on this for Bizcommunity earlier this week.)  According to Qualman we will, in future, “no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.” So what happens when you don’t have a social media presence?

While I know our US clients can see these effects of social media in their business communities every day, in South Africa we (unfortunately) do not enjoy the same level of connectivity as our US counterparts and therefore also aren’t as exposed to online social content.  That doesn’t mean that the effects of social media aren’t reaching us here, or that the effects of social media won’t continue to snowball in our own business environment.  Many local businesses are already very active on Facebook running profiles, fan pages and groups – and the hype is slowly expanding to Twitter too.

A perfect example:  I hadn’t hear of the book Socialnomics until reading the article on Bizcommunity, but after reading it I found a blog and YouTube videos by the author, promoting his book.  There was so much information, and so much to convince me that the book must contain some interesting facts, that I’m recommending it to our blog followers the very next day. 
And that’s how online word of mouth works.

But what does this have to do with email marketing?

GraphicMail has been rolling out new ways of integrating social media with your email marketing – we want to assist you and your business to be prepared for this next wave of online expansion.  Last year we enabled you to place social widgets in your email footer so your subscribers can share your newsletters through their social network accounts - recently we’ve even added a new social widget reporting tool.  (It allows you to track who shared what, who they shared it with and through which network.)  Finally, we announced the release of our new social share feature in our newsletter two days ago!  I’ll be publishing a blog article tomorrow to explain the features of this exciting new tool, don’t miss it!

Now:  If social media is this powerful, imagine what you can do with the combined powers of email marketing and social media…