The Email Wars

Cream? Sugar? Shaken? Stirred? Bookmarked? Email? RSS? LinkedIn? Facebook? Or just plain fat fingering your way to remember this blog each and every week. Well the choice is yours. We at eROI are open to giving people media and content not matter how they want it. We are not email only snobs but a group that lives, eats and breathes all new things digital. Do you know about or are you using ANY of these?

Are you following eROI and this blog using Twitter? You can and you should.

Personally I am on a mission to bring more people to learn and understand why Twitter and other tools are an important empowerment and reach platforms. And did you know that you can refeed your email campaigns and blog posts into Twitter? We have done it and it works great.

I don’t blog on it too much, but I do pontificate on it all day long with clients and here at the office. So allow me to pull up the Soapbox for a few moments.

I have been watching Twitter for almost 2 years. Yep since SXSW 2007. I passively started using it in July 2007. Now I state passively as there were not many people I knew using it at the time. By March of 2008 the tide turned. There were more of us on it and more conversations happening. For me that is when the tide started shifting on it.

Although less than 10 active million people are on Twitter (equal to 0.15% of the total online audience) these people are some of the most valuable to many brands. These users are evangelists, pundits, media, viralists, and the market leaders that can help you more than you know. Some of them are you. Many of you I know are on Twitter. I have conversations with some of you each and every day. I value this as a channel to know you more and interact with you more.

I am seeing new brands come on, as well as well known personalities (The Real Shaq and Dave Matthews)  and new personalities being created via Twitter stardom – my favorite Ms Julia Roy who is producing a weekly TWEETWEEK videocast for all of us. Media companies are amazed with how well it has worked. HBO, CNN, Local News Stations, music personalities, writers, speakers and more. The media channel is moving into it which means it is on the path to “Jumping the Shark” (meaning hitting mainstream acceptance.)

But what is Twitter doing for the rest of us? Well it is connecting us to one another in a new way.. or is it connecting us in an old way to using a new thing? In it’s essence it is giving us a lens into each others lives and helping us to know more about one another that we might not every know. We all “know” people and what they do to a certain extent, but never do we truly know what is going on in everyone’s lives, thoughts, work, loves, futures, and with others outside of our view. Twitter gives us a little of this in a good way.

We are experimenting at eROI with Twitter use to pass on email messages. We are just playing with it now as another addition to the campaign and will see what occurs. We know that using it for our blogs already marks it as a Top 5 driver for our 5 blogs daily traffic referral points. So why can’t it augment email campaigns where you might not have subscribers to your emails? Worth a try.

But will it work for your brand?

Businesses on Twitter

http://www.socialbrandindex.com/twitter/business

Media Properties

http://www.socialbrandindex.com/twitter/media

Examples of Brands

http://www.twitter.com/jetblue

Examples of Fake Stars

http://twitter.com/darthvader

Examples of Real Stars

http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong

http://twitter.com/LIVESTRONG

http://twitter.com/cnnbrk

http://twitter.com/the_real_shaq

http://twitter.com/DaveJMatthews

http://twitter.com/pennjillette

More Examples:http://www.socialbrandindex.com/twitter