Yesterday, the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, sent tweets predicting a longer winter and updated his Facebook status. Even our furry-friend Phil is an effective marketer in 2010! However, as the marketing world becomes more social, we shouldn't forget about those communication channels that still work effectively – email marketing for example. Do you intend on going social in 2010? Don't forget about the power of email marketing. Email marketing is still a solid, cost-effective method to communicate with your customers and prospects. In fact, marketers are sharpening their email marketing skills in order to enhance and bring about even better responses to their campaigns.

What can you do in 2010 to enhance the power of your email marketing program? Here are a few tips:

What's so great about being social? There are many reasons you need to get on board, not only Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Other niche interest groups are creating their own expanding social networks, Ning for example. With so much scattered interest, where do you begin to start?

First, make sure your resources are served wisely by going into this arena. Don't sacrifice other marketing efforts that are making money efficiently for you. Divide and conquer with your staff and begin slowly by making a plan and sticking to it as appropriate.

Twitter updates can are especially effective for retailers. Alert your customers to special sales and new item arrivals. Invite them to a special customer event. Let them know that subscribing to your tweets will pay.

How about your fans? Facebook interactions allow for robust consumer interactions, where you can interact and respond directly to consumers. It can be more than games and ads. Consumers are looking for reviews and feedback. Urge your current customers to interact with you and provide feedback for new prospects. Do you leverage the use of page tabs on Facebook? You may want to look into a fan page management system with fan page templates such as Social Bravo.

After reviewing the results of numerous surveys studying the affects of social media, one consistent finding comes up time after time. Companies that are heavily invested in social media are surpassing their peers in terms of both revenue and performance. The biggest challenge for marketers is proving to senior management that social media is driving these results. When trying to determine the value of social media efforts, marketers should focus on the following metrics:

1. Know the number of contacts. When email prompt subscribers to share the message, you won’t get the forwarded email address, but you will be able to glean how many contacts in total there are in their networks.

2. Track the number of invitations shared. Identify the number of invitations sent by your subscribers in order to track social engagement in a scalable way.

3. Track the number of invitations accepted. Subscribers most likely have large social networks and will send significant amounts of invitations regarding your company’s products and services.

4. Track conversions by your subscribers. Knowing this information will help marketers segment their lists by level of influence, which is essential for developing a results-driven subscriber list.

Marketers looking for opportunities to sell their products on Facebook now can use PayPal to pay for the ads. PayPal is an online payment service owned by eBay.

Advertisers can target people based on things such as location, age or interests, which makes ads more relevant to the more than 400 million Facebook users worldwide,” a Facebook spokeswoman says. “People can also engage with Facebook Ads as they would with other things on the site. For example, you can RSVP to an event or become a fan of a page through an ad.”

Offering PayPal will especially help business in areas where payment processing can be difficult or expensive, Facebook says. This would especially apply to smaller firms based outside the United States, Facebook says.

The social networking site also will offer PayPal as a payment option for Facebook Credits, through which consumers buy virtual goods, such as components of online games. “People can use Facebook Credits to purchase virtual goods within a small number of games and applications on Facebook platform, as well as virtual gifts sold in Facebook's gift shop,” the spokeswoman says.

More and more companies are flocking to Facebook to promote their brand. The reason being is Facebook has quickly supplanted MySpace as the king of social media. When you compare Facebook and MySpace, Facebook members are more engaged with the network and more active. Facebook has a lot of functionality that allows members more chances to interact with other members.

One of the reasons Facebook has leaped to the foreground for brand-building is they redesigned the pages that businesses create, making them more interactive and, most importantly, making it possible for those pages to become part of a company’s Facebook fans’ home page news feeds. Now brands can go to consumers, as opposed to hoping consumers remember to visit their favorite brands.

Facebook also offers a variety of opportunities that go beyond conventional online marketing. Companies can use a fan base as a virtual focus group, for example. They can see through Facebook profiles what interests and motivates their customers, and respond accordingly. And they can create applications that connect fans with staff or other fans on a one-to-one basis to discuss products and answer questions.

Conversation and engagement are vital components of a successful social media campaign. Make the most of your social presence by actively seeking out and engaging your target audience—expecting them to come to you won’t work. Additionally, playing an active role in the development of your business’s social network will help ensure that the time spent on your social profiles is contributing to the growth of your business.

If your brand is going to use social media marketing as a legitimate business building initiative and not just a popularity contest, choose your networks and friends wisely. You want to make sure you are reaching out to your target demographic. Plus, you want to make sure your brand is reaching out to those who will be you best product advocates.

MySpace has been losing ground lately to Facebook. Why? MySpace hasn’t kept pace with offering new features and functionality that keeps sites fresh. One of the reasons Facebook has leaped to the foreground for brand-building is they redesigned the pages that businesses create, making them more interactive and, most importantly, making it possible for those pages to become part of a company’s Facebook fans’ home page news feeds.

On the other hand, MySpace still remains one of the biggest sites on the Internet. According to comScore Inc., MySpace is one part of Fox Interactive Media, the fifth most visited set of properties on the web. Facebook on its own ranks No. 6, YouTube No. 1 as one part of Google Sites and Twitter on its own No. 46.

Even though MySpace is now known as the place for bands, there are still opportunities for companies to build their brand. There are companies that still use MySpace in its social marketing mix to ensure it’s reaching out to as many consumers as it can to spread the word about the company and its culture of customer service but also to put a face—literally, in many instances—to the company.

Facebook and MySpace are social networks in the broadest and deepest sense. They do everything: friends, profiles, photos, videos, applications—the list goes on. YouTube, however, does one thing, video. But it does it extraordinarily well.

Of the Big Four social networks, it draws the largest crowd: In June it reached 87.7 million unique visitors, a 22% year-over-year jump, research and measurement firm The Nielsen Co. reports.

Internet users can create their own accounts and channels with profiles and heaps of favorite videos. Once signed up, YouTube members can link to friends just like on Facebook and MySpace. And they can subscribe to the channels of others, including retailers, so when others post new videos they are alerted to the new content.

Not only does YouTube offer a high-visibility venue for brands to connect visually with consumers, it’s also a way to boost brand awareness via natural search, where videos are now routinely popping up in what is called blended search—search results with site links, images, videos, news links and more.

Videos posted on YouTube can get great exposure in natural search. It’s harder to find a video posted on a brand page on Facebook or MySpace than a video that’s been posted and properly tagged with keywords on YouTube.

The talk of the town lately seems to revolve around Twitter. What makes Twitter so popular is its quick-and-easy, down-and-dirty way of communicating with friends, family, readers or customers in 140 characters or less anytime and oftentimes, thanks to mobile phones, anywhere.

Companies can approach Twitter passively or actively. Passively, they listen to what is being said about them and their product categories and products through routine monitoring via Twitter search and of consumers or bloggers it elects to follow.

Actively, they can tweet away every day on anything and everything related to its market and customers, occasionally sending out Twitter-only promotions, and encouraging a strong, two-way dialogue that can turn Twitter into a new kind of customer service vehicle.

Twitter is a phenomenon that keeps growing and growing. Users are highly engaged and like to incorporate it into their daily web environment.

Status updates are the most common social gesture that companies make toward their fans on Facebook. So, how do you make the most of these engagement opportunities with your community? 

A well-planned and creatively-written Facebook status update can make your fans curious enough link through to your fan page, visit your Web site  or read your blog.

How do you do it? Here are 5 hot tips for writing engaging status updates with a click-through in mind.

1. Have a talk with your friends. Write your Facebook and Twitter status updates from a personal perspective. You're a real person talking to a real person. Some businesses make the mistake of writing in an impersonal manner, which contradicts the personal connection of Facebook. Take a look at a few of your fan profiles before you sit down to write and think of them while you're writing.

2. Make your content rock. Fans like your page for a reason. Make sure that you're giving them what they expect, so stay on topic as much as possible. While it's fun to mix it up with fun, timely topics from time to time, be sure to focus on what makes your business fan page unique. Fans expect exclusive content, so make sure your content rocks.

3. Ask a question. Everyone likes to give their opinion. It's a fantastic way to collect rich data you can use to delight your customers, develop new products and create outstanding promotions. New! Use the new Facebook Ask a Question tool to create a simple poll right in your fan's news feed. Now there's no need to load a separate app on your page. Simply add the Facebook Questions to your page and ask away. 

4. Respond to a fan comment. Use a listening tool to make sure you don't miss any fan comments, questions or conversations. Take advantage of the opportunity to respond and have a meaningful dialogue. If you are reacting to negative comments, be sure not to simply defend your position. Acknowledge that you appreciate their comments and that you'll do your best to find a positive solution. 

5. Learn more about your fans. Be sure to look at Facebook Insights to see the demographics of your fans. In addition, look through your fan profiles to determine their other "likes" and interests. They can be a significant source of information for future posts.

Using these 5 Hot Tips for Engaging Status Updates should help you create more personal dialogue with your fans to help you achieve your social media goals.

For more information on social media marketing, contact us.

Today, more and more consumers use their phones as personal, on-the-go computers. That's why it's critical your email campaigns are mobile-phone compatible. Use these simple tips to make sure your emails are easy to read on smartphones such as the Blackberry, iPhone and DROID.

1. Make sure your subject line is appropriate to the content. You'd think it was intuitive. But, avoid incorporating terms that spammers use like Free! and ALL CAPS or worse yet FREE! in all caps.

2. Careful of the images. Remember, not all desktops or phones automatically download those images. Make sure you use appropriate names for your images so your customers can recognize the content.

3. Get to the point. The text that is. Make sure to add text to the email and get to it quickly. Don't be too long-winded and get to the point. Call in the action...what do you want that customer to do?

Digitally connect consumers to your brand and drive Web traffic using QR Codes. QR Codes, a.k.a. Quick Response Codes, are popping up everywhere. (You know, those nifty little barcode boxes you can snap with your phone.) These 2-dimenstional matrix barcodes allow marketers to engage consumers through a digital connection with their mobile device. QR codes are readable by smartphones, other camera phones, and web-connected devices such as the iPad. The information encoded may be text, a URL, vcard, calendar event or other data.

Cool and cutting-edge? Think again.

While you might think these crackerjack marketing tools are new, we have to give proper credit to the Japanese who've been using these for many years. Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave created the QR code in the '90s for use in tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing. With the ability to be decoded at a high speed, QR codes were soon adopted in a much more broad, commercial format across Asia. With the adoption of camera and smartphones in the US, there has been an exponential growth in the interest, and "cool-factor" in QR codes.

What you need to know.

The following list of five best practices will help you avoid making some potentially embarrassing and costly mistakes is using a QR code in Marketing. 1. Layout the code properly
Make your QR code easy for your users to scan. Keep proper layout of the QR code in mind. Since QR codes aren't mainstream yet, give subsinct directions to your users about how and why to scan. QR codes are black and white squares. Don't color them or reverse them out. In addition, the white border around the black information square is part of the readable code -- so don't trim. 2. Provide valuable content
Give customers a payoff for scanning. A URL with a few paragraphs of information just won't cut it. Provide an incentive, a video tutorial, an interactive quiz or even a chance to enter a contest. You need to make the value of the scan higher than the consumer's data charge from their wireless carrier. 3. Make the code concise
The more information that is stored in a code, the harder it is to decode. While QR codes can contain a myriad of information, less is more. QR codes can fail and errors can occur when text or URL strings are too long. Consider using a URL truncation service, or host your own small URL, to create a more efficient code. 4. Land on a mobile page
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Unfortunately, many marketers have already made this mistake. Since your users are leveraging a mobile phone to access your content, make it easy on them! Ensure that if visitors are landing on a URL, it is designed for primary use by a mobile application. For added punch, make the landing page campaign specific. 5. Be creative.
The world is your oyster. Us a QR code to:
Land on a "Tweet this" or "Like this" for Twitter or Facebook respectively.
Link to a reading list
Generate a PayPal Payment.
Use a QR code on your promotional items.