Email is losing ground to Social Communications

I recently delivered a Social Enterprise marketing campaign titled "Being Social...More Than Just Talking" where the purpose was to raise awareness inside the enterprise that Being Social is not just about tools, it's about a work style change.

The campaign followed Steve, a Sales Communications Specialist, who was a bit of a social sceptic but was open minded to listen. He went on a social journey of discovery and soon realised that by being better socially connected with his colleagues he could be more collaborative AND more productive. Though he didn't managed to reduce his caffeine intake too much ;-)

The campaign was delivered on 3 fronts:

• An introductory email to 25,000 employees
• A poster campaign
• A set of 5 Diary Entry videos (done in the style of Bridget Jones) - one released each day for a week

The campaign has been received very favourably (average marks 9/10 by the employees) and I have had numerous requests to do a follow up Diary Series. BUT what was interesting was the statistics on the initial email that went out.

The email introducing the marketing campaign went out on a Monday morning. Of those 25,000 employees who received it only 5,569 actually opened the email (22%) on the Monday. By the end of the week this figure had increased marginally to 6,310 (25%).

Just let me reiterate that:

three quarters of the workforce had not even bothered to open the email before deciding to discard or delete it

Now there are other factors that have to be taken into consideration here like:

• was it holiday season?
• was the subject heading interesting?
• does the sender have influence and respect of the employees?

The answers to these questions are no, subjective, and again subjective respectively (though the name of the programme was used rather than a senders name here to provide more credibility).

The conclusion I draw from this is that if you want to communicate a message to the masses you can no longer rely only on traditional communication channels but you must use a combination of both traditional and social communication platforms. This is true inside and outside the enterprise.

The days of email blast campaigns are coming to an end.

Welcome to the Social Communication Revolution!

Sponsored conversations - good or bad?

I recently listened to one of the most fascinating podcasts I have heard in a long time.

The podcast was from The Social Mediasphere where they had a great illustrious panel consisting of Sean Corcoran from Forrester Research, Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web and Ted Murphy of IZEA and Wendy Piersall of Sparkplugging, all talking about whether 'sponsored conversations' should be allowed or not. This is an old podcast, but is still a relevant and hot topic even today.

For those that have not heard the term 'sponsored conversations' before, Forrester Research defines it as:

"a marketing technique in which marketers provide financial or material compensation to bloggers in exchange for them posting blog content about a brand."

Click to download the entire independent report by Forrester Research.

The podcast is 90mins long, but I highly recommend you pour yourself a glass of wine and sit back and listen to the whole show, but for those that cannot spare the time, let me provide the highlights for you with a little flavouring of me added in.

Marshall’s standpoint was he didn’t agree with "paying people to put words in someone’s mouth", and I have to say I can understand where he is coming from. If we take an A-list blogger who has a loyal following, and Apple approach them to write a review on the new iPad and tell them that they can be as honest as they like in their post and once finished they can keep the iPad, surely this 'payment' is going to influence their review? If a poor review is written, Apple are unlikely to use them again.

There was also a lot of talk that providing 'full disclosure' to your readers when a post is a true post or a 'sponsored conversation' is acceptable behaviour, but I do wonder where this full disclosure takes place – at the bottom in small print maybe?

However a good point was made by Sean, "how is this any different from a resort paying someone to fly over to write a review on their hotel?"

I very rarely sit on the fence, but this debate had some very good and compelling arguments on both sides. However, in the current climate it is hard to argue against anyone wanting to be paid for doing something they are good at, but it will ultimately be down to the readers to determine the authenticity of their posts and whether they will remain loyal followers.

I came across this video on YouTube from IZEA called The Caveman's Guide to Sponsored Conversations and whilst informative it is also a little humourous. Had to share it.