Nonetheless, a thorough understanding of how to not only drive but also maximize the value of components is a prerequisite to recognizing the possibilities for fusing them together.

True, there's no substitute for basic training, so get that training (hint: you're already in the right place!)

So, taking two specialties near and dear to my heart—email marketing and social networking—here's a quickly brainstormed list of ways to create digital convergence between them:

• If you have an e-newsletter, tweet the link to each issue as it is published with a question answered within it, or a catchy fact from it, that provokes curiosity.
• Speaking of Twitter, always come from a place of service or inquiry rather than blatant self-promotion (save the shameless self-promotion for email).
• Include a feature like Silverpop's Share-to-Social in your emails to help you go viral. 
• Include the link to your email sign-up page on all social media Web site individual or group profile pages. (Twitter, for example, allows you to upload your own custom background design—great real estate for including alternate points of contact).
• Include your Twitter handle and links to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or other relevant points of online presence in your email templates.
• Use—in your emails, marketing materials, and on your site—reader praise, questions, and experiences (with permission) gathered from social networking sites.
• Create component exclusivity and change it up frequently. What do you offer Twitter followers that they couldn't find anywhere else? Which exclusive perks, deals, or intel are available only to email subscribers?
• Solicit user-generated content from all avenues, then populate content-rich environments (e-zines, blog, photo albums) with the results. Or fashion the effort as a contest.
• Entice and reward audiences to share, share, share! More people would rather share once with a network than forward-to-a-friend via email, especially since Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and LinkedIn have gone mainstream and the average user can reach a significant percentage of colleagues, friends, and family members via these environments. Then again, brilliant email campaigns can and do take on a viral life of their own.

Marketers who have put these and other simple steps into practice begin to notice exponential rather than linear increases in subscribers, brand recognition, leads, word-of-mouth, and sales—increases that can't be attributed to a single digital channel or practice alone.

It's as though once given enough heat... digital connections fuse, changing the properties of the original compounds and resulting in a new, more valuable substance just as the alchemists of old attempted to transmute common metals into gold.

In marketing and elsewhere, quantum shifts are being made. You need to be willing to take some risks, make some leaps, or be left behind. Old systems are crumbling and new ones are breaking through. Worry less about how to deal with them and more about whether you're participating. Then get in the game.

Really, the only way to understand fusion is to be willing to mix, mash, and experiment a bit.