I was delighted to be the email advocate on a panel on "Creating an Environment for Viral Marketing Success," moderated by entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki last Thursday. It was a virtual complement to the SmartBrief Buzz2009 event, held in Washington DC with more than 80 association executives.


The panel included social media practitioners Brendan Hart, VP of National Geographic, Stacey Kane, Marketing Director for the California Tortilla chain of franchise stores in the DC area, and Andy Sernovitz, author and founder of the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association.
When creating buzz, the panel discussed the necessity of matching the message to the medium. I noted that there are two ways to build word of mouth - sustained programs, where we send out some small bite of content every day; or a campaign, which is a one-time, big blast that you hope will be the top search link for a day or longer.
The sustained approach is a great way to engage. Offer a coupon for a taco like California Tortilla, or link to a way cool photo and invite comments as National Geographic does. I gave the example of Publisher's Clearinghouse emailing the video of the winners (yes, they still give out million dollar checks every month). These are the most forwarded messages.
Campaigns are harder to build and take a commitment. They are also risky - they could generate complete silence, or negative publicity, or lots of noise but not a lot of sales, like the Subservient Chicken campaign from Burger King. National Geographic built a puzzle of Mt. Everest which drew in a lot of traffic. It includes "Look, I did it!" links to share.
For California Tortilla, the rate of response is slightly higher on Twitter, perhaps because these are the "freshest" (most recent) subscribers, but the largest number of people by a magnitude of 100x is via the Taco Talk (https://www.californiatortilla.com/taco-talk.html) email newsletter. So, while Twitter and Facebook have "cool" factors, when she needs to bring people to the stores for lunch, email has the reach and remains her best friend.
Guy Kawasaki is of course a wildly heralded thought leader on entrepreneurism and social marketing, and has 175,000 followers on Twitter. He uses Twitter exclusively among the social networks to help promote his latest business, Alltop. He says that if you aren't "pissing off" some people on Twitter, you aren't using the channel properly. He freely admits that he uses it as a broadcast channel only. It was good to see that strategy (which works well for his personal brand) contrasted with what Stacey is doing (engagement and direct marekting) and Brendan (loyalty).
Andy Sernovitz gave a wonderful intro about how word of mouth is just the result of "making love" with your customers. Delight them, arm them with great sharing tools, and tap into what they already love about your products and services, and you will enjoy stronger word of mouth marketing, he said. Andy also suggests that you don't need to use all the bright new shiny technologies out there to be successful with word of mouth. Don't get distracted, but focus on where your customers are already hanging out. Like email!
What I loved about the discussion is that while it was all about viral and the buzz generated from social networks, the emphasis kept coming back to email marketing as the foundational element for most marketers. Certainly email powers the social networks .... it's the biggest traffic driver. But more importantly, for most of us, email is the most powerful link between your brand and the largest number of customers simply because that is where our customers spend time.
Integrating social and email is a great idea, and I offered a number of tips to help, including:
1. Match the content to the medium. Email is great for lifecycle marketing, promotional broadcasts and content newsletters. Facebook fan pages are great for surveys or building loyal fan bases. Twitter may be great for customer service as well as broadcast. Don't just repost your blog everywhere .... send content that is relevant to the channel so that you appeal to customers who consume information in different ways.
2. Make it easy to share. Add "SWYN" or Share with Your Network links, but do so prominently and integrate them into the content. SWYN links in the footer will not drive significant sharing, just like a buried Forward to a Friend link will get little use.
3. Host your own social community. Invite conversation among Facebook fans (e.g.: What do you think of this new product feature?), offer product reviews or build your own community (IBM Corp. has nearly 45 community sites). Use that content in your email newsletters, and to help keep product and customer service and marketing teams connected to the marketplace.
4. Tie it back to email. Integrate the opt-in invitation everywhere .... on your Facebook page (Lenovo does this well), at the end of videos, on your Twitter profile, on key landing pages for shared content..
5. Celebrate your listening skills. If you are responding to customer and prospect input, be sure to communicate back your responses and any changes you are making. This makes for excellent email newsletter content.
6. Participate. Do more than listen, participate. Don't engage halfway.
As with everything in email and social media, it's all about the subscriber experiences you create via your content strategy. All the viral mechanics and technology automation in the world will not make your brand compelling or engaging. Be where your customers are .... and for now, you can't ignore the inbox.
At the end of the day, here's why email is the coolest and sexiest channel in the digital marketer's toolkit: Revenue. Email drives the most revenue at the lowest cost. Period. And you just don't get any sexier than that in business.
Check out the full webcast (90 minutes) here. And follow the Tweets using #buzz2009. Thanks to SmartBrief for having me, and thanks to Guy, Andy, Stacey and Brendan for a great conversation!