Archive for March, 2010
By Kyle Austin
ExactTarget made fairly big news on Tuesday with their acquisition of CoTweet. The email marketing and one-to-one marketing provider acquired the popular Web-based platform that allows companies to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard. To date, CoTweet has teamed with brands such as Whole Foods, Starbucks, JetBlue, Ford, Pepsi, Sprint and Coca-Cola to effectively manage global Twitter engagement. So what does an email marketer want with a Twitter platform?
What they originally have planned for the service, may shed some light on that. According the their release, CoTweet will operate in San Francisco as a business unit of ExactTarget and will lead the company’s social media product development. CoTweet co-founder and chief executive Jesse Engle will also lead the San Francisco operation and spearhead the creation and expansion of the company’s social media lab.
“What we’re seeing in the market is organizations are moving quickly to try to capture the potential of social, but are discovering that it’s siloed and not integrated effectively with other forms of digital communications,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget co-founder and chief executive officer. “By combining the power of ExactTarget and CoTweet, we can provide businesses a complete solution to tie together all forms of interactive communications and drive deeper customer engagement online.”
An end-to-end marketing tool, which includes social media functionality could be huge, but initially I would have some fears with an email marketing company (synonymous in some consumers’ eyes with spam), imploring similar tactics with social media. Do they really understand the back and forth engagement between consumers and brands that makes Twitter what it is? It doesn’t sound like Jesse Engle of CoTweet has that fear.
“We see a huge opportunity to build on ExactTarget’s incredible business and customer relationships to help companies drive more measurable value from social media,” said Engle. “As part of ExactTarget, we’ll have the global resources to cement our early lead, rapidly expand our platform and develop the next generation of social media communication tools.”
Perhaps then, they do understand the difference in the social media channel. If it allows for CoTweet to build on their services and offer more real-time measurement and CRM functionality then I’m all for it. If they can apply email measurement and CRM to social, and even mobile, ExactTarget could turn the acquisition into a future leadership position in the holistic Web marketing space.
March 4th, 2010
By Kyle Austin
PitchEngine, the social media release platform, announced on Tuesday that it is partnering with Technorati and MyMediaInfo to develop components for its soon to be released, Pitch™ Platform.
We didn’t have the chance to catch-up with PitchEngine’s CEO Jason Kintzler today, but according to the PitchEngine release, The Pitch Platform (due to be released in beta over the next few weeks) will offer a new kind of “social media relations”. Instead of sending press releases to email addresses, the platform will create a new channel for conversations and sharing content with real people (journalists and consumers).
Technorati will assist in creating the Technorati List (fueled by PitchEngine), which is designed to help organizations and bloggers simplify and expand blogger outreach. MyMediaInfo will assist on the traditional media end with access to 400,000 media members.
With the Pitch Platform, media will be able to follow and filter only the content that matters to them. If they see something they like, they’ll be able to interact privately, one-to-one with the Pitch creator. Media can also pitch story needs to brands and organizations from within the same categories of interest making Pitch a genuine media relations tool.
But do we really need another channel? With more channels than ever before to connect with journalists and brands, will journalists want to open a new channel (even if it is a filter)? We’ve seen the evidence that they’re already using social media for similar purposes. A study released in January found 65 percent of journalists are using social networking sites and 52 percent are using micro-blogging sites like Twitter as part of their news gathering. Add on calls and instant messaging, and that’s a lot of channels to keep track of.
Any new channel will have to offer a lot to get journalists to abandon any of the aforementioned channels. Hopefully we can give you a better idea if this does all that, when we trial the beta offering later this month.
March 2nd, 2010
By Kyle Austin
Not only are consumers spending more time than ever before on social networks, they’re also using social networks as a one-stop-shop for news and information. The latest study released by Pew Research Center today found that 75 percent of online news consumers get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites.
However, online news consumption isn’t completely taking over offline (mainly TV and radio) consumption. Instead, consumers are combining both offline and online sources to digest news. In fact, 59 percent of the 2,259 U.S. adults (18+) surveyed, noted they use both sources. Meanwhile, only two percent noted they only use online sources for news and 38 percent of those surveyed still use offline sources as their main news provider each day.
Pew goes onto note that today’s multi-platform news environment is becoming portable, personalized and participatory:
- 33 percent of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones
- 28 percent of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them
- 37 percent of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
Looking closer at Facebook as a news hub, it will become increasingly important for brands to ensure that their messages and announcements penetrate the social network. This could be through their Facebook fan pages, personal posts, aggregation buttons on corporate blogs or even journalist posts. In addition, news stories with brand and message inclusion should also be scored on if they make “most emailed” lists, are posted to an outlet’s Facebook page (i.e. the New York Times posting a story) or if a reporter personally posts a story to their page (example illustrated above).
Personally, Twitter has been a great crowd-sourcing tool for myself each morning that often beats the morning paper in terms of multiple sources, stories and varying points of view. However, I’ve found myself going to Facebook for the same type of crowd-sourcing recently. With the combination of friends’ updates and news posts from both friends, colleagues, news outlets and clients it becomes a more personal experience. I also find that with more information posted (no character limit), I spend less time clicking through to stories (not necessarily a good thing for media companies).
And that personal experience isn’t only key for myself. Despite all of the online activity, Pew notes that the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites. Most likely because the news and information is overwhelming and consumers opt for sites that they are comfortable with and engage within themselves.
March 1st, 2010
Next Posts
