Now compare that perception with your initial reaction upon hearing a new acquaintance say, “you can find me on Twitter.”

Of course, with any new technology there is always going to be the knee-jerk reaction that any early-adopter is probably a geek. But let’s disregard that perception for now—as any mobile phone user now knows, giving out your cell phone number today does not send out images of the Zack Morris brick phone the same way it did in say, 1990. Once a technology becomes mature, the geek argument becomes moot. But think about the other stereotypes that come with saying “you can find me on Twitter” to someone you have just met, and then consider the obvious negative implications that someone might draw from it:

• You have enough interesting and/or important things to say in 140 characters or less that this person should be happy to receive all of your updates in real-time…
• By that logic, you consider yourself an interesting and/or important person…
• You are very concerned with how many people are “following” you…
• You are an egotist.

Obviously, this string of stereotypes is an unfair characterization to draw without getting to know someone first. But here’s the problem I see facing the Twitter community: there is some significant truth to these conclusions.

To support this theory, I’d point to an outstanding recent blog post by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski at the Harvard Business Blog, entitled “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets.” While I don’t want to summarize their findings too much here, I will call out a particularly damning excerpt that explains the crisis of selfishness that Twitter faces down the road:

Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days… At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

So to recap, celebrities, businesses and media folks have predictably jumped on the Twitter bandwagon because it serves their self-serving interests under the guise of community building (and hey, we have a Twitter account too, so we get the appeal!). But for everyday folks, there needs to be a broader value proposition, otherwise Twitter will be viewed as just another venue for media bombardment and not the revolutionary communications tool that everyone was touting in 2008.

I would also point out that Twitter is not the first social networking site to experience these stereotypical narratives during their early years. In the interest of full disclosure, let’s take a humorous look back at the stereotypes scoreboard from social networks’ past:

Friendster:

• You want to meet new people online through friends…
• You are too embarrassed to admit that you are looking for a date, and therefore use Friendster to meet “friends” who will date you…
• You have become really embarrassed because you didn’t realize that almost everyone you know left Friendster in 2006…
• You moved to the Philippines because it was the only dignified way for your Friendster account to remain viable.

MySpace:

• You want to connect with your favorite bands online…
• Actually, you really just want to be famous for something yourself, even though you don’t have much talent…
• You realize that you can get your own reality tv show based on your number of MySpace friends and therefore don’t need any talent…
• Your forthcoming hip-hop single/reality show cross-promotion will get panned by the critics, but you don’t care because you have 37,243 MySpace friends.

Facebook:

• You want to connect with the people you go to school with…
• You attended an Ivy League institution, and therefore only want to associate with other Ivy Leaguers…
• Even though anyone can join Facebook now, that doesn’t mean they can sit at the “cool kids table” with you…
• You use the Facebook photo tagging tool as a passive-aggressive way to ruin your “frenemies’” reputations.

Email, alas, is very fortunate to avoid these stereotypes nowadays. While I suppose there are those out there who say that email is only for old folks (and I shake my fist at you little whippersnappers!), we are lucky to say that our channel is largely stigma-free. Our email accounts are blank canvases that we choose to color in with communications to friends and colleagues, as well as those trusted businesses that we have explicitly asked to hear from. That being said, email marketing seems like a good place to be right now—it works on a neutral playing ground that thrives under both good and bad economic conditions. So let’s take a pause to savor the moment; now is as good a time as ever to celebrate the neutrality of email!

My advice to the pundits: don’t call the coroner. Even better, you can un-friend him on Facebook because he won’t be visiting us anytime soon.

Now, I realize that I have covered this topic on our site before, but there have been some over-reaching statements made recently regarding the viability of the email industry that require a response. Let’s have a look at what’s being said about email right now and think about what’s really going on.

From ReadWriteWeb, responding to a Nielsen report showing that more adults are now on Facebook:

Our take away from these findings? People prefer the clean, controlled, multimedia and publicly social experience of social networking communication over the relatively open, individualistic and spammy medium of email. The fact that there is effectively no data portability allowing communication archives to be ported from one social network to another as there is with email doesn’t appear to be bothering people in the short term.

While the Nielsen numbers do confirm that adults have definitely warmed to social networks, they do not indicate what people “prefer” or how they interact with them. To suggest that MySpace became popular because it provides a “clean” experience is patently absurd to anyone with two functioning eyeballs. To suggest that the 15 Zombie/Vampire War requests I have in my Facebook account or the now-famous “work from home” Facebook ad scams are not “spammy” is equally ridiculous. For the record, I would also point out that there’s a difference between being private and “individualistic” – I would consider my email account private, while my tally of Twitter followers skews more towards the realm of “individualistic” and ego-serving.

As for the portability and privacy issues, I wholeheartedly disagree there as well. As Ben Isaacson pointed out here last week, people were quick to jump on Facebook’s change in terms of service. The bottom line was that people realized that their personal privacy and content ownership was at stake, and they mobilized quickly to undo these changes. Had they not undone their policy changes, there would have been an exodus of users to some extent – exactly how much, we’ll never know – accompanied by an outpouring of disdain among former Facebook users whose content was irretrievable.

These quibbles aside, the data does not suggest that people are jumping ship from email altogether. Again, email and social networks do not present an either/or proposition – ultimately it’s up to the user to decide if a particular message or topic of interest is worth sharing with the rest of the world or better kept private.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Diana Dilworth from DMNews states that “E-mail shines in recession”:

Even though the channel has been around for some time and is not a hot new channel the way that social media and mobile are, it is really blossoming these days. And why not? It is a really efficient way brands to connect directly to consumers on a one-to-one basis. Since bigger brands are getting more deeply into it, the industry seems to be blossoming with higher expectations and standards of execution.

I agree that email marketing is an appealing option during a recession because of how cost-effective and quantifiable it is, but it is certainly not immune to belt-tightening. When marketing spend decreases, that can affect the scope of some programs – unlinked multi-channel data streams can remain unlinked, and acquisition initiatives sometimes play a secondary role to maximizing existing customer value. I guess my point is that lethargy has always been a marketing pitfall, and now the recession gives some people a built-in excuse for maintaining the status quo, so to speak.

So which is it – dead in the water, or alive and kicking? Searching for the correct answer, copywriter Bob Bly simply asks “Is E-Mail Marketing Dead?”:

New media evangelists have long denigrated e-mail as “interruption marketing” and praised both search and social networking as non-intrusive alternatives…The younger generation (my teenagers) also seems to shy away from e-mail, preferring Facebook and texting as their primary means of online communication.

Do you agree that e-mail is not only a viable but an extremely profitable online marketing channel, and will be for many years to come? Or do you side with new media gurus who predict e-mail marketing is going the way of the dodo and the dinosaur?

Two comments on Bob’s post seemed to bring some clarity to the situation:

Tom Kulzer said:
Someone forgot to tell social networks that email is dead. They all rely on it to drive a significant amount of their traffic back to the site. Have you received a “what’s new” email notice fromLinkedIn, an email from Twitter about new replies, new Facbook friend emails, etc. Reports of email being dead are just trying to catch attention by being sensational.

Jim Logan said:
Tom hit the nail on the head: 1) social networking sites recognize great benefit from email marketing 2) talk about “this” or “that” dying is hype to gain attention. Relevancy is the issue with marketing. There’s no such thing as an interruption from something you value.

At the end of the day, I tend to agree with Tom and Jim. When you value information, you’re always happy to receive it, regardless of whether it’s in the form of a friend’s status update or a weekly email newsletter…or even, heaven forbid, a good old fashioned postcard. This logic alone is enough reason to keep faith in the email channel. So long as we continue to bring the relevance, the response should be there for some time to come.

Scrolling through my inbox, the main image of the Urban Outfitter “Where to?” campaign grabbed my attention above all the others. For those of us on the East Coast, it’s been a long winter. Nevertheless, spring is in the air, and Urban Outfitter’s image of the ocean popped out at me. The creative inspired me to open the email and daydream a little about being on a beach where I could forget about the economy and relax.

The “Where to?” campaign is a great example of using attractive photography and creative marketing to engage your subscribers to open your emails.

Because I took the time to look at the picture, I saw that Urban was advertising friends’ top picks for the season based on their travel plans. Their approach of using friends’ favorite items was a clever take on viral marketing, used in this instance to market a number of different products. Even if the recipient does not have any trips planned, the items fit different personalities as much as they fit the destinations selected.

The marketing effort is also well supported. The email links to landing pages from which you can toggle between the picks as well as the product detail and purchase pages.

I wondered if the “friends” were really subscribers or if this was just a marketing effort, so I continued to look for this campaign elsewhere on the web. I was happy to discover that Urban had included the campaign on their Facebook group page and on Twitter.

I don’t know if these “friends” are actual fans of Urban or if this is just a fun idea. I’d also love to see them go even further and open this up to their fan base to use their picks. Either way, it works!

In the good old days, marketing agencies would hand out new branding ideas and even if consumers didn’t like the changes, they would eventually accept them. With a few notable exceptions (New Coke is the classic example), it used to be difficult for consumers to make a fuss about their displeasure with corporate marketing. But in the brave new world of Web 2.0, one customer’s voice can be heard fairly easily. And in some cases, that one voice can lead to an avalanche of public opinion over the web. As the Times piece states:

Such attention is becoming increasingly common as interactive technologies enable consumers to rapidly convey opinions to marketers.

“You used to wait to go to the water cooler or a cocktail party to talk over something,” said Richard Laermer, chief executive at RLM Public Relations in New York.

“Now, every minute is a cocktail party,” he added. “You write an e-mail and in an hour, you’ve got a fan base agreeing with you.”

…Or disagreeing with you, as the case may be.

Beyond email, Facebook groups, Twitter users, and bloggers are driving more of the conversation than was ever possible before, and often times, it’s not complimentary. Just this past fall when I joined the Facebook group “Stop Playing Toyota’s ‘Saved by Zero’ Commercial,” I was pleased to see that within 2 weeks, my Sunday football games were no longer being ruined by the aggravating ad popping up on my screen after every kickoff. On Twitter, angry mothers took to the digital streets in protest of Motrin’s baby wearing campaign. And my personal favorite, the recent leak of a Pepsi re-branding document by Gawker Media reveals that their new logo is not just a remix of the Obama logo, but something uniquely “breathtaking.”

The takeaway here is that marketers must maintain a thick skin as their work becomes increasingly scrutinized on the web, and then respond calmly and promptly to better enhance customer relationships.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some complaining to do on Twitter…

Every emailer gets some complaint feedback from recipients, often routed through direct ISP ‘feedback loops’ where users press the ‘spam’ or ‘junk’ button. While studies have shown that a portion of this feedback may be ‘false positive’ mistakes, the substantial majority are clearly negative feedback from aggrieved users.  Unfortunately, few email marketers closely track these complaint percentages or use this data to quickly respond to trends/spikes in complaints. 

The message here is simple; every email marketer can quickly respond to increases in complaint feedback.  The reasons for complaint increases are usually very clear, and often tied to subscriber acquisition practices. Email is the greatest testing vehicle ever created, and complaint reduction can be tested along the same lines as subject lines. However, if the complaint reasons or testing processes don’t seem clear, then comment here and I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.  

It took 64,000 complaints for Facebook to pay heed to their users.  After doing so, their users are now further endeared to them.  How much negative feedback do you need to before you re-examine your privacy practices?