Experts Provide Insight on How to Make Social Media More Effective for Marketers

March 17, 2010 - PRLog -- Global email marketing and one-to-one marketing provider ExactTarget released a new executive briefing today that identifies the top tactics executives should employ when building a social media strategy.

Featuring insight from 12 of the industry’s top experts including Flip the Funnel author Joseph Jaffe, MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley and MarketingSherpa’s Sergio Balegno, the briefing is a collection of letters to executives explaining best practices in social media engagement.

“With more than 60 percent of the Fortune 100 now on Twitter, the expectation of companies to engage and serve customers via social networks as greatly increased,” said Peter McCormick, ExactTarget co-founder and general manager.  “Social media provides marketers with a significant opportunity to identify what customers want and ensure deliverability of these requirements. This allows for an immediate experience with their brand.”

The Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Social Media briefing provides quick, helpful tips for integrating social media into organisations’ broader marketing efforts.  Key topics in the briefing include:

•   The importance of planning and implementing a social media strategy
•   How to build stronger customer relationships using social media outlets
•   Operationalising social media marketing and how it directly impacts your bottom line
•   The value of social media testing and optimisation efforts

“People don’t experimentally engage with brands on social networks, they engage with the brands they already support; thus, your organisation should consider how you’re going to ‘be’ social, not just ‘do’ social media,” said Jay Baer, Convince & Convert founder.  “There are answers to all of your social media questions, and by committing to testing and optimising your social media efforts in 2010, you’ll go from having a social media presence, to having a social purpose that drives meaningful ROI.”

Forrester Research predicts social media marketing will grow faster than any other form of interactive marketing.  In its 2009 U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast Report, the independent research firm estimated social media marketing will grow at compound annual rate of 34 percent, reaching $3.1 billion by 2014.  

The Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Social Media briefing is available for free download at: www.ExactTarget.com/GetSocial.

The launch of the briefing follows ExactTarget’s acquisition of CoTweet, a Web-based collaboration platform that allows companies to tap the collective wisdom of people across functional areas like marketing, PR and customer service to engage with customers in authentic two-way conversations on Twitter via a single dashboard.  The acquisition creates an ExactTarget business unit based in San Francisco, and the industry’s first business unit focused solely on social media development.  For more information about the acquisition and ExactTarget’s social media development, visit www.exacttarget.com/connected

-ENDS-

Media Contacts:
Tom Flisher / Sean Fleming (Octopus PR for ExactTarget) – 08453 700 655 or thomas@octopuscomms.net  / sean@octopuscomms.net
Mitch Frazier (ExactTarget) – 00 1 317 275 5034 or mfrazier@ExactTarget.com

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About ExactTarget
ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email and one-to-one marketing solutions. The company’s software as a service technology provides organisations a single platform to connect with customers via email, SMS text messaging, voice messaging, social media and landing pages. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget’s software powers permission-based multi-channel communications for thousands of organisations around the world including Expedia.com, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, Sun Microsystems, Value Retail, World Society for Protection of Animals and Gulf Air. For more information, visit http://www.exacttarget.co.uk.