I know that I am way late on this one, but since it is Festivus, I am going to air my grievances. Remember that now “infamous” Wall Street Journal Article titled, “Why Email No Longer Rules”? If not, this article seeped through the email marketing community in October of this year and mostly fell on deaf ears. Here is why:

Author Jessica E. Vascellaro only did half her homework. She claims that, “a new generation of services [are] starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world”.  What she fails to notice, is the fact that all of these online networking communities are powered by email. Without email, one cannot opt-in to any of these communities or continue to communicate within them . Secondly, lets think about MySpace. Myspace was the premier social network before Facebook and Twitter took over. Companies poured money into harvesting their communities, only to find out that everyone left and moved on to the next community. If they “owned” those relationships through email, it would not matter what community the consumer subscribed.

So, what does this all mean? Email is not dead or dying, but rather the opposite, it is fueling these new communities. Email allows the user to share articles they enjoy or shows they would like to attend or even updates about what band is coming to town. What savvy email marketers should take from this, is how to incorporate an eco-system of marketing.

Sean Corcoran recently wrote an awesome blog which explains all of the relationships that can form a successful eco-system, incorporating owned relationships (email) with partially owned relationships (social networking sites). He states that, “Owned media is a channel you control. There is fully-owned media (like your website) and partially-owned media (like Facebook fan page or Twitter account). Owned media creates brand portability. Now you can extend your brand’s presence beyond your web site so that exists in many places across the web – specifically through social media sites and unique communities”. Using this idea, email is still the big mama jama. Incorporating social media to your marketing plan is great and it plays real nice with email. Check out Sean’s blog for more ideas to create a solar system of owned media and rest assured that nobody has usurped email’s throne.

[courtesy of Sharethis.com]