Marketing Technology Stories you might have missed

I took last week off since I was in Acadia National Park. The forests have great camping, hiking and biking but lousy wifi! Check out Christina’s recap of our adventure in Maine.

MT5 Edition: #51

Stories This Week:  Facebook to allow marketers to use their email lists, Romney & Obama turn to social media, top email marketing tactics, Google+ for business, and the world of comment spam.–

1. Facebook To Roll Out Email- and Phone Number-Based Ad Targeting Next Week

[VentureBeat] Facebook will be launching new features next week that allow advertisers to target their ads to customers based on contact information that the advertiser has already collected. It’s a way for businesses to connect their Facebook ads with the customer lists they may have built up elsewhere.

My Take: A powerful tool indeed as it mergers the traditional email campaigns with Facebook.  Marketers have to ensure their Marketing Automation vendors are planning to integrate this feature into their product suite, otherwise their ability to manage the Facebook campaign will be stunted.

2. Presidential Race Turns To Social Media

[theVerge] Romney buys a Twitter trending topic – #RomneyRyan2012

[Mashable] Obama holds an Ask Me Anything on Reddit

My Take: I’m not convinced either tactic was terribly effective.  With America largely polling down the middle, purchasing a hashtag to promote a campaign, a campaign that every American is already aware of, doesn’t make much sense to me.  Looking at the tweets on #RomneyRyan2012 you’ll see what you’d expect – Romney lovers and bashers taking swipes at the other side.  So it probably wasn’t a wise spend (trending topics start at $120,000) other than it does allow the campaign to focus their supporters on a single hashtag. I’m sure the Romney war chest could easily afford the ad and it gives them another way to “check the social media box.”

The big winner in Obama’s AMA was Reddit.  Most people probably have not heard of Reddit so this was a nice coming out party for them. I tried to jump on the page and Reddit servers were swamped with traffic and the site went down.  Obama scored points with the geeks for showing up on this niche social network.

Email Objectives – need, difficulty and popularity

3. Marketing Research Chart: Ranking 12 top email marketing objectives

[MarketingSherpa] Limited marketing budgets often force marketers to select from a variety of possible email marketing tactics. This survey shows which tactics marketers turn to most readily.

My Take:  I prefer charts that have the preferred quadrant as top right, but alas….  The bottom line: segmentation, testing and creating relative content are considered the most important tactics to email marketing today.

4. Google+ Launches Tools for Businesses

[Mashable]

After a private beta test period, Google is releasing on Wednesday a suite of business tools for Google+ users.

The tools are available for free through the end of 2013, but users will then need a paid subscription to Google’s cloud-based software for businesses, Google Apps, for continued access.

My Take: These Google+ updates are really updates to Google Apps which underscores the fact that Google+ isn’t a social networking service, its a layer over all of Google’s services. It means to add a social layer over its properties to create a better user experience for customers and improve it’s search results by adding in social content.

5. REVEALED: THE GRUBBY WORLD OF COMMENT SPAM

[kernal] This story does a deep dive in why we have comment spam in our blogs and the tools of the blog spam trade.

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