A recent report from Econsultancy indicates that email still is a powerful medium for targeted advertising.

Stefan Tornquist, Econsultancy’s US Research Director says, “Despite the current hype surrounding social media, social network adoption and its influence on e-commerce is far from maturity. More than a third of consumers (37%) do not use a social networking site, while those who have recently become a ‘fan’ or ‘friend’ of a company or brand online are still in the minority.”

In fact it has been found that communication through email and even snail mail is more effective than the newer marketing efforts via delivery notices, notifications, vouchers and special offers on social networks.

What Is The Best Way To Receive Ads For Sales & Specials?
(Image courtesy of Econsulting)

Econsultancy’s report, titled How We Shop In 2010, has separate findings for the U.S. and for the U.K. as there are some differences in the online shopping habits of both places.

In the U.S. the study was conducted across a cross section of 1,400 respondents and about 1,000 in the U.K. Detailed demographics concerning age, sex etc were used to better understand and interpret the results.

The study does confirm that it is essential to target your ads at the appropriate audience as 53% of users felt that irrelevant information devalues the mail and 54% felt that the emails had no special advantage.

In the U.S. 55% of respondents said that high product ratings increased the chances of a purchase and 56% said that consumer generated reviews increased chances of using an online store. Two thirds of those under 24 check emails on mobiles and search is the primary source of information for most purchases. Men are more likely to use search engines and women are more likely to have discussions online or off. Those between 25-38 years of age are most likely to rely on e-commerce.

In the U.K. 57% appreciate ad messages which provide discounts and other special offers, 365 say email helps them make online purchases and 38% do not use social networks. 61% use search engines to study products, while 75% of those between 18-26 years use social networks to research products.

Now, whenever Facebook users receive a notification email regarding a friend’s status update, photo upload, wall post, video etcera the user can send their reply to Facebook via email, without actually having to sign in to their Facebook account.

Facebook has also implemented some special features within this functionality that will enable filtering out all unrelated text, such as the user’s email signature.

This feature will be particularly useful to those who want to check their Facebook status while they are at work, or through their mobile phone, while on the go, as this facility will allow them to do so without signing in to Facebook, thereby bypassing any restrictions set by IT departments.

When the user receives an email notification, he or she just has to click ‘Reply’ and then type a comment at the top of the email received. Clicking ‘Send’ will automatically direct the email to a Facebook service that will add the main email contents as a comment on Facebook.

Visits to Facebook by individual users could fall, as a result, though the added interaction this prompts could keep Facebook atop of user’s minds longer. Advertising could very easily be integrated into email notifications if Facebook wanted.

Users who don’t currently receive email notifications can simply visit their account settings and choose to receive email notifications through the ‘Notifications’ tab.

Blog subscriptions were found to be far more popular through email than through RSS.

In fact, Hubspot noticed that the average number of email subscriptions was almost 12 times the average number of RSS subscriptions. They investigated this trend within a number of different industries, and found that the trends were more or less consistent across the board.

Blog followers in most of the industries, such as consulting and business services, medicine and biotech, retail, real estate, banking and finance, education and even non-profit and government organisations, follow the same trend of having higher email subscriptions than RSS subscriptions.

There are some exceptions to this rule, however. These were seen in the software industry and in the online marketing and SEO sector, where the difference in numbers is much smaller, and both email and RSS subscriptions are running neck-to-neck.

The technology industry also exhibits a similar trend. Though, the total number of email subscriptions here is much lower than the number of RSS subscriptions. Individually, almost 50% of the tech companies in Hubspot’s survey had more RSS subscriptions than email subscriptions.

One possible reason for this reverse trend is that these industries are more technologically advanced, and so, RSS may be used more effectively by their employees than by others.

RSS may eventually overtake email subscriptions as the medium of choice for blog readers once other industries also become more tech savvy.

Social media platform Wetpaint and digital consulting firm Altimeter Group conducted a study of the world’s top 100 brands, with regards to their interaction with consumers through the social media sites and their level of revenue generation.

The results, which were revealed recently, show that companies with the highest level of presence on the social media registered an impressive 18% growth in revenue in the last year, while companies with poor or no presence on social media sites registered a drop of 6% revenue in the same time period.

A lot more than just social media presence contributed to the above rises and falls in revenue, but social media awareness definitely did play a role in the overall fortunes of the companies involved.

The top engaged brands were as follows:

1. Starbucks
2. Dell
3. EBay
4. Google
5. Microsoft
6. Thomson Reuters
7. Nike
8. Amazon
9. SAP
10. Intel and Yahoo! (tied)

The only brands that added links in their email marketing messages to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace were Pepsi, Sony, The Gap and Hewlett Packard.

Links to Facebook and Twitter in email marketing campaigns have increased drastically over the last couple of years.

In the same time period, the ratio of number of emails linking to Facebook and to Twitter has reversed.

In 2007, 215 campaigns were linked to Twitter and 729 campaigns were linked to Facebook.

In 2008 Twitter had 2,540 campaigns and Facebook had 12,650 campaigns.

However in 2009 Twitter has received 41,399 campaigns until June, while Facebook has received 41,052 campaigns during the same period.

Twitter had been trailing behind Facebook in January and February 2009. In March the two companies were running neck and neck. However since April, Twitter seems to have established a clear lead over Facebook.

It is expected to be ready for release later this year, and can be accessed at:

Google Wave

This new tool has been developed by the same sibling team, who have developed the immensely popular and useful Google Maps.

Google Wave will be a new model of communication which will have the combined features of various communication methods like email, chat-lines, instant messaging etc.

This new project was initially codenamed ‘Walkabout’. The team started out with a set of questions that they hoped to solve. The questions were:

• Why is it necessary to divide the various forms of communication such as email, documents, instant messaging etc?
• Would it be possible to combine most of the communication methods available into one simple format?
• Could they design a communication model which would take advantage of the current abilities of computers?

The Wave will allow users to communicate and collaborate with each other using various formats such as text, videos, photos, maps etc. all at the same time.

A user first creates a wave and then adds people to it. All the users on the wave can communicate, using the different forms of communication available on the web. Users can insert replies or edit the wave and other users will see this almost instantaneously. Users can also store this communication or use ‘Playback’ to see how the wave developed.

Google wave will be an open source entity, to enable developers to make additions to the Wave before the public launch.

The Google Wave product is an HTML 5 application built on the Google Web Toolkit having a rich text editor and other functions such as ‘drag and drop’.

Google Wave is also a platform with open API’s to allow developers to use waves and other web services and make new extensions in the wave.

The Google Wave protocol is an underlying format to store the communication and as a means of sharing the waves.

Now after working on the Wave for two years the team has set up a prototype and is releasing it on an experimental basis to get feedback from users and developers before the public release.

The demo video seen below shows how Google Wave could become an extremely powerful medium of communication.

Studies conducted by The Pew Internet and American Life Project have found that only 65% of teens use social websites nowadays, as opposed to 78% who play online games.

Not too long ago, social networks were the hot favorite among this age group, along with email, which was used by 89% of teennagers at that time.

The latest trend, however, is to use text messaging and instant messaging instead of email, which is now used by only 73% of teenagers.

Significantly, young adults between the ages of 18 and 32 seem to be following the reverse trend, with only 50% of them playing games online while 67% access social networks.

Surprisingly though, it was found that only 10% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 years spend time in virtual worlds, which is almost the same percentage as was found a few years ago, and hardly 2-3% of the older generation do so.

Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy Survey found that another victim of the changing times was the good old television. Studies reveal that those between 14 and 25 years of age are far more likely to use their PC for entertainment through games, music and social networks, than to sit and watch TV. This study was conducted across U.K., U.S.A., Germany, Japan and Brazil.

Searching and downloading music was the most accessed facility on the internet with 80% of youngsters using it while 73% access chat rooms social networks and message boards. It was also found that 59% of the youth use their mobile phones for entertainment, and the amount of time spent watching television is about one-third less than that spent by other age groups.

As far as advertising power goes, however, it was found that TV is the most influential for youth, followed by magazines, online ads and newspaper ads, while radio ads are fifth in line.

• Pew Internet Report: Adults & Social Network Websites
• Pew Internet Report: Adults & Video Games