Social Media Marketing Budgets Rising At Businesses, What About Non Profits?

Last week Mashable ran a blog post about the increasing budgets for social media marketing at big businesses. It was based on a report by the Aberdeen Groups covered in more detail on EMarketer.com. The report had two important findings: 63% of best in class businesses surveyed said they would be increasing their social media marketing budgets, 21% said by 25% or more. 59% of the companies said it was somewhat or very difficult to measure social media. My gut reaction on point number 1, 25% of nothin’ is nothin’. However, the report shows that $2 billion was spent in ’08 and projects an increase of 17% to $2.35 billion this year. But the second interesting thing about these numbers is that more than half of the companies said it was hard to measure social media, AND more than half said they were going to increase their budgets for it. Companies take risks like this. In business it is important to among the first to market, and I believe that the social media space is no different. How many tweeting airlines, grocery stores, or online shopping sites will people follow (for me the answer is 1, 2, 1)? And how much will the traditional media care about the company that is 1275th to be on Twitter? Specific companies using Twitter will cease to be a story as it becomes more commonplace. I’ve seen some interesting posts (and this one) essentially about the attention economy, and attention scarcity. In a world with a finite amount of attention, as the social media ecology grows more crowded, it may become harder to...

Email Management Strategy Phase 2: IMAP with Gmail iPhone and Thunderbird

In Developing A Personal Email Management Strategy I discussed the sorting, filtering and processing of the seemingly endless flow of email I receive. Recently, I took the plunge and converted my non work email to IMAP in preparation for converting work email to the same. The goal is to be able to see important direct email on my iPhone without seeing all the list traffic, commercial communications and other solicited bulk email. First, Some History I’ve had GAFYD (Google Aps For Your Domain) for my domain for quite a while.  I used multiple aliases for different types email traffic, travel@ for example for when i signed up for travel related services and lists, buy@ for commercial email and receipts after making purchases. This made sorting and filtering the incoming email really easy, just set up a message filter in Thunderbird based on the To: address. But all of these email addresses were just aliases delivering the mail to my primary account. Thus when checking email on the iPhone, sifting through all the solicited bulk email for the personal messages was like finding a needle in a hay stack. Step 1: Decouple Email Aliases from Primary Email Address The first thing I had to do was get all those aliases pointing at a different address. In GAFYD domain administration I created a new user. I then deleted all the aliases from my main user/address and recreated them for the new user. Now this new address will start receiving all the solicited bulk email. I could set this up as IMAP, but I don’t need to because for the most part...