I suppose I shouldn’t say this but, to be frank, I always feel a deep sense of suspicion when I hear them. For the last three years or more, I’ve heard  ‘social media’ heralded—by ‘experts’ of varying degrees of expertise—as the solution to any number of  marketing conundrums.

Of course the fragmentation and ‘socialisation’ of media is changing the way the industry works—and with it our customer’s expectations—but I find myself continually frustrated by hearing the notion that there’s a kind of social media wand to be waved over campaigns which will instantly improve results. That’s plainly nonsense. Social media platforms are so diverse and the term has so many associations that generalisations about its impact are always going to be unhelpful.

Too many so-called experts are guilty of overcomplicating the issue and many marketers are taken in by jargon-filled promises as they hurry to join bandwagon. The most sensible thing to do—as is the usually the case— is to take a deep breath, pause, and consider the issue in the context of your existing e-marketing model.

Based on some of the fairly exhaustive conversations of last month and earlier (our clients include British Airways, Confused.com, Sony Playstation, Expedia, Philips, Thomas Cook, Dell, Skype, Boots and HP); we could draw four fundamental observations:

1. Email is the channel through which consumers’ want to hear commercial messages. Beyond that, it’s the channel through which they expect to be able to control and manage their relationship with your brand. We recently conducted some European research that showed only two per cent of 18-24 year olds, the supposed digital natives, want to be contacted about new products by social networks while 66 per cent prefer email. It sounds obvious but in most cases, when a customer chooses to join a brand’s social network group, their desire is to interact with other fans of its products or services – not with the brand

2. Email can usually tell you more. An integrated email database gives you the ability to capture and apply a wealth of customer data in order to market to them on a one to one basis. A social network might tell you a customer is a fan of your products but your email database can tell you, automatically, their most recent purchases, location of their favourites store –even their clothing sizes

3. It’s clear from the abundance of poorly managed Facebook groups and Twitter feeds, which simply broadcast commercial messages, that some marketers are treating social media platforms as if they were a DM channel. Obviously a mistake, but that doesn’t mean that the reverse is true to the same extent. Email can incorporate social media content – so long as it’s understood that email is not a social media platform!

4. Email is a stepping stone to social media. A conclusion we all reached was that the most successful way of integrating email marketing with social media strategy is to use the channel to encourage recipients to become active on social media platforms. The most effective way of doing that is by bringing social content to customers’ inboxes. By sharing customer reviews, blog posts, and virals by email, you can accelerate not only the consumption of social content, but also the customer’s willingness to cross channels. More than that though, email should be a call to action – allowing social bookmarking, embedding applications that enable easy sharing across multiple social networks, inviting recipients to follow your twitter feed. The bottom line is: email should make it easy for consumers to cross over to social media