SUBSCRIBERS RULE!

MySpace Entering the Social Inbox Fray?

MySpace webmail on the horizon?

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reported last week that MySpace has been building a new webmail offering on the down-low for the past several months.

According to the article:

The first hint of the new service was a reassignment of some MySpace employee email addresses to [name]@myspace-inc.com, which people have noticed. This is a sign that they are preparing to assign MySpace.com email addresses to users, which is exactly how Yahoo handled the transition when they launched Yahoo Mail in 1997 - Yahoo employees moved to yahoo-inc.com email addresses. We’ve subsequently confirmed that MySpace is currently building a webmail product.

If and when MySpace enters the webmail fray, it will instantly become the web’s third largest webmail provider at 125M users, trailing only Microsoft’s Hotmail (284M users) and Yahoo (277M users).  Gmail, however, will have something to say about that as it currently claims 118M users and is growing faster than any other major webmail provider.

What this means for email marketers remains to be seen; however, it is yet one more bit of evidence that the social inbox arms race is on.  Can an open Facebook webmail client be far behind?  Stay tuned.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Social Inbox Concept

Fear Not, Brave Email Marketers!

In the course of my career, I’ve come to realize that email marketers carry a disproportional amount of FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) compared to marketers in other disciplines.

I’m no psychoanalyst, but I’m guessing it’s due to the fact that email marketers exist at the whim of the ISPs and the myriad of ways in which they render, filter, and block emails.  I also suspect that despite the medium’s unassailable ROI, we all have a little bit of a complex because the cost-effective nature of email means that we command less of the marketing budget (and therefore, in-house respect) than our counterparts who wield large advertising budgets.

The FUD cloud that hangs over email marketing becomes all the more evident when you stand us side-by-side with the social media crowd.  Talk about extroverted!  Those folks love to talk, link, share, and pontificate — and they do so despite the fact that social media is struggling itself to command more of the overall marketing budget.  My colleague Morgan Stewart summed it up perfectly in his article for MediaPost’s Email Insider this week when he stated:

Social media folks understand authentic interactions with customers, they get customer relationships, they just haven’t figured out how to make money! Contrarily, email marketers know how to make money, but too many of us consider a deliverable email address a “relationship.” Let’s face it, we are socially retarded.

If only we could create that X-Filesque alien/human hybrid — the best of the email marketer and the social media guru — we might have an unstoppable force in the marketing department.

Well, guess what.  It’s happening.  As I discussed earlier this week, thanks to Yahoo, Microsoft, Gmail, and even AOL’s Bebo, 2009 stands a good chance to be the year that delviers us a viable social inbox — a space that brings all of our email and social interactions together in one place.

With email and social merged for consumers, email marketers and social media gurus will have no choice but to collaborate.

While this sounds wonderful to some, email marketers will have to fight off their FUD instincts.  It’s easy to see how social inbox features (such as the “From Connections” view in Yahoo’s social inbox beta) will strike fear in the hearts of email marketers who seek to sell rather than serve subscribers.

My firm belief, however, is that the social inbox holds great promise for email marketers.  Here’s why:

1. It’s an Inbox. Who in the online marketing world understand the inbox better than email marketers?  Our understanding and respect for the inbox environment should prove to be a tremendous asset as we seek to increase consumer engagement and response no matter the medium.
2. More integration means more use. The more communication tools that the social inbox can integrate into a single dashboard (email, IM, SMS, Twitter, social networks, etc.), the more consumers will remain in the inbox, and the more responsive they will become to relevant, timely messaging of all types.
3. Email’s strengths will shine. Email supports images, attachments, archiving, search, multiple recipients, and messages more than 140 characters.  The social networks depend on email to drive engagement, send account notices, and alert you as to new friends and followers.  In the social inbox, email’s strengths will shine as part of the expanded suite of communication tools that users have at their disposal.
4. Relationships will rule. The social inbox will reinforce the importance of relationships.  As a result, companies who take the time to understand and serve their email subscribers needs will be rewarded with above average response and an opportunity to extend those relationships into the social media (or vice versa).

While the social inbox will bring change, it will also bring opportunities to those who remain focused on the “four rights” — sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time, through the right medium.  So, set aside the FUD fellow email marketers, and focus on the fundamentals.  Subscribers will still reign supreme as the year of the social inbox unfolds.

The Beta “From Connections” View & You

Having dubbed 2009 “The Year of the Social Inbox” yesterday, I’d like to spend some time this week digging into what that might mean for reputable email marketers — i.e., those who follow the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy.

Let me begin with a simple acknowledgment.  The features of the social inbox will undoubtedly vary greatly by provider.  For all the differences of the soon-to-be-evolved Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Live Hotmail and Google Gmail, they will also share the goal of aggregating online communications in a manner that puts the consumer in charge (not marketers).

With this in mind, I’d like to take a look at the potential ramifications of a very simple feature found in the limited beta of Yahoo’s Social Inbox.  The feature, the “From Connections” mail view, is described in this video, and you can see the feature in the screenshots below:

"All" Email View in Yahoo's Social Inbox Beta

"From Connections" Email View in Yahoo's Social Inbox Beta

In the top, “All” default view, the inbox is unchanged from its current state.  The user sees all of their messages including permission-based emails from the New York Times, The Cheesecake Factory, Yahoo, and Chili’s.

In the bottom, “From Connections” optional view, however, the user sees only those emails from people with whom they have “connected” via Yahoo’s connection process.  According to this video, your connections need not be Yahoo users, just people who have confirmed your connection.

As Yahoo proclaims in the image callout above, it envisions that the “From Connections” tab will be used to “cut through the clutter.”  With one click, users can see all their emails from connected friends.

The flip side, of course, is that with that one click, the “All” view is hidden, and so too are all of the emails in there whether they are transactional, permssion-based or even personal inquiries from people outside of the users “Connections.”  For those keeping score at home, that’s what Yahoo means by “clutter.”

Putting on my consumer hat, I think I’ll love this feature.  Just as on Facebook, I decide who are my Friends/Connections, and that enables their messages to get preferential treatment in my inbox.

Putting on my marketing hat, the “From Connections” email view in Yahoo’s beta raises the spectre of a new round of “Add to Address Book” mania.  I can see the email headers now — “Add Us to Your Connections,” “Add Us as a Friend,” “Seriously, add us — we’re cool,” etc.

The issue here, however, is a bit different.  The “Add to Address Book” effort was largely a creature to ensure email deliverability before the evolution of sender verification.

The potential “From Connections” view issue is one of visibility and response, not deliverability.  Your message still gets delivered — but unless you’re a “Connection” your message will only appear in the “All” view of the email inbox.  Whether this makes the “All” view a new form of email purgatory akin to the Junk Mail folder — only time will tell.

One thing is for sure, however — it has never been more clear that email marketers have a stake in the world of social media.  So if you’ve been putting off dabbling in Facebook and tweeting on Twitter, better make a quick resolution to do so in 2009.  The knowledge you gain may help you navigate the new twists and turns of the social email inboxes to come.

Tune in tomrorow as I’ll make the case that the social inbox is the best thing to happen to email in a long time (even with the “From Connections” view).

The Year of the Social Inbox

With the clean slate of 2009 upon us, an endless parade of pundits, publications, and politicians are dusting off their crystal balls in hopes of proclaiming what 2009 will be “the year of.”  Today alone, I’ve read that 2009 will be the year of the subject line, the “naycation,” thoughtful consumerism, and the ox.

Whatever 2009 will be, it will, for the most part, be unexpected.  Taking this into consideration, I am prepared to make my prediction:

Microsoft and Yahoo will help make 2009 the “Year of the Social Inbox.”

After the failed merger of these Internet titans in 2008, I can understand fully if my prediction is met with skepticism.  Each company, however, has been working hard behind the scenes to evolve their respective email inbox offerings in such a way that they fuse the best parts of the email inbox with the immediacy, control, and serendipity of social networking applications like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. If they succeed, they bring their millions of “old school” Internet users into the social media mix in new and extremely interesting ways.

According to a recent article in Ars Technica (”Yahoo begins rolling out social, extensible e-mail inbox“),  Yahoo’s social inbox is already in limited beta and its features include:

• “My Connections” — Akin to friends on Facebook or people in your Address book, these folks get top placement within the Yahoo Social Inbox main page
• “Updates from My Connections” — Akin to FriendFeed, this sidebar aggregates updates from your Connections across a number of social media applications like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.
• A new Yahoo home page that eschews banner ads in favor of your more personalized updates from your Connections

I plan to explore what “The Year of the Social Inbox” could mean for email marketers all of this week.  As homework for tomorrow’s post, be sure to watch the following videos from Yahoo:

• Yahoo Mail: Understanding the New Smarter Inbox in Yahoo Mail
• Yahoo Mail: Getting to Know Your Smarter Inbox

In so doing, keep an eye out for the “From Connections” option within the inbox.  Should email marketers be concerned?  More tomorrow…

The Yahoo Social Inbox - In Limited Beta Now