• 59.3% of EDAC members are using email campaigns.
• 28.1% of EDAC members are already using social media. It is the top new marketing activity planned for 2010 for those that aren’t.
• 92.8% have a website specific to their organization, yet only 7.3% have a blog.

As more economic developers embrace new social tools, it is important to realize that when it comes to these new marketing channels, the old rules simply don’t apply. Here are 8 tips that cover ideas, etiquette and advice for getting started with social, blogs and email:

1.    Have a strategy and integrate it

If you hear your colleagues exclaim: “We need to get a Twitter!” or “Let’s get at least 100 Facebook friends!” or “Let’s buy a third party email list so we can show big distribution numbers!”, then you don’t have a strategy, you have a big, big problem.

True, these tools are growing in popularity and importance, but aiming wildly at the flavour of the month is not the way to take advantage of them. Like any marketing channel, you must answer basic questions like “Who do we want to reach?”, “What message do we want to send?”, “What is the goal of this activity?” Once you’ve got that figured out you can decide on the tool that will get you there.

Your strategy in these new areas must also work with your overall marketing strategy. Too often, marketers neglect the important potential of cross-pollination that comes from social media, blogs and email. How can you use them to leverage each other and your other marketing efforts?

2.    Do your homework
We can’t offer you a magic bullet when it comes to selecting from the suite of tools available to you. While Twitter may work for some, the openness and frequency demanded by that platform may not be right for others. An in-house email solution may be the route for you, while your neighbour may choose to leave the technology up to an outside agency. It is incumbent on you to research what is out there and decide what, if any, tools you want to integrate with your current strategy.

Using these tools may seem like a cheap way to go, but what you save in hard costs you will incur in the time required to keep your content fresh and interactive. Think carefully about what you will have the time to sustain.

3.    Don’t jump right in

Once you have decided on the channels you’d like to integrate, it’s time to… sit back and take notes? Yes. Many social media platforms have their own vernacular and etiquette. Watch how your peers are using these tools, and note how audiences are responding.

Email, blogs and social networks are fickle mediums, as it takes very little effort to “un-follow”, “un-friend” or hit delete. Be sure to get a good grasp of how to make the best impression and build trust and credibility. You will only get one shot.

4.    Measure

One of the greatest advantages of these new tools is how well they lend themselves to measurement. Set goals and constantly measure your progress in order to tweak content and determine which channels are working for you so that you can allocate your resources accordingly. Some ideas for measurement include:

• Traffic: Use a free tool like Google Analytics to see what efforts are increasing traffic to your website or blog. You will be able to see what content is most popular, where users are being referred from and how often they return to your site.
• Comments and other interactions: Which blog posts get the most comments? What Facebook updates spark the most user interaction? What LinkedIn discussions get the most responses? Use interactions as a measure of engagement and make note of what is generating conversation.
• Email Metrics: If you consider pasting 300 email addresses into your “bcc” field an “email campaign”, then it is time to check out some of the new tools that allow you to track specific user behaviours, compare campaigns to one and other and see what content is most popular. Email metrics are powerful, and can be used for specific events as well as ongoing communications.

5.    Be human

There is an expectation with blogs, social networks and emails that content is more conversational and personal. Remember that you are being invited into someone’s inbox or personal network, so don’t regurgitate your media releases and mission statement. Share advice, offer resources and don’t be afraid to add some personality to your writing. Being interesting is more important that strict adherence to corporate taglines and rigid grammar.

6.    Listen

When you open yourself up to interactions with your audience, be prepared to listen. You may need a thick skin sometimes, but it’s critical not to censor or try to control the conversations that happen as a result of a social presence. You may get a harsh “What a crock!” to one of your blog posts, or a snarky comment on Facebook, but you’ll earn a lot of credibility for letting the conversation happen without trying to steer it. You may also find that other users jump in to defend you, which is far more powerful than a rebuttal from you. More importantly, the things you may not want to hear are the exact things you may need to be hearing:

“At a talk about a year ago, one audience member stood up and asked a question. Her company wanted to use social media, but they were scared about what would happen if people said bad things about their products. As a result, she asked how they could minimize negative comments on the web about their products. In her search for a way to control the message, she missed the most basic solution: Fix your stuff.” – Eric Karjaluoto, SmashLab

We used to pay big bucks for focus groups. Social networks provide a focus group of sorts for free, and the responses are often more spontaneous and honest than those you get around a board room table or in a town hall forum. Be sure to listen to how your community can “fix its stuff”.

7.    Quality over quantity

It takes a long time to build a good network, and trying to find shortcuts will not serve your goals. It may be tempting to purchase an email list, but before you do, think about the last time you received an unsolicited email. Likely, your reaction was one of confusion and annoyance, not one of relief that someone sought you out to tell you this great piece of information. Further, privacy practices dictate that you cannot send emails to people that don’t explicitly give permission or implicitly give it by having done business with you within the last two years.

Social networks and blogs are similar. Many treat them as a popularity contest, but the most valuable friends, followers and subscribers are those that look forward to your posts and engage in conversations with you. In short, it may be tempting to try to push up your numbers, but do you really want to be talking to people that don’t want to listen to you?

8.    Put the shoe on the other foot

There are no hard and fast rules for how often to post to a blog or send an email newsletter. The one rule you should heed however is to never waste your reader’s time. Before you put a message out there, put yourself in your audience’s place and ask if this is going to add some value to their day. If it’s not, it’s better to wait until you’ve got something to say that will build your credibility and leave them wanting more.

In closing

Like any other industry, economic development marketing is moving towards new tools for communication that rely heavily on technology, transparency and measurement. Used correctly, they can greatly enhance your community’s brand in the market, and can facilitate business development, job growth and civic pride. Take the time to figure out the best strategy for you, respect the practices of these new platforms, and you will reap the rewards as you grow this area of your marketing strategy.

Gone are the days of shot gunning thousands of brochures out into the abyss and wondering if they landed in the recycling box. Now it’s about targeted electronic efforts that tell you exactly whether your communication earned you a “click through” or an “unsubscribe”.

Social media in particular has democratized marketing and communication, providing real-time feedback on your brand and the effectiveness of your latest marketing efforts. If you’ve done a great (or not so great) job in your community, you can be sure you’ll hear about it on Twitter or Facebook. Transparency and personality are applauded in the social realm, and corporate speak and PR spin are harshly punished.

It’s a whole new world out there. This white paper will offer a practical guide to get you started with social media, blogs and email campaigns – the new communication tools for economic developers.

Click here to view the new EDAC White Paper!

Here are just a few of the questions that (initially) deserve an “it depends”:

• When is the best day to send my emails?
• When is the best time of day to send my emails?
• How often should I send my emails?
• How long should my copy be?
• Should I brand the subject line?
• Should I personalize the subject line?
• What open and click rates should I be happy with?
• The problem is we all like clarity.

So here goes:

Sunday, 8.45am, Once a week, About 300 words, Yes, No, 25% and 10%

You can take false comfort in clear answers. But these answers are based on data and experience that has no relevance to the actual situation you find yourself in. So they are unlikely to get the most out of your efforts. They may even be counterproductive.

Or you can accept the correct answer to all those questions: it depends.

He is absolutely correct. We get these same questions too from our own clients and from now on I think I’ll just forward Mark’s article because he puts it far more eloquently than I could. Overall open rates based on data from many many markets mean very little to economic development marketers. For example: Would you really be happy if your network of partners and clients (likely to be the bulk of an economic development email list) opened your email on average as frequently as a product offer sent to thousands and thousands of faceless customers from a major retailer? Obviously, you’d expect your opens to be much much higher.

The only real measure of success is against yourself, and the only way to arrive at where to set the bar is to vary your content, study how your readership responds to it, rinse and repeat. Sure, you can use universal numbers as a loose starting point, but the real art of email marketing comes in the tweaking of your own content. That in turn comes from really studying how people respond to your campaigns – what links they click, what subject lines work, what amount of content seems most palatable… you get the idea.

The bottom line: Don’t be happy measuring up to grossly generalized targets. Instead, use your last campaign as the standard to beat. That’s the true measure of success.

 It sounds a lot like something that started as an April Fool’s joke — or maybe even something that came up over a few beers at Google one night — but the latest advancement from the Internet search-engine giant is designed to help you avoid those awkward weekend episodes where you have to apologize for an email you sent late the previous evening.

Known as “Mail Goggles,” the feature can be turned on at the time of your choosing — for example, you could set it to be triggered whenever you send an email between 2 a.m. Saturday morning and 2 a.m. Sunday morning — and prompts you with a popup window that asks “Are you sure you want to send this?”

You are then given several math problems to solve, and if you can’t answer them correctly (you get to choose the skill level) then Google will refuse to send your email.

An interesting idea for those emails you wish you hadn’t sent. You can read the full article here.