The way I see it, email & social media often go hand-in-hand. It’s not either/or – it’s both/and. The right tool for the right job, with the caveat that sometime the right tools need to overlap and play nicely together.

Google’s recent announcement of Wave is also a boon, as it’s shaping up to be the next killer app that rethinks email as it should be today, not how it was intended when it was invented.

Here’s a quote from the article about Strongmail Solution’s new thinking:

StrongMail, which enables direct marketers to integrate social media into email marketing programs, has developed a social media framework that consists of three core functions: Social Programs, Social Direct and Social Share. As direct marketers struggle to fit social media programs into their overall marketing strategy, Ryan Deutsch believes the tools that integrate both will become the hub that supports strategies.

Among the tools being introduced into the market today, Influencer Ad enables marketers to create direct-response campaigns. The tool is being offered through a partnership with PopularMedia, which focuses on developing social and viral campaigns.

The biggest challenge then becomes making the campaign interesting to drive it virally. For example, rather than send a coupon in an email for 50% off a bar blender, the email would include a link and message to “mix your friend a drink.” Clicking on the link would enable the person to virtually make a strawberry margarita and send it off to share with Facebook friends.

The pages that allow consumers to mix and share drinks are served up by StrongMail. Technology tracks the message and the people who concoct the drinks. It lets marketers identify “influencers,” Deutsch says. Based on behavior, the marketer can target people with specific promotions.

This is the beginning of a new way of online marketing and communication to collide and converge. I can’t wait to see what’s next!

Here are two compelling quotes from the brief article:

My advice is to plan now. Don’t wait for that communications crisis to take place before planning for how you’ll handle the fallout when something bad (inevitably) happens.

Here’s #5 from the list of things to do:

5. Don’t overthink. Running through committees, endless drafts and approval processes to get a response out there can cause far more damage than good. As long as you have taken the time to assess the situation and can take a rational, respectful tone in your response, even an awkward response is OK to start with, and buys you time to continue to respond to the problem.

Here’s a brief quote from the article, which you can find online here.

“There exist religious-themed alternatives to most social media specifically targeting people of faith — Tangle.com provides a Christian alternative to YouTube, while Saddington’s pet project Gospelr is a Christian-themed Twitter analogue. While they may be good for uniting the faithful, some are skeptical of services that allow believers to segregate themselves from the wider world. Saddington said that both secular and religious services had their uses, but that people should keep in mind that they were unlikely to spread their faith if they confined themselves to online communities that consisted only of fellow believers.”

As I state in the e-book, Twitter, in particular, and social networking, in general, is an augmentation tool for email, print and video. I don’t think it’ll eliminate email- hardly – but it will make it easier for use to choose the optimal communications vehicle for out content and conversations.

You can read the entire article here, but I’ve included a few key quotes below as food for thought:

“I think it’s a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it,” said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, while at Google

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: “It’s been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate.”You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it. Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.”

What are your thoughts on the subject?

There is still time to sign-up for this free webinar. It’s sponsored by Worship Facilities Conference & Expo taking place May 13 – 15, 2009 at the Long Beach Convention Center in Long Beach, CA. To learn more, please visit www.wfxweb.com.