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!

Time magazine’s

Here are some of Steven’s observations and predictions:

“as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.”

“Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact.”

I personally believe that what Twitter has done is create an in-road for leveraging Text Messaging (SMS) in a new way. Regardless of Twitter’s success or demise, what they created will continue. Twitter is the new email.