Monday April 27th Roundup

It was a quiet weekend for the blog, with low traffic and few comments. I guess the warm sunny weather prompted people to leave their screens for a little R&R.

But the rest of the net seemed to be humming with stories on the future of social media, showing off in email marketing, studies on how teens use the net, and the UK watching you.

• We start the week with a little futurism (you all know how much I love futurism). Forrester, being the trendy characters that they are, are preaching social media as the future of the web. Their advice is generally good: they recommend brands think about social media, prepare for transparency, connect with advocates, set up your enterprise system to connect with social features, and prepare to have less centralization to your web efforts, or as they say it “shatter your corporate website”.But most of this doesn’t actually seem that new. Yes, brands really should have always been prepared for user interaction with their products, not just online but offline (and most do). Connecting with advocates has been the foundation of community marketing since the Bernaise was hiring young women to light cigarettes at women’s lib marches. The only new ones are evolving your enterprise systems (which honestly people should have been doing immediately at the end of the dotcom crash) and shattering your corporate website—the latter of which I am not sure is entirely a good idea, given that they seem to be advocating decentralization of web efforts, and that centralization is just really useful in permanent and semi-permanent mediums.Maybe I’m just being struck again by the old McLuhanism: the media is the message. And in the end, the message is as it has always been: “we are in a social age.”
• Next up, GetElastic has a wonderful look at email marketing, and a reminder that you should show off your product knowledge in retail email. Their examples are great, and have me thinking about how this can be applied more generally to email marketing. I’ll have to play with that when our next newsletter goes out. By the way, why haven’t you signed up for our newsletter yet?
• And finally, just to round off this section, Advertising Age has a great article on getting the most out of social networks. A big one of their appears to be spam prevention, which we could not agree with more.

• In tech news, Google opened up the Google Analytics API this week, allowing all sorts of neat developments. We can’t wait to see what people make of this.

• A typepad blog? In my roundup? Yep, Brent’s Social CRM Blog netted an interview with Eric T. Peterson. It ain’t transcribed, so grab some headphones and listen.

• It ain’t usual to see conversion rate experts in our usability section, but this week they take a look at conversion killers which includes some great usability tips.
• This next one is pretty old, but new to me: IBM on User Centered Design.

• While twittering I noticed that NAA put out a study on teens use of online news media. Some of this is really killer info for people thinking about how to target websites towards teens. As a bonus most of what it says is just generally good design, both in terms of content and visuals.
• Finally, while we’re talking about cookies and privacy, the UK Government has dropped plans to monitor the internet. Fewf.