This research from Get Response tracks with my own experience: “A distinct minority of small-to-mid-sized-business (SMB) marketers use social media links or icons in their promotional emails.” And I’ll argue that even larger businesses do not consider steps like this…not instinctively.

Marketers are so busy, we can sometime think in silos. It’s a result of focusing on a project. It’s understandable and I think it happens even more in social media. Most everything we read notes how we need new rules for social media and how different social media is so it’s no surprise that we sometimes throw golden rules out the window as we create new rules.

New tools usually do require new tools. For example, social media is an engagement tool, not an awareness tool. And you can tell which brands understand this by ticking through their Facebook pages. Which brands are trying to engage you and which ones are simply broadcasting the same message in a different channel?

But some golden rules do not change. Audience and goals win the day no matter what medium you’re knee deep in. Brands have hard-earned touch points established with their customers. The email newsletter mentioned in the research above is usually one of those touch points.

Marketers need to step back from the retweets and Like counts and look across these touch points. A 360 degree view lets you see unnecessary duplication as well as untapped opportunities. Doing this would drive down the results from Get Response’s research I suspect.

So let’s think in Venn Diagrams and not in silos.

Perhaps to a fault, I’m a very visual thinker. I tend to sketch my ideas (poorly) to explain them and to test their validity. As a result the Venn Diagram and I became fast friends somewhere in between when John Venn created them and before they became pop culture icons. It’s just one tool we can use to remind us to step back and take in the view from time to time.

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