In an attempt to give our readers some real world application of all this social media theory swirling about we will be occasionally speaking with some real people who do the real work. How about that? Today we look at social media and the sports world.

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a bit of a sports fan. I say a bit because I am no longer playing any fantasy leagues etc so I am not a sports fanatic. I am primarily a New York area sports fan but not the usual kind (Giants, Mets, Devils. I could care less about the NBA). People in that area are pretty passionate about their sports and that’s how I learned to be a fan.

Now times have changed considerably. It is difficult for the everyday fan to afford attending actual games (especially if a family is involved). As a result the connection to sports is changing and social media is creating a whole new channel for the fans to interact and be a part of the action that they may not get at the stadium or the ballpark.

Pat Coyle of Coyle Media has been involved in the social side of sports for quite a while now. Pat has worked as the Director of Marketing for the Indianapolis Colts and helped create MyColts.net, which is an active online community for the fans of the NFL franchise. I talked to Pat about this and other social media projects he has underway.

Frank: Since most people in the social media industry came from somewhere else what is your background?

Pat: I have always had an interest in ways technology impacts human communication. I am a Chicago native came out of a direct marketing and sales career to be the Director of marketing for the Colts. I left to start a company and returned to the Colts after five years to be the Director of Digital Business for four years. Coyle Media, my consultancy to the sports industry, is now 2 years old.

Frank: So tell us about Coyle Media and what you are doing?

Pat: Coyle Media has two legs at this point. One is Sports 2.0, which has its own community at sportsmarketing20.com. The focus of my sports practice is to help teams (and other properties) make money through digital media. The main revenue sources we assist with are sponsorship, ticket sales and community building.

The other part of Coyle Media is a social media platform called SmallerIndiana.com, which is a hyper-local online community we launched 2 years ago. It has grown to 8,000 members, and is driven by a sponsorship business model.

The consulting business keeps me very busy so the communities, while growing, could use more of my time. That’s the nature of the online community business but I’m not complaining.

Frank: You started and have grown MyColts.net. Tell us about that.

Pat: The theory is simple: connect fans to each other and you connect them closer to your brand. Colts fans want to socialize with other fans. They want to be seen and recognized and they want to feel like they’re getting inside access. MyColts.net was designed to give fans all three of these things. We figured if we could engage fans through social media, it would give us another way to help sponsors engage with fans and it would give us another channel through which we can sell merchandise and tickets. So far the site has over 28,000 registered members.

Research showed as well that while there are ticket buying fans that are in the Indianapolis region the greater number of Colts fans actually reside throughout the country. This site gives them a chance to become more involved in the team without ever likely being able to attend a game.

Frank: What are your thoughts on the NFL and their attempts to limit social media interaction with the athletes and fans?

Pat: I run a little counter to the “let it be wide-open” crowd. I can see the side of ownership and the need to protect their investments. While most think that the owners are just rich guys getting richer, they are actually taking on all the risk so their desire to keep things contained to protect the brand are less about being “old school’ and more about doing good business.

I do, however, think ownership must face the fact that fans are gaining control, so their habit of controlling content may have to evolve rapidly in order to allow fans to do what they do. While it will be an interesting transition it will be best for everyone in the long run.

Frank: How will social media effect how sports are marketed and sold in the future?

Pat: There is a HUGE opportunity to tap Facebook and Twitter in combination with team social communities in order to add value to fans’ experiences, create opportunities for sponsors and make money for the team. But these things won’t happen by accident. Teams need to make them happen.

So far, most teams do not have anyone running their digital channels. I think that needs to change if teams are going to tap the full potential of digital. I hope to see teams begin to optimize their sites for sponsorship and ticket sales. In fact, that’s the focus of my Sports 2.0 service…to help teams optimize their digital channels to drive profits.

The biggest idea in my brain right now is a way to help teams sell tickets through the social graph. I am working on this one and will let you know more when it’s ready. I am really excited about the prospects for sports teams as a result and I think the future of sports marketing will be heavily concentrated here.

Frank: Thanks for your time. We look forward to seeing how the sports industry embraces social media and how you will help shape the way we interact with sports teams in the future.

You can see more of Pat’s thoughts on these subjects at patcoyle.net

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When asked how often they measure results, 57 percent said they measure results 24-48 hours after deployment. Only 18 percent said they measured results on an annual basis.

“One thing that I find noticeable is the lack of revisiting campaigns and their metrics on a more frequent basis,”Luc Vezina, vice president of marketing at Campaigner, said.

“In order to truly use email metrics for the betterment of your campaigns and gather key learnings from them, marketers must continually evaluate and benchmark their campaigns, in addition to looking at them immediately after the send.”

Email campaigns were usually measured for success, but just half of email marketers said they used metrics for budgeting or forecasting.

Respondents had a range of email marketing budgets, but the largest number of markets (31%) budgeted less than $50,000 annually.

Simms Jenkins, founder of EmailStatCenter.com said,” It is clear from these responses that there is a strong need for metric definition and standardization across the email marketing industry and that metrics are a very valuable tool in measuring and maintaining success.”

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The Wall Street Journal Recently published the story, Why Email No Longer Rules. The writer, Jessica E. Vascellaro, talks a lot about the increasing number of people jumping on the social media bandwagon, and how that could have a negative effect on the way people use email today. Are people jumping on the social media bandwagon? You betcha! And why not? It’s free, easy to use, and you can communicate to the masses. But are they using email less? Nielsen doesn’t seem to think so in some recent research they’ve done.

So I started thinking about how this is the antithesis of what we’ve been seeing in our own customers businesses, and I really wanted to write about it. However, ME writing about it seems somewhat self-serving, since well, I run an email marketing company.

Then I got an EMAIL forwarded to me that Chris Crum at WebProNews had come to the rescue and already wrote about all of the things I’ve been thinking about relating to how consumers are using email and social media.

So here is Chris’s story “10 Reasons Social Media isn’t Replacing Email.”

I decided to add my own .02 about how marketers feel about this article: 10 More Reasons Why Social Media Won’t Replace Email.

11. Twitter and Facebook are fantastic products and companies; but that’s what they are, companies. Even though email is host to 279 million users vs. 301 million users of social media according to Nielsen, email isn’t going anywhere soon with many companies offering it as a service. Twitter and Facebook are just two companies that likely make up most of the social media users.

12. Your email recipients are still going to use business email for business purposes. They’ll not likely let their boss know that they’ve finished the spreadsheet and are ready for the meeting now by posting to Twitter. If they don’t use their business email address they probably also have a personal email account that they like to receive your email-only specials.

13. You can’t easily segment your friends and followers to do targeted marketing in Twitter & Facebook for the optimal response.

14. You can’t tell who clicked on a link with some social media outlets so that you can follow up with them again because they might be interested in your content.

15. That said, you can’t tell who didn’t click on the link so you can follow up with them with a different message trying to get them to take action.

16. You cannot personalize your Facebook updates. This has been proven to boost response in any marketing campaign you do.

17. You cannot size your graphics or use more than one in Facebook. You can’t use them at all in Twitter. Graphics help tell a story.

18. You can’t track how many clicks you got on your links in Facebook unless you use a third party URL shortener [Ed's note: This feature appears to be on the way though].

19. You are limited to 140 characters in Twitter leaving it impossible to put multiple messages in one Tweet.

20. You almost have to have separate social media accounts for your business and your personal life. Some customers might not care about that vacation you took where you…let’s just say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Am I against the use of social media as a marketing tool? Hell no! I love it. I’ve written about how Twitter & email marketing work together, and I’ve written how to use Facebook to grow your email lists. I’ve also written about how to post your email marketing campaign to your Twitter and Facebook pages to get more readers of your newsletters because I feel that these are two mediums that complement each other very nicely. Why? Because no one is going away from email anytime soon, and people are using social media as well. What are you seeing?

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Seventy percent of coupons-using households get their coupons from newspapers. However, the Internet is a growing coupon resource. Over the last three years, the number of households that get their coupons online has increased by 46 percent.

Click rates trended higher for coupon emails, with an average of 17 percent for coupons redeemable online and 24 percent for coupons redeemable in-store.

“For marketers, the data behind our coupon study further validates how email coupons can and should be used to engage customers and drive traffic and sales to other channels,” said Matt Seeley, president of Experian Marketing Services‘ .

“Understanding the purchase drivers and triggers along with the channel preferences of unique customers is an essential element in building loyalty and engagement. Today’s consumers are multi-channel and marketers that acknowledge this will see greater return on their marketing spend.”

Other highlights from the study include:

Two-thirds of American households use coupons, with the vast majority of them (87 percent) used to save money and 30 percent used to try a new product or service.

Eighty percent of online coupon mailings garnered higher transaction-to-click rates and transaction rates than the non-coupon campaigns. Of this group, 78 percent also had higher revenue per email.

More households are now using coupons at restaurants/fast food chains. Compared to 2006, there are now 9 percent more households redeeming coupons at restaurants.

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Social media replacing email has become a hot topic. WebProNews ran an article on the topic recently, as something of a response to a recent Wall Street Journal piece, which seemed to declare email all but dead. We took the opposite stance, and so does ExactTarget’s research.

“The total number of social media users is rapidly increasing, but often these users jump in quickly, only to curtail their use of social media over time,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy. “Email on the other hand, is woven into all online interaction, making it an essential tool that consumers continue to use more and more.”

“Nearly 40 percent of students use smartphones and two-thirds of those use email,” said Mike Hanley, director of the Institute for Mobile Media Research in the study. “The increased use of mobile email is significant because it reverses the five-year trend of declining email use among college students.”

ExactTarget notes that while email is here to stay, the channel is presented with some challenges, such as those that stem from increased volume and consumer’s adoption of multichannel messaging.  The firm names two tactics that marketers should implement to drive continued email success:

- To break through consumers’ inbox clutter, marketers should deliver timely, relevant and personalized emails to consumers

- Due to consumers’ increasing receptivity to promotional messages via text, marketers should develop mobile messaging strategies.

Where do you stand in the email debate? Feel free to leave your comments below, or join the existing conversation on the topic over here.

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mUrgent Australasia, in Brisbane, Australia, was successful enough when it opened in June 2004 that mUrgent decided to move forward with their international expansion plan targeting four countries in the next 18 months. mUrgent Israel will open two months ahead of its original date.

“We already have several potential clients lined up,” states Michael Ripstein, mUrgent’s Director of Business Development for Europe. “The majority of the companies I have spoken with have met mUrgent Israel with great anticipation and excitement over what the company can do for their business.”

Ripstein explains that Israel is the ideal market for new marketing strategies because, per capita, the country’s economy is the strongest in the Middle East.

Although mUrgent is focusing on offering its services in several languages, Ripstein believes that English-based promotions, especially using mUrgent’s proprietary SMS marketing technology, will hit the country with enthusiasm.

Ripstein says that his years of dealing with international commerce are the reason he was intrigued by mUrgent and its set of solutions.

“I’ve worked with a lot of businesses where keeping in touch with customers was always a top priority,” Ripstein says. “I would watch them constantly making phone calls, but I never found that to be the most efficient way for them to make sure their customers were happy. I’ve even seen many businesses with sincere motives take on email marketing on their own and wind up spamming their customers.”

Because mUrgent’s solutions are permission-based, clients can carry out email marketing safely, without any risk.

mUrgent provides full service and self service email marketing solutions for businesses ranging in size from one location to national, multi-unit enterprise operations. Self service customers using EMPACT, mUrgent’s web-based email marketing software, are able to manage their customer list, design and send their own emails and SMS campaigns – all from the same interface. mUrgent’s full service solution, Enterprise, employs the company’s email marketing expertise to provide clients with data management, email campaigns and extensive campaign metrics.

About mUrgent

mUrgent Corporation is an e-marketing authority and provider of both full service and self service email marketing solutions businesses can rely on to automate more frequent, personalized communication to customers and bring a higher return on investment. For more information about mUrgent, please visit http://www.murgent.com.

Released by: mUrgent Corporation
Web Site: http://www.murgent.com
mUrgent opens offices in the Middle East to progress with international expansion plans.

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for each computer operator, they have different point of views. So, this is not certainty about your email marketing message would be looked same at every looks and feels. So, try to check your email marketing message with different email marketing services.

Do not use email marketing during holidays as well as use targeted region based currency.

Because of busyness, people never read the email message from top to bottom, so your writing should be some ethic so that they may start your message from top to bottom.  Every time you should show to your customer about information security with saying that your information would secret not would be used for marketing sources. Definitely, this would increase number of signup persons from one email marketing message.

Before doing work, visit to consultant. this would help to you after doing some research about your goals. You can give them some references also about your past business’s customer feedback.  Before sending email marketing, do not thinks that what your consumer want? For knowing their interest, be open with comments, question, suggestions and concerns.

Email marketing creates lots of leads for your business, if you use right email marketing structure with right stuff and right time. But this can be reason for your business to spend some moneys into vain. So, these some mistakes, if removed, may not affect on your email marketing campaign. Email marketing services and SMS marketing services are growing marketing services for any type of business. Fax broadcasting is also one of growing method for marketing of products or services.

SMS marketing is important for local based marketing, for example, if you would like to have marketing for their products for your near region. then every body should choose, SMS marketing for their marketing. you can use in many method.

SMS marketing is cheapest method to get good response from your local area. Based on research, users for the mobile services are growing day by day, so overall mobile marketing are growing. SMS messaging is also belong to MMS marketing. MMS marketing is not only based photo marketing but also with other new attractive video and audio combination. MMS marketing spread with application-to-person. With MMS marketing, mobile operator can also get revenue by movie tailors, cartoons.

Any business may have good revenue from IM, SMS, email marketing and fax broadcasting. In SMS marketing anyone can use MMS, IM based message to promote to their business. SMS marketing is beneficial with current updates of gifts, new services update of services to your local people. According to survey by Textalert, people has biggest fear to sign up with any services because of lots of spamming message. For different country, there is different legal activities in case of spamming message.

SMS marketing is growing world wide. Middle East region is one of growing top SMS marketing. SMS marketing companies are giving their best services to Middle East region.

ezMail Flash software: This is very power full software newsletter publishing software. It allows making html and text based email newsletter. This software is best for small and medium based business. Features:

Unlimited Subscriber
Unlimited Email Campaign
Unlimited Data Sources
Opened email and click through
Dynamic message creation
Real Time Report

Email Marketing Professional 2.0: This is free email marketing software allow to make HTML and text based email newsletter. It is perfect for real state agents, non-profit organizations, professional artist, mechanic and retailers also. Features:

Import customer list
Customize database of people
Automatic Subscribe and bounce-back handling
Authenticate to remote SMTP server
HTML And Text editor based email
Reports to track unsubscribe

Lyris HQ Email Software: This email marketing software with advance capabilities to target to your resonate users. It is good software with good features of integration of other internet marketing tools. This is award winning software and formerly known as EmailLabs.  Features:

Triggers Messages
HTML and Text based Email
Schedule and send emails
Integrate with internet marketing tools
Use of Email API
Segment and target

For any email marketing companies, there is required to have attractive email with proper content. there are lots email marketing services provider around the world an they are giving there best services.

There are lots of email marketing software, available over internet. They are free, some of them demo version and then buy them. But what Things are needed to have good email marketing software ??

First thing for free based or purchased software is handling email campaign to provide them to user. Some of other features are :

Monitoring: This is one of important prameter for business success. if you would not have any medium to monitor which email is bounced, why email are not delivered, feedback email reports and more other monitoring process included, would tell any business marketing status.

Scalability: What would happen if your email marketing software is not fullfill your per day delivered email target? Definitely your business would be in deep sea. Your software should have upgradable so that new features would may added to your software and your software may have long life.

Create HTML Format: HTML based newsletter has better response then plain text based newletters. In HTML based newsletter you may make this more attractive using images, color combination. This is one of major factor to have more conversion than plain.

Characters Support: In worldwide email marketing this is important to support multiple character to be supported other lots of email would be in deep sea.

Personalization: This is also one of most important activities. There is needed to personalized lots of activities in one compaign so that it would easy to handle them. So personalization should be easy to handle, lots of activities should be added in one.

One of email markeitng software is ezmail flash software, this can handle unlimited campaign, unlimited bounce email records, HTML support, scalability, easy to handle. There are lots of uae email maketing software and uae email maketing companies and Dubai email maketing companies. They provide uae effective email marketing with cheap email marketing services.