Tips for Integrating Social Media and E-mail Strategy

By Abny Santicola

Some keys to creating content that people want to share are:

Be specific, unique and brief. Calls to action should be like: support a family; start a new program to protect at-risk youth; or send a relief package to those in need.
Create a sense of urgency with deadlines and petitions. These types of e-mails can easily be embedded in social-media sites like a Facebook fan's page.
Provide a retweet button. Make tweeting easy by adding the retweet button to e-newsletters, appeals, videos, blogs, anything you feel is worth sharing.

"You might not know or expect that a particular story is going to be of interest to people, [but] if it is, you want to allow them to share it," Johns said.

Create better targeted e-mail messages by monitoring what your supporters are interested in and discussing. Listen with Google Alerts, technorati, Twitter and RSS; participate using Twitter and coComment; generate buzz using Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon and FriendFeed; share content using Blogger, YouTube and Flickr; and network using Ning, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.