Flickr Photo: OzymanI gave a little talk on social media today to folks who publish print media (both non- and for profit). My big takeaway is that, nonprofit or for profit, we're all facing the same dilemmas regarding social media: we're nervous about the same issues of openness, and we all have trouble explaining it to our bosses.

Another big takeaway was that everyone has the same email marketing questions. How much should we send? Should we buy names? What kind of segmenting should we do?

The session after mine was presented by Alex Williams of eROI, and focused on emarketing tactics. Along the way, he shared some interesting stats (for those of you who are into that sort of thing):

1. In an average week, people receive 274 personal emails and 304 business emails.
2. More than one quarter of all email is marketing email.
3. 46% of Internet users say that email is not targeted enough to them.
4. Open rates for segmented campaigns are as much as 20% higher on average for the first 30 days.

All of this data, and the bulk of Alex's presentation, echoed many of the ideas and concepts we've been discussing in recent reports, at the NTC, and around the community for a while now.

Maybe we're not as far behind on the tech adoption curve as we thought?

NPTimes has a nice short piece today about email delivery and spam scoring systems. I was under the impression that this software, which "reads" your email and tells you what spam filter flags you have in your message, could be immensely helpful in avoiding the spam trap. According to Bill Pease of Convio, it ain't so:

"Unless your organization's email content regularly involves commercial-sounding language, content-only spam scoring systems are of relatively limited utility."

Agree? What have your experiences been?