Last week, I wrote about how the email became the pillar of the Web, a necessity for all kinds of online transactions. As the director of a company very much focused on emailing (Epsilon), I obviously like to keep an eye on the upcoming trends around emails. In this previous post, I identified how emails were a central components of social networks and micro-payment solutions. Following up on that idea, I read this today on VentureBeat: How will email, social media marketing merge? The post elaborates on the purchase of CoTweet, a Twitter communications management application, by Exacttarget, an indirect competitor to Epsilon.

You can read the following on Exacttarget's Website:

Increasingly customers and partners around the world have asked for a solution to integrate social media more closely with other interactive marketing channels.

Last week, I wrote that email was THE primary tool to start using secondary ones such as social networks and micro-payment solutions. The example of Cotweet's purchase above is an example of how fundamentally different it is from Epsilon's approach of email marketing. In a nutshell, our Indianapolis-based competitor doesn't see social networks as a second layer on the Web, and email as the first: They picture everything on the same level, and decide to measure the impact of their solutions across social platforms. How could that impact the quality of the relationships between the email provider and the recipient?

First, Cotweet's buyer does not focus its email technology on better understanding the interactions it generates. At Epsilon, we have Loyalty Marketing Solutions to go deeper into each relationship we bring to life. This means we go through a lot of data-mining to define the quality of our recipients' satisfaction towards our messages. We rely on those indicators to better comply with our recipients' expectations. Such a discipline is extremely complicated, requires a lot of engineers' sweat, but the outcome is an unrivaled database of trustworthiness on top of which our customers make profitable transactions. Why multiply your clients' communications channels if you don't priorly provide full control on the email channel?

Second - and I find this aspect important because very hard to control - Twitter and Facebook users have very different ways to connect their social networks with their email inbox: For example, some people like to read all their social updates via email. Others don't pay attention to Twitter's DM because it's spam 90% of the time. Some will reply to a comment on Facebook via email, while others will visit facebook.com to follow up on a discussion. in a social media world, there are way too many behavioral factors that slips through the marketer's fingers. I don't see any "Social Media Marketing Best Practices" document on Cotweet's new owner's Website. How exactly will they advise marketer to use their solutions? How messy could this get?

Third, at its core, Cotweet is interesting because it enables collaboration and mostly automation. While collaboration is cool, Twitter automated tools are known to be online engagement killers and bad weeds for any social network out there. The biggest challenge is not on automating tweets, but rather on defining the art of doing seamless automated communications. I will take my hat off to the first company that develops a fully-automated Social Media Marketing solution, and which would also contain a built-in loyalty enhancer (similar to Epsilon's email solution) to help marketers maximize their Social Media marketing dollars.

Until then...