I read an interesting article in AdWeek this week about the value of a “fan” on social media. According to the article, based on research by a firm called Vitrue, companies that have 1 million Facebook fans receive a brand lift equivalent to about $3.6 million in media expenses. Each fan at that level is worth about $3.60.

When we talk about the value of an email subscriber we normally revert to Lifetime Customer Value metrics, which are based on direct marketing principals. It’s possible to estimate the total profit a subscriber will generate if you have enough historical data to work with. It’s complex and onerous, but is the cost of doing business at many direct marketers and online retailers. If you know, for example, that a customer acquired through paid search has a lifetime customer value of $100, you know that you need to pay less than that to acquire each one through that channel. So if your search ads do a 1% conversion (1 out of 100), you can’t pay more than $1/click ($100 for the 100 clicks you need for that conversion) to turn a profit.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. The Vitrue research points to the media or brand value of a fan. These fans help spread the brand’s message through social channels, generating incremental media and brand impressions. $3.60 per fan is a powerful multiplier, and speaks to the impact of word-of-mouth marketing and engaged ambassadors.

It occurred to me when reading the article that a company’s email file is a similarly powerful brand asset. Not only does each subscriber in your file give you permission to place your brand in their inbox regularly; each one also passes along your messages (and brand) to friends and colleagues through Forward-to-a-Friend (FTF) and Share-with-your-Network (SWYN) features. The Vitrue study demonstrates that each of these impressions has real value. Leveraging your subscribers and your fans and your followers allows a company to effectively increase its media budget, multiply its brand presence, and increase share of voice against competitors.

How much is each subscriber worth to a brand? The exact answer can only be found on the other side of a good-sized piece of research. But according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations I’m confident in estimating that the brand value of an email subscriber > $0. That is, every email address in your subscriber list has a value above and beyond the direct profit each one contributes through his/her own purchases from your company. This knowledge in itself is enough to influence an email marketer’s behavior. You have a brand asset on your hands: how can you best use this asset?

Here are some tips for better leveraging the brand value of your subscriber list:

Design with a brand advertiser’s eye. So much of email design is based on what compels click-throughs. Look at your templates and your messages though to make sure that you’re getting the most of your brand impressions. If your emails were forwarded to someone who didn’t know your company, would they make a powerful first impression? Convey the most important brand attributes? Identify what your company does? If the answer is no to any of these, make some design tweaks so that your messages serve the dual purpose of compelling clicks and delivering brand impact. And as always, roll out your new design with A-B testing against your old design to make sure you’re not sacrificing any of the direct response pull you’ve worked hard to build.

Encourage Sharing. Make sure your templates include SWYN and FTF buttons to allow your subscribers to spread the word. And use copy to encourage them to do exactly that. I have a two-year-old and can attest from personal experience that sharing does not come naturally. It needs to be taught, reinforced, and taught again.

Grow your list. If 1000 subscribers each have brand impact, 2000 subscribers is even more powerful. There are dozens of contact points available to you to enlist new subscribers. Some may not seem like they’re worth the trouble and integration. But if you recognize the brand value of each subscriber on top of the direct marketing value, maybe the resources required are now outweighed by the lift. Why not take another look at each place you come in contact with customers and prospects, and see if you can’t justify some new subscription catchers there?

A few weeks ago I came across a research study which indicated that peers were losing their credibility as a source of recommendations. This flies in the face of everything I had seen over the past 5 or 6 years, and certainly much of what word-of-mouth marketing relies on. The study hit me pretty hard (a more complete version is available on Advertising Age – subscription required), so I tackled it in my column for MediaPost this month. The column is reprinted below, or you can read it on the MediaPost site. Feel free to leave comments here or there – I read and respond to both.

SWYN Vs. FTF: Does Social Sharing Remove Too Much Friction?
by Mike May
published on 3.10.10 in MediaPost’s Email Insider

A lot of ESPs are now offering share-with-your-network (SWYN) functionality, and I can attest first-hand that inside the email industry we’re pretty excited about the email-social media integration that SWYN affords. “It’s like forward-to-a-friend on steroids,” we (collectively) say. Instead of subscribers passing your message on to a friend or a handful of department colleagues, they can now push it out to their 350 Facebook friends or 1200 Twitter followers. What a huge lift for your readership and ROI metrics, right?

Maybe — for now, anyway. Social sharing is appealing for marketers (email and otherwise) because it removes a lot of the friction from word-of-mouth marketing, and can amplify an audience exponentially. We’re all suddenly very organized about learning now to build campaigns optimized for SWYN functionality, tapping into the huge viral lift social media affords.

I was an analyst with Jupiter Research from 1999 to 2001, and if I had a nickel for every startup that brought in a PPT deck with the word “viral” at the top of the marketing section, I certainly wouldn’t have as many regrets about where my stock options ended up. Then viral went out of vogue for a stretch, when it became pretty clear that for most companies it wasn’t usually a marketing tactic, but a marketing substitute.

Now viral is back, made more appealing (and seemingly achievable) than ever through social networks. Let’s play it forward a few years. What if it actually works? What if a sizable chunk of your Facebook and Twitter subscribers start passing along your messages? If you crack the code, so have your competitors, so your subscribers will be passing along other messages as well. And the hundreds of millions of other social media denizens will also be dumping the contents of their inboxes into the socialsphere. If all your Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn friends pushed just 1% of their inbox into your news feed every day, on top of what they’re already sharing, how long before your preferred social network would be too cluttered to be of use?

If that happens, we’ll have on our hands a success disaster not seen since the heyday of spam. At the height of the spam epidemic, email itself was threatened with obsolescence. The channel was so easy — and frictionless — to penetrate that the legitimate messages from disciplined marketers were either buried, or wrongly lumped into the same offending category. As email marketers — legitimate and shady alike — clambered to reach the top, they caused an avalanche that blocked the high road.

We may be in danger of causing a similar avalanche in social channels today. Last month Edelman’s Trust Barometer Survey was released, and the findings were troubling for marketers lined up at the frontier of social media as if it were the Oklahoma border in 1889. “The number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45% to 25% since 2008.” CEO Richard Edelman believes that social media “absolutely” contributed to the decline.

So what are we as email marketers to do?

1. Keep the long view. Let’s keep pushing forward and carving out our own best practices in social networks, while at the same time being mindful of the big picture and the state of the channel.

2. Look ahead, remember behind. Even though we’re not the only ones interested in marketing in social networks, I believe we’re uniquely qualified — through our experience in handling the spam crisis — to take a leadership position in social marketing as well. Let’s not forget what we’ve been through. Our experience may be called on again.

3. Don’t abandon the one who brought you to the dance. SWYN may be FTF on steroids, but FTF is pretty awesome even without the steroids. Don’t stop writing messages that are arresting and targeted enough to compel some action. Sometimes the extra effort required to share individually makes all the difference to credibility and ROI.

Last week we outlined the first 5 of our 10 tips for launching your social media marketing strategy (read the full post here). Here are tips 6 – 10 for supercharging your email and social strategy:

Create specific content for the people most likely to share.
We talked about Power-Sharers in last week’s post. Once you identify who is sharing your content (and what kind of content your Power-Sharers are drawn to), you can start crafting campaigns expressly for this audience of amplifiers. The objective of these campaigns? To encourage the recipient to spread the word across his or her network. So craft your messages accordingly and you’ll likely see your content on Facebook walls, referred to in tweets, and making the rounds in LinkedIn groups. 

Sharing is like shopping.
Think of “share this” in the same way you think of ”buy now” links. Make it obvious, simple, and remove all obstacles and unnecessary steps like you would in an online shopping cart. Integrate a one-click way share your content in your message header, sidebar or footer using a “share this” button or the familiar social networking site icons. To make it even easier, put the icon(s) in the same place for every type of shareable message you send – so recipients know where to look when they are struck by the need to share the content.

Don’t share this.
Not everything you send via email is necessarily appropriate for sharing — or meant to be shared — on social networks. For example, an event registration receipt with a recipient’s personal information and payment details is not something s/he would share on their network. So don’t ask them to. Slapping a “share this” icon on everything you send can be counterproductive – instead of promoting your social savvy, you may come off as an organization that doesn’t understand social networks, undermining the rest of your social efforts in the process.

Seize Sharing opportunities when recipients are most engaged.
Even if the receipt example above is the wrong kind of message to share, catching someone right after they’ve registered is exactly the right time to take advantage of an attendee’s commitment to your event. Let’s continue to use the reciept example. Making a confirmation email share-worthy can be as simple as rewording the message to read: “Congratulations! You’ve just registered for the Annual Summit, October 12-14 in sunny, surfy San Diego. In between Margarita Hour at the opening and the popular Roundtable Recaps that close the show, you’ll enjoy keynotes from industry leaders…” Imagine the impact on your marketing if a message like that spread across Facebook news feeds in the weeks leading up to your event.

Remember RSS.
Most social networks allow their users to plug RSS feeds in easily, allowing a Twitter account (which is RSS) to act as a regular status updater on Facebook, or for a blog (again, RSS) to automatically show up as a new link on a wall or within a group each time a new post is published. If your email provider already integrates with RSS, you’re more than halfway there. If not, consider re-publishing your emails onto a blog or another platform that generates a RSS feed. Publish these feeds onto your organization’s Facebook page, LinkedIn group or Twitter account. You can also promote these RSS feeds to your recipients (particularly to your Power-Sharers) and give instructions on how to add them to their own social network accounts to update automatically.

You can’t treat social networks like you treat email, but you can approach them like you approached email many years ago: take a long view with a strong analytical bent, and work hard to identify the unique features of this powerful and rapidly growing channel. The conclusions won’t be the same as they were with email, but the process of learning and mastering the channel is.

Not exploring how to leverage social networks for marketing?  You better get started.  Social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter already have proven their worth as independent marketing channels; not to mention their strong synergies with email marketing (ask us about Real Magnet’s Share With Your Network capabilities). 

If you’re not on board yet, you’re not alone.  So we’ve asked Mike May, Real Magnet’s Director of Insights, to provide his top 10 tips for launching and maintaining your social presence.  Today we post the first 5.  Check back soon for the remaining 5:

Make a metrics-based commitment to Social.
Facebook announced recently that they now have 250 million members worldwide. LinkedIn boasts over 40 million professional contacts. And analysts estimate that as many as 10 million people are using Twitter. So not only are your attendees on social networks; they are very well connected within communities characterized by conversation, personal context and the sharing of ideas. Each person on social networks you reach can help you amplify your message to dozens or even hundreds of additional people.

Socialize yourself.
If your objective is to understand how people use social networks and to create something that people will share or follow or join, you have to be on them yourself. Not to the point of needing an intervention, but you do need some channel fluency.

Invest in a voice.
Social channels are still largely personal. The deep interactions there are authentic, based on genuine connections between people. For your messages to be included, shared and heard, it’s no longer enough that they sound like they are coming from a person. They have to come from an interesting person. Even better, that person should be connected to your message. For example, try sending overviews and promotional offers from your CEO or Executive Director.

Identify your Power-Sharers.
Seth Godin calls them “Sneezers.” They’ve also been deemed Influentials, Social Influencers and a number of monikers that connote their viral nature. The right integration of your email and social tools will allow you to identify who from your list is most likely to share content, and also whose shared content is read the most frequently. You may learn that Sophie shares everything, which looks good on paper. But further analysis shows that the stuff she shares doesn’t generate much additional audience. Maybe she shares too much, or has a smaller circle. Larry only shares as quarter as often as Sophie. But Larry knows everybody, and the items he shares are read by dozens, even hundreds of additional people, making him a far more valuable Power-Sharer than Sophie. Dig deeply enough to find your loudest amplifiers then craft even more powerful, share-worthy content expressly for them.

Your best Power-Sharers may come from within.
When most organizations begin building out a social presence, it usually consists of an official Facebook page that their customers can “Fan”, a corporate Twitter account and maybe a LinkedIn group. But organizations are not social. People are social. Treat your employees like a subset of Power-Sharers themselves, and create content expressly for them to share in a way that’s authentic and transparent.