In a month from now (August 4-5th), there’s going to be a conference in Seattle about Email Marketing.  The event is being put on by What Counts and is called Summer Summit. I looked at the agenda and I am very interested in hearing the “State of the Union” address about where the State of the Email Industry is.  The founder and CEO of What Counts is David Geller and the President is Brian Ratzliff.  I used to work with both David and Brian back at Starwave.  I’m very interested to hear from them and the other industry experts on this topic.  In my opinion, there seems to be so much emphasis on social media, Twitter, Facebook, customer engagement it seems like people are forgetting about email marketing.  What I’m hoping to learn is to find out how email is evolving, what are the new cutting edge ideas on how best to use email in conjunction with these other social channels.
I have to quote my friend, Anna Billstrom, who wrote a blog article titled “The Demise of Email“: Anna states, “Basically: email is about as dead as your social security number, your physical address, or HTML.”
In the past, while I was working for Disney.  I managed the broadcast email system on the engineering side.  The tools we created were used to send out millions of emails to all the people that registered on websites like ESPN.com, ABC.com, ABCNews, Disney.com etc.  The CRM team that used our tools, sent out over 100 million emails a year.  Now as a person running thinkspace, I’m looking at ways to connect with more people, share the stories of what goes on inside thinkspace, and also educate people about my products and services.  I’d like to build a better strategy and I think email is one of the areas that needs to be used in a more strategic manner.