An Era of Integrated, Interactive Marketing begins

ExactTarget’s acquisition of CoTweet heralds the beginning of the growth of Social as an integrated marketing channel and is nothing short of being historical. And this is why:

1. This confirms social as legitimate, mainstream, and permanent. For all businesses that have even an iota of doubt, this announcement puts a stop to all the questions raised about the legitimacy of social media as a viable marketing channel
2. Integration and not silos will make Enterprises invest in social media. The acquisition of CoTweet by ExactTarget announces the beginning of an integrated marketing experience for enterprise and users alike.

In last one year, Twitter has evolved as a primary and viable marketing channel. The success of early adopters like Dell and small innovative businesses like Kobi Barbeque has caused even the traditional marketing giants to adopt social media in a big way.

The biggest problem with social media today is that it is still an isolated function –one that is not a part of the bigger strategic picture, is still very ad hoc, and lacks result driven processes.  All this year being a marketer, the biggest challenge has been to reach the customers on the channels of their choice without being too pushy. And in absence of an integrated platform, brands end up having disjoint strategies, thus causing either fatigued or confused user.

Social Media Today

A centralized platform that strategically integrates channels will make sure that messages are in sync , business goals are achieved , end users like it, and businesses benefit from it.

Integrated Strategic Platform for Social Media

ExactTarget’s acquisition of cotweet is one step towards the goal of unified view of the customer. In the near future, it will be interesting to see how solution providers for different segments – small and medium (like Constant Contact) and large segments (like SAP, Unica and Aprimo) respond to this.

As the Social Media landscape gets defined and redefined, it will be of particular interest to see how different players in this space evolve, and what trends emerge. At ObjectiveMarketer, we have range of customers: some who heavily rely upon campaign management, and analytics, thus happily using ObjectiveMarketer, to some who prefer both CoTweet and ObjectiveMarketer. As, enterprises reveal their success stories and we know of more use cases that work, the social media landscape will become more solid, and will be a part of the integrated marketing solution.