MEDIAPOST — Email marketing firm StrongMail said it has launched a new "campaign management application" for social media marketers tabbed Social Studio. Among its aims is to help marketers use social-media channels to find brand advocates, while measuring their effectiveness in carrying forth messages. "Brands understand very clearly that consumers have surrounded themselves with influencers and the trick is how do you communicate with those consumers, given the fact they're not necessarily as easy a direct target as they used to be," said Ryan Deutsch, vice president of emerging media at StrongMail...

TECHCRUNCH — Email marketing software giant ExactTarget has agreed to acquired CoTweet, a young company that offers a tool that enables multiple people to communicate on Twitter through corporate accounts. CoTweet will continue to operate from San Francisco as a business unit of ExactTarget, essentially taking charge of the company’s social media product development...

MARKETINGPROFS — When marketers evaluate all the digital communication channels at their disposal, they're faced with a rich array of choices, including the latest in social-media and mobile marketing. Social-media marketing includes participation on social-networking websites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace; video- and photo-sharing websites, including YouTube and Flickr; blogging; microblogging (e.g., Twitter); podcasts; forums; product reviews, such as those on Amazon; and social-bookmarking websites. Like email marketing, those channels help companies disseminate information to large audiences rapidly and cost-effectively...

HUBSPOT INBOUND INTERNET MARKETING BLOG — Yesterday Google announced a new social media service called Google Buzz. This new service combines a number of different social media tools into one: (a) friends, commenting and rich media (photos, videos) like Facebook, plus (b) simple, public status updates like Twitter, and (c) location based updates like FourSquare. Google Buzz also adds two more new and interesting things: (a) curated recommendations of what updates are likely to be most interesting to you, and (b) easy access to the social network through a tool 175 million people use...Gmail. If you want to know more about how Google Buzz works, read the official Google Blog article announcing it. This article is about the marketing implications of Google Buzz...

CONVINCE & CONVERT — Aren’t social media and email more alike than they are different? Both seek to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers and prospects, communicating in a relevant, timely way that ideally is measurable and testable. But the problem with email and social media is that too many people are positioning it as an either/or scenario. Several blog posts have foolishly been written about social media "killing" email. As my friend Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget (client) says: "How can social media kill email, when you have to have an email address to belong to a social media site?" And that’s the premise behind Flowtown, one of the most exciting new social media tools I’ve seen in months...