Answer: There’s no doubt that email marketing and social media marketing enjoy a positive, symbiotic relationship. Email marketing is a proven, cost effective outbound messaging tool, and social media marketing is becoming a highly scalable outbound and inbound messaging tool--all made easily consumable and sharable "on-the-go" with laptops and mobile phones.

Extending email marketing efforts with social media communications can help build awareness and community with your customers and prospects. But, social media marketing is not a one-hit wonder. To effectively utilize social media, companies need to commit to doing it right and avoid these three common pitfalls:

1) Lack of commitment

If your business is an active, trusted email marketer you have a tremendous opportunity to use your email to reach more like-minded people by simply making it really easy for opt-in recipients (i.e prospects, customers and influencers) of your newsletters and email campaigns to share your point of view and offers. For example, Lyris HQ enables our customers to effortlessly insert social media sharing widgets, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn directly into their email templates before a campaign is sent. By leveraging social media sharing, customers increase their odds of extending their reach, subscriptions and relevancy in like-minded communities.

2) Missed relevancy

Speaking of relevant messages, or "missed relevancy", and assuming you have enabled social media sharing via your email marketing campaigns--don’t assume that your current email messaging style and tone will resonate with prospects who receive your campaigns via a friend in a particular social network. For example, your current customer newsletter may be written and segmented to appeal to customers only, not prospects. A subtle change in messaging can make or break your opt-in success with a new prospect who discovered you via social networking. Further, consider making email headlines and subject lines shorter so they are easier to "re-tweet" on Twitter.

3) Occasional monitoring

Are you intently-listening to conversations or just occasionally tuning in? Once you’ve committed to using social media in your marketing and business communications activities, we highly recommend you monitor daily--even if it’s just one person for 15 minutes a day. In social media, when taking time to listen to what others are saying about you, your business, trends, competitors, etc.--you stand to gain far more intelligence, and put your business in a position to respond in a timely manner. Oftentimes, by simply responding within one day (vs. a week) of a negative or positive post or tweet via social media, your timeliness will determine whether or not you earn a friend or foe on the Web. It all comes back to being committed.

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About the Author

Erick Mott is the communications director for Lyris. Connect and collaborate with him on http://twitter.com/lyris and www.linkedin.com/in/erickmott.

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