Social Media Examiner presents an excellent post by Phil Mershon, 26 Promising Social Media Stats for Small Businesses. It’s not the stats that are the meat of this post, though, it’s the key takeaways, especially this one: “Be sure to integrate your social media efforts with your website and mail efforts (online and offline).” Spot on.

If not, it’s in the top 10 of all time, for sure. I wish I’d come up with this one: “5 Email Marketing Lessons from Nigerian Scam Letters.” Read it over here.

How long before a political issue or movement can be appropriated for marketing purposes? Well, according to the screen shot of my inbox above (note the highlighted subject line from Daily Candy), the over/under seems to be about a month.

Several times a week I receive an email that says something like the following (excerpted from one I received yesterday):

Could you please let me know your target market that you are focusing to reach.

I could help you reach this market through our 11+ million business contacts database which was released this Jan 2011.The list comes with information such as: Company Name, Website, Executive Contact Name, Title, Verified opt-in Email address, Mailing Address, Telephone Number, Fax number, Industry, Sic Code, Revenue, Number of employees etc. You can use this list for online lead generation, telemarketing, newsletter promotions, etc.

The list I really want is a list of list marketers so I can send them all a targeted message to remove me from their list marketing their lists.

Takeaway to marketers: Email to third-party lists like these is repeatedly shown to be among the absolute worst-performing online marketing tactics. Just saying.

Today is a confessional blog post.

Confession: I’m an idiot.

Okay, that’s being a little harsh on myself. But I sure felt like an idiot when I sent a note about I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster to my good friend Joe Bua, a superlative teevee blogger …

… and he responded by telling me he hasn’t blogged since July. To be exact, July 13. Wrote Joe (in part):

Has absolutely no one noticed that I haven’t written anything on my blog since July? Seriously. I even sent out emails to ppl (not you, you’re not on that email list) and no one, NO ONE has figured it out. Yet. Still. I just got tired of it. I get inquiries every day. Many of them. Anyway, sorry … not your fault. I am kinda pissed that there wasn’t any negative reaction to my not blogging anymore.

So here’s why I’m an idiot. Well, two reasons. Number one, I wasn’t checking Joe’s blog every day. It was great. Joe’s a terrific writer. He should be working for — well, for whoever he wants to. Number two, I didn’t check Joe’s blog before I sent my suggestion to him.

All of which says a coupla things about the worlds of blogging, outreach to bloggers and online communications in general.

First of all, if you’re a blogger you should probably assume that once a blogger, always a blogger, so get used to it … at least where your email is concerned. Joe gets inquiries every day because his hard work got him on all sorts of mailing lists for teevee people. It’s a lot easier to delete those emails than it is to delete one’s name from all sorts of mailing lists.

Also, you might want to think about maximizing your push marketing. Sure, people will find you blog, but are you making your feed available via RSS? Are you sending out a regular newsletter? Are you pushing links to particularly notable content out to relevant audiences? If audience really matters to you, you need to keep reaching out to that audience on an ongoing basis, otherwise when you disappear they won’t notice … because they haven’t really been noticing all along.

Now, a word for you people who, like me, do this thing called media relations: Are you even paying attention to the lists you use?

As a blogger, I get all kinds of email from all kinds of people. I’ve even gotten spammed by Tea Party organizations. (Yes, spammed, in the very legal sense, too: I never signed up for their lists, they just added me and started mailing to me. When I asked them how I got onto their lists, they couldn’t tell me. But that’s another rant for another time.) But like once a blogger, always a blogger: It’s easiest to simply delete the email I don’t want to read.

The problem is, we’re all rushing through the day and the week at hyper-internet speeds. Corners get cut all the time, and when corners get cut mistakes get made and people look stupid and people get annoyed.

I don’t know how to slow down this runaway train, but I do know this: We all need to take a deep breath and slow it down and take a little more care with the email we send. Let’s make sure it’s sent to the right people for the right reasons at the right times.

Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s make sure it’s not riddled with typos, either.

Happy Monday.