Sharing email elsewhere

In an earnest attempt to merge email and social media, Blue Sky Factory launched Share With Your Network (SWYN), which enables email subscribers to share the content they read across popular socnets.

The "SWYN" acronym is already part of the email marketing vernacular, a generic term for icons that enable users to share a given piece of content with social networks in general. For example, a row of icons like these, across the bottom of a blog post, would constitute as SWYN functionality:

Blue Sky's SWYN offering will be incorporated into its Publicaster email marketing application. Its objective is to "extend [email's] reach beyond the inbox and into all of the other forms of social media that so many users rely on today," explained CEO Greg Cangialosi.

The service is compliant across social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, digg and MySpace.

SWYN also boasts reporting metrics, including how often a message is shared, which networks were used to share it, and total number of views and clicks per message, per network.

In February, Nike incorporated SWYN links into emails for its Lunartrainer+iD product line. And a recent study confirmed a record number of email marketers this year plan to bridge the gap between online social networks and email marketing campaigns.