For email to remain a relevant marketing tool, it needs to become “social” as well. Whereas email was merely a means to delivering a message, email is now a way to interact with and engage your customers. For example, an email from Starbucks promoting its new VIA Ready Brew invites customers to tell the company what they think of the new product—in writing, with a photo, or on video.

In 2008, 40 percent of email participants used social sites to collect product-related information and recommendations. There’s a natural intersection occurring between email and social media. If you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, etc., then you should be promoting those in your emails. Interestingly, only about half of online retailers are including links to their social media presences in their email campaigns.

So, it’s no longer enough to simply include a “forward this message” link in your email messages. You need to make them shareable. If you consider that the average social networker has between 150 and 200 friends, then combining email and social sharing means your message is reaching a much wider audience and resulting in increased click-throughs.

These two actions demonstrate the president’s commitment to transparency and accessibility, and highlight some differences between the Bush and Obama administrations. They also illustrate how the conversation between the government and the public is shifting, which reflects a trend in the corporate marketing world, too: We’re all tired of spin, and we can sniff it out with increasing ease. Trust is at a premium.

The old way, both in government and marketing, was a monologue–a stream of messages that spun the truth and interrupted our lives. The new approach is a dialogue in which consumers have more choice and can dismiss anything that smacks of a sales pitch. In a world in which conversational marketing trumps traditional marketing, what do corporate marketers need to know? Here are five things to keep in mind:

Interruption marketing is dead.

Just as DVRs allow us to watch TV shows when we want to watch them, we also buy things when we need them. Sure, we may need a reminder once in a while (say, in the form of an enticing email newsletter), but those reminders need to provide more than just coupons. As Joe Pulizzi explains in his book, Get Content. Get Customers., “Content marketing is about getting customers to invite you to interact with them. It’s about creating relationships that transcend transactions.” He cites as an example the viral videos on willitblend.com that drove up sales 400 percent in one year. These were not straightforward videos rattling off the merits of Blendtec products; instead, they were hilarious spots that you wanted to pass along to your friends.

Your customers are talking to each other about you.

Whether or not you join the conversation, it’s definitely happening online. Customers trust other customers’ opinions more than they trust your marketing message. MediaPost noted, for instance, that in 1977, 67 percent of people surveyed said they were motivated to take some sort of action because of “word-of-mouth” influence. By 2003 that number was 92 percent. The 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer indicated that 58 percent of respondents believe what “a person like me” says about an organization is a more credible source of company or product information than the company itself (or its product advertising). Joining the conversation by providing information of value will help you gain trust; joining it with spin, messaging, or a sales pitch will get you ignored.

Talk authentically and offer value.

At its core, conversational marketing is about forgoing jargon and company-speak and talking in a real voice that your customers can relate to and trust; this form of marketing offers useful information so that both parties benefit from the relationship. Last month I joined a webinar on social media and one auto executive on the call discussed a recent experience. He had engaged in an online dialogue with a woman whose son was paralyzed after an accident in one of his company’s vehicles. While he knew he wasn’t going to change her mind about the car, he treated her with respect, got more information about her situation, and listened. He cared enough to have a dialogue with her rather than defend his product, and that kind of message gets passed along. In addition to approaching conversations with authenticity, corporate marketers need to deliver content of value (and content that speaks to their customers’ needs) to gain the attention and trust of their audience. I might be interested in a hybrid car, but if the difference between Honda and Toyota is that the Honda website offers articles on the mechanics of hybrid technology, why maintenance matters, and case studies that tell me more about the customer experience, I’d gain more from a relationship with Honda than I would from a competitor that just tries to sell me.

Lose control to get a grip.

Marketers often have a hard time being conversational because it requires relinquishing some control over the message. But part of being successful at conversational marketing is allowing the conversation to develop a life of its own. This also separates the wheat from the chaff: If you don’t have a product or service worth selling, you can no longer hide (see point #2). That said, you don’t have to relinquish all control–consider blogs, for example. “Blogs represent the best chance for companies to inform the conversation,” said Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman Public Relations, on Technorati. Though a recent Forrester report acknowledged that only 16 percent of adults surveyed trust corporate blogs, I suspect the number would be higher if corporate blogs focused less on spin and more on facts. With a blog, you can connect directly to your customers, you get valuable feedback, and you can humanize your company. Sure, you can’t–and shouldn’t–control every posted comment, but by engaging in a real dialogue, you can build trust.

Marketing is not a numbers game anymore.

While traditional marketing focused on volume and eyeballs, conversational marketing focuses on the quality of your dialogue–and showing up for the dialogue in the first place. Whether you’re talking to 60 people who follow a specific blogger or a Twitter community, you have to pay attention. Find out what conversations are going on out there. You can start with a basic tool like Google Alerts to help you get clued in–and then figure out to what extent you’re going to get involved in the dialogue.

The bottom line is that engaging in a conversation with your customers requires you to rethink your entire approach to marketing, from outbound monologue to full engagement. Building trust requires you to offer information and content of value rather than a message that interrupts your customers on their way to finding what they want. If you spend more time understanding customer needs and interacting authentically, you’ll earn your audience’s trust. And today, trust drives preference and transactions.

We spoke with Hewlett-Packard Marketing Communications Manager Alex Flagg about the “HP Engineers Say It” viral video campaign he led last year. A longtime Tendo customer, HP conceived the series in response to aggressive competition from IBM. (Full disclosure: Tendo does produce video content but did not contribute to this series.) Learn how Alex combined a process with proof points to successfully execute a viral video series that did more than just entertain.

How did you conceive the idea for the HP Engineers viral video series?
In April 2008, IBM began an aggressive competitive campaign claiming their Power6 products had superior performance on a smaller system over HP’s Superdome Integrity at 93% of the cost. So we organized an overall marketing strategy to come up with competitive proof points against their mainframe, such as superior power savings and superior TCO savings. But we don’t have the advertising dollars that IBM has to be able to blast out this message. We decided that we should do something humorous and aggressive using viral videos—if it gets noticed and gets out there, you get free media.

Was the viral video part of a larger campaign?
Yes, the overall campaign was called “Out-market IBM,” and the other elements included an offer to give NonStop hardware away for free for the first year to those migrating off of a mainframe. There was an internal employee contest that invited people to come up with alternative uses for IBM’s mainframe; the winning one used IBM’s mainframe as an ice fishing hut, which we used in posters for the sales force. We did lots of press outreach. We created leave-behinds for customers—there was a slide rule that calculated TCO of the mainframe vs. HP Integrity, which we used for direct marketing in the United States, and there were announcements at conferences.

What audience were you trying to reach?
The broadest audience was the press, analysts, and mainframe customers. To reach mainframe customers, we needed to rely on communication channels—such as viral video—since they may not be receiving installed-base communications. The second-level audience was current Integrity and NonStop customers—we wanted to be able to reinforce the value that we are giving to them. The last audience segment was HP employees and the sales channel. The sales team especially had to feel confident in our product line.

What other approaches did you consider for achieving your objective?
We discussed a “Myth Busters” idea. This would have been good because it captures the scientific-analysis vibe in HP’s data-driven engineering culture, but it required us to design a real experiment that we didn’t have time for. We needed to do these quickly.

The video concept we landed on was more of a process than a script. We held a casting call and invited every engineer in the Bay Area to audition. We got about 140 responses and invited 50 people to read, just to get the funniest engineers possible. The reason we wanted to use real HP engineers with no script was that we wanted to capture the HP culture. We wanted to get the offbeatness and social awkwardness of having engineers star in the videos.

What did they do during the casting call?
Each one played a character and read a script from the “MythBusters” idea, and we evaluated them based on their energy, their persona. From that, we chose 15 engineers to videotape.

We then came up with six simple proof points about the IBM mainframe, like “the IBM Mainframe z 10 uses 8,000 watts more than the HP Integrity Superdome.” We simplified it even further by telling the engineers the proof point and asking them to show how they’d demonstrate 8,000 watts in power and cooling savings. We gave them a week to write their own scene using whatever materials they wanted. We also asked them to send us their idea and tell us what they were planning on doing a few days before the shoot itself.

Did you give the HP engineers any incentive?
We gave them a small employee award if their video was one of the seven or eight that we selected.

What part of the process contributed most to the success of the videos?
Let’s first define success, because it was successful in some ways and not so in other ways.

It was very successful in capturing the HP culture blended with the TSG (Technology Solutions Group) look and feel, and also tying the videos back to actual proof points. A lot of viral videos forget that they’re marketing tools and tend to be more movies or entertainment. What’s the point of doing that?

Many of these tech viral videos go for entertainment over messaging, so you need to strike a balance between how viral and entertaining you want to make it and how much you tie it back to the business. If you go too far to the entertainment side you forget about the message. Putting the competitive message in the foreground was important. From that standpoint, the videos were successful.

They didn’t become million-view videos, but according to some metrics, seven of the eight videos achieved 20,000 views total over a period of four months. It’s not bad for corporate marketing videos in our category.

Another thing that we did right was have more videos rather than investing in a single video. It spreads the risk, and collectively you get more views because each one feeds off another.

We also tried a new measurement technology, working with an agency called Zocolo (a social media agency specializing in measurement methodology). We measured the height, the width and the depth of the digital footprint. The height is the volume of discussion around the videos on blogs, or how many views are being generated; the width is the overall scope of influence of the social content, measured by incoming and outgoing links to other networks and videos; and the depth is the level of messaging and tone toward the brand—whether it’s negative, neutral, or positive. They create indices for each one of these and then aggregate them to get a metric.

Where we were fairly successful was on messages. We put the videos on YouTube, HP’s video site and Viddler, and we created a microsite to host the videos. And we invited bloggers to check them out. But the most successful distribution vehicle was HP employees, their friends and their social networks.

Did the video series accomplish what you’d intended?
Overall, the videos were successful from an executional standpoint. We’ve been able to repurpose them and use them at conferences and in press articles. They were successful in taking our proof points, isolating them, and making them simple and accessible.

Rather than go for pure entertainment and have it be very light on marketing, we decided to go for something in between “Gatorade Girl” and a PowerPoint presentation. In doing so, we had a good volume of quality views within a targeted audience. It’s hard to tie them to a message and have them be wildly entertaining. We don’t have a product like Apple that’s naturally exciting—we’re talking about high-end servers and mainframes.

The most success we’ve had is gaining confidence from our HP sales force and employees, who say, “We should be doing more of this sort of thing.” It fires people up and makes them want to fight IBM.

How long did the whole process take, from conception to posting?
About a month and a half for the videos only. And then the website was about six to eight weeks.

Any other advice for corporate marketers experimenting with video content?

• Don’t be afraid to try it, but set your expectations low because there’s no formula to making corporate viral videos that tie back to your message.
• Don’t outsource your creation to a vendor and just rely on them to come back with the idea. If you do that you’ll get a slapstick video with no message and no content. Start with the marketing message and proof points you want to communicate.
• Make sure the viral video is a reflection of your brand. Because it’s so creative, it’s easy to have them go too far off brand.