In its posting Is Facebook’s Project Titan Really the End of Email Marketing? MarketingVox echoes the concern that Facebook’s Project Titan, a purportedly whitelist-based webmail service for its 400 million users, may spell doom for email marketers.
Christopher Penn of Blue Sky Factory suggests a mechanism to gain permission to email involving setting up fan pages and getting yourself onto a recipient’s friend list. I think this misses a key point.
Last October Facebook announced they would change the rules about how applications and Facebook Connect-enabled sites can contact their users. The change went into effect March 1 this year. They removed most of the options to notify subscribers within Facebook channels, but vitally they now provide access to the Facebook subscriber’s email address (with their permission), and unlike other personal information, allow you to store it to use indefinitely. It seems very likely that Project Titan will base its whitelist on this mechanism.
This means that if you provide people the option to sign up for your list using Facebook Connect, they can give you explicit permission to email them, and you will be whitelisted without all this fanpage-based maneuvring. This blog posting on Facebook explains how:
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=355
We have been advocating our clients to include social media login (Facebook Connect, OpenID, Twitter) in their sign-up forms and preference centers for a while now. Many subscribers prefer to sign up with these IDs rather than create yet another account (ReadWriteWeb reported 89% of signups on Lady Gaga’s website came from third-party login services), so using them can improve signup rates. Project Titan, if and when it arrives, will likely make Facebook Connect login a necessity to reach Facebook email subscribers.
