A new report by RSW/US that studies the communication channels preferred by B2B buyers has found that email remains the overwhelming favorite. 77% of survey respondents said email was their top choice for receiving contact from a prospective partner, more than twice as many as direct mail in second. Fewer than one in four preferred the phone or conferences as a way to find new partners. 

In an emergency, email is pressed into service because it is quick, efficient, robust and mobile-friendly. Brands should have an ad hoc template ready for when disaster strikes, with subtle and professional branding, customer service contact info and even the CEO's headshot and signature at the ready. Read the full article at the ExactTarget blog. 

Smartphones and tablets are now responsible for over 18% of traffic to e-commerce sites, according to a new study by Monetate. The share of traffic from mobile devices has more than doubled from a year ago, when it was 7.7%. PCs still lead in conversion at 3.28%. Tablets are not far behind at 3.12%, but smartphones lag at only 1.01%. 

The Taliban publicly revealed its entire 400-name email list of public relations contacts last week when a spokesperson emailing to the list imported it into the CC field of a mail instead of the BCC field. The organization maintains the list principally to claim credit for attacks.

Email continues to reign supreme in ROI, with social media coming in ahead of SEO, according to the 2012 Digital Optimizer Survey. Published by Lyris, the study highlights the most digital marketing practices as well as future investments. More than half of the marketers surveyed report that triggered messages generate the greatest ROI, and the biggest challenges cited by marketers were increasing the number of subscribers and sending relevant messages. 

To underscore its functionality as a platform for widespread communication, Twitter now allows users to email tweets directly from the web. The functionality will appear in a new "More" icon next to the "Favorite" icon. It is not clear if the sender of the email will be the email address of the logged in user, or if the emails will come from Twitter itself. 

A study by Mimecast that surveyed 2500 information workers has found that they spend an average of four hours per day reading, writing and responding to email. That is the equivalent of 111 full days of work per year. Only one in four are satisfied with the functionality of email and one in three expect email and social to converge in the next five years. 

From a USPS steamship in 1887, to horse-drawn USPS buggies, the first airmail service in 1918, and the iconic 3-wheeled "Mailsters" of the 1950s, the visual history of the USPS is comprised mostly of vehicles used to transport letters and packages.

Salesforce has launched Marketing Cloud, an integration of its recent social applications Radian6 and BuddyMedia, which provide social workflow and allow the company's clients to target social users by sentiment, age, location, emotion and intention. Salesforce's new focus on social mirrors the similar investments of the email services company that integrate with the company, making for an uneasy truce.

Major investments are flowing into marketing technology currently, through the public markets, venture capital and M&A activity. Gartner predicts that a third of marketing budgets will soon be devoted to CRM, predictive analysis and e-commerce, and by 2017 CMOs will be spending more on technology than their CIO counterparts.