Merkle (www.merkle.com), the nation's largest and fastest growing customer relationship marketing agency, announced it is introducing Integrated Social Marketing, a new approach for marketers seeking to optimize how they use social media to attract and engage customers, leverage key influencers and refine brand positioning. Merkle's data-driven approach to social marketing, which was developed based on work with several major clients, allows marketers to integrate social behavior insights across channels to drive new marketing opportunities.

Merkle's Integrated Social Marketing framework involves closely examining consumers' social behavior to help marketers understand how their customers interact with other customers and brands online. By combining the power of social segmentation and social listening, Merkle provides marketers with new insights that make it possible to identify key influencers and drive more authentic content to more effectively engage consumers. These social insights are then integrated with direct, email, mobile and website programs to add new intelligence to marketers' existing programs. This ensures a more holistic and knowledge-driven marketing approach, while also making it possible to measure the impact and performance of social marketing programs.

Merkle's recent View from the Social Inbox report found that demographics such as age, gender, ethnicity and education influence which social sites consumers use, while social networkers are more likely to be avid email users, as measured by time spent with social email as well as the number of times these sites are checked daily. These and other findings reinforce the need to integrate segmentation and customer engagement approaches that have long proved effective with other engagement channels.

"Within an extremely short timeframe, marketers have eagerly embraced social media as an effective new tool for reaching consumers," said Rich Fleck, Vice President, Enterprise Strategy Group, Merkle. "However, in most cases, marketers struggle to integrate social initiatives like Facebook and Twitter into their overall marketing programs. Having a presence within the social media channel is no longer sufficient- the current hurdle is making it an actionable channel to engage customers. Merkle's integrated social strategy helps marketers develop an actionable, measurable marketing approach that aligns social marketing strategy with consumer behavior.