I got a pleasant surprise a few days ago when Liz Bradley, a senior manager in Akamai’s Corporate Comms team, replied to my tweet, shown below:

She could easily have tweeted me a 140 character reply with a link to some report on Akamai’s website.

Instead, I got this email:

“I wanted to respond to your tweet requesting additional information about how Akamai defines attack traffic. Pasted below is a brief overview-please let me know if you have further questions.

Attack Traffic:

- Unadvertised systems distributed across Internet

- All inbound attempts to connect treated as attacks

- Akamai’s EdgeScape service used for geolocation”

The cool thing is that my email address isn’t directly available on this site and she probably had to find it via LinkedIn or one of my other sites. I was impressed by that and also reminded that b2b social media is all about joining in conversations and providing helpful information wherever possible.

There’s still an important role for email to play in permission-based marketing and Akamai just demonstrated an effective and personal way of doing so.

- Mark McClure