Mark Riordan from the University of Michigan presented this interactive breakout session. He stressed at the outset he wanted the session to go beyond email and into e-marketing.

According to Mark, Michigan has an email database of about 260,000 addresses, and they sent out roughly 70 emails last year to different segments within their database. I think these numbers are pretty high (both the amount of addresses in the list and amount of emails/year), granted Mark is at a big school. Interested to hear what sort of numbers other schools are dealing with, let us know in the comments.

Most schools represented in the session we’re using PACMail from Paciolan most citing price (free) as the deciding factor for using it. A smaller percentage we’re using Scoutware for their email marketing.

Mark was pretty upfront and clear about what he thinks is the number one problem most schools face in their email/e-marketing initiatives: lack of knowledge and understanding of the medium.

After Mark said this you could see some people shifting in their chairs, perhaps uncomfortable, but I think after Mark continued everyone tended to agree that there was a lot to learn. Mark offered up Seth Godin and David Armano as bloggers to read to keep abreast of goings on in the e-marketing world.

Towards the end of the session the conversation turned to leveraging social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to help schools engage with their fan base. This works great with students and recent grads especially. It was interesting to hear that some schools do not participate in online social networks because they do not want to come off as hypocritical since they do not allow their student-athletes to maintain social media profiles on these sites.

Mark also brought up Twitter towards the end of his presentation. Twitter is basically blogging in 140 characters or less. Short form blogging if you will. Almost no one knew what twitter was, which was quite surprising considering the demographic of most of the attendees. Watch our twitter feed in the right sidebar or follow us here.

Image credit: Scoble’s Social Media Starfish on flickr by Dbarefoot