The growth of new media is becoming old news. (Just to toss out one example, Twitter grew 1,382% in the past year!) But email is still the digital glue that holds it all together. Your inbox is where your RSS feeds show up, where DMs from your Twitter friends arrive, and the place most of us organize our lives. And, your email address is like an on-line fingerprint, the way you identify yourself in the digital world as you join new groups and sites or simply add your comments to various blogs. You can’t afford to ignore the email medium, but you should find ways to integrate your email efforts with other platforms. Here are a few simple ideas to get you started…

Add social media bookmarks to your HTML emails so people can easily archive and share your e-newsletter, new media release, or evite. (Here’s an example from a project we sent this morning). As an fyi, bookmarks are scripts that won’t work in email and the script code will trigger spam filters so look for creative work-arounds to deal with that.

Embed multi-media content in your email. If you are part of a community like YouTube, Viddler, Slideshare, Flickr or BlogTalkRadio, add that multi-media content to your emails using the embed codes those services supply. It can make your emails more dynamic and introduce your recipients to your other social media identities.

Add your social media footprint to your emails so people can easily click to follow you on Facebook, My Space, Twitter, or wherever you hang out. (We think this client does a nice job with that.)

Invite your friends to join your emails list. When you have good content coming up, make sure you tell your friends and ask them to join your list. This is a great way to increase your permission-based list and improve those friendships even more.

Ask visitors to your blog to join your list. Many people re-purpose blog content and email content, but for most marketing and PR professionals who are working hard to create interesting content, the different platforms enable different types of information so be sure to cross pollinate your audience so they get the most of your expertise.