From Our Brains to Yours
Is your email newsletter a waste of time?
Across the pond, Obama digital strategist Thomas Gensemer, made waves when he proclaimed email newsletters a waste of time. Mr. Gensemer argued that email newsletters take too much time to produce, get read too infrequently, and too inefficiently drive action. He said that, “email newsletters don’t get read, yet they take more effort to prepare [...]
Online is not IT
The building blocks of direct mail are paper, printing, and postage. But would you put responsibility for your organization’s direct mail program in the hands of the folks who buy your office supplies, or the person responsible for buying stamps for the office? Of course not. You know that the success of a direct mail [...]
“It sure seems like we spend all our time on #4″
Seth Godin identifies the The Five Pillars of Success:
See (really see) what’s possible
Know specifically what you want to achieve
Make good decisions
Understand the tactics to get things done and to change minds
Earn the trust and respect of the people around you
and suggests, “It sure seems like we spend all our time on #4.”
Agreed. The tactics are [...]
The secret for growing a giant list, revisited
Shayna’s post from a few weeks back, The secret for growing a giant list, asserted that “delivering true value is a secret of communications success that is easy to recognize, but hard to deliver.” So true.
Adam Singer over at The Future Buzz continues the argument with his post As Your Content Expands, Things Get Easier. He makes [...]
I’m going to spend $100
I’m headed out the door in a few minutes and while I’m out I’m going to spend $100. My neighbor is headed out, too, and she’s going to spend $150, but I’m just going to spend $100. Am I being smarter, getting the better deal? Will the thing I buy work?
You’re no doubt [...]
Returning to social media: is it worth it?
A few weeks back, I navel-gazed a bit on the value of social media for outreach vs. edutainment. I argued that it could be a force for good, but only if it’s done well and deliberately, driving toward a specific outcome.
Care2, one of the largest lists of progressive activists on the internet, has gone [...]
Information versus Knowledge
Flipping through this month’s issue of Wired, I found myself with a little bit of literary deja vu. In his missive, “Manufacturing Confusion: How More Information Leads to Less Knowledge,” Clive Thompson argues that the “information revolution” hasn’t brought about greater knowledge, understanding, or widespread acceptance of truth, but rather it has wrought confusion and [...]
More first principles: What is school for?
Last week, I argued that in all the hubbub about TARP dollars and stimulus spending versus tax cuts, we’re missing the point: what are our our “first principles” when it comes to the economy? Before we can decide whether the various proposals on the table are good or bad, worth the investment or not, we [...]
User Experience: Not a one and done
First a little Ben Franklin to set the tone:
“I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong”
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.”
Then a couple of great thoughts from Whitney Hess’s post at Mashable: “10 Misconceptions about User Experience [...]