Do you send out or are you planning to send out e-mail newsletters. There are federal rules and regulations for doing this and big penalties for violating them. Here are links I found on Google providing details about what to do and not to do
First, read this Time magazine essay about how the news cycle has changed for the White House with the web and it’s ability to get info out as it happens. Contributing to this is cable news channels with their wide-variety of choices.
This means that politicians need to be constantly monitoring what’s said about them in all these different places all the time and they need to be able to respond.
But read down a few paragraphs in the essay and you will see that Obama has created his “own media empire” with the 13 million he has on his e-mail list and who subscribe to his periodic e-newsletters.
The lesson: Politicians and political candidates need to be collecting e-mail addresses from people. They can be gold if they’re used properly.
How many of you already do this? Do you ask people for theirs?
This is the best free advice I’ve seen in a long time for anybody trying to persuade or sell a product or a set of ideas.
There are so many individuals and groups with so many important things to say and they’re failing at it. Chaos rules in the whole communication arena.
Pastors struggle with it as do politicians, including and especially local officials like city council members, county commissioners, state legislators and whole lots more.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a young New Jersey guy who gets it. He understands what has happened in the marketplace with changes that started before the web. He’s a wine guy who has a turned into a bastion of wisdom. His daily wine podcast is downloaded by thousands.
Watch this CNN interview if you have a need to see your ideas or your product. Then leave your impressions and questions. I really want to talk about this more.
There are a handful of personal blogs that I read pretty faithfully. They give a birds-eye view of an individual, a family and the situations they deal with.
Some are a daily script of their everyday life and others have been given special circumstances to deal with like this young mom, Morgan, whose son was born with Downs Syndrome. The blog, Learning From Bear, is a transparent account of dealing with issues relating to their son and sharing what they learn.
Their story is a positive testimony from a committed and focused couple.
Do you have any favorite personal blogs that you can share along with the reasons that you like them?
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with newspaper front pages. As a kid when my mom would go to new places, the gift I wanted was a local newspaper, so I could look at the front page and its innards. On my personal blog, Daily Grit, today, I write about a website from the Newseum in Washington D.C. where you can check out each day’s front pages online. Really neat.
Yesterday, I posted about the Cluetrain Manifesto, a document put together by early web thinkers about how the Internet will be changing the marketplace. It would be easy to scan this and yawn.
But, regardless of your position, a pastor, teacher, city council member, construction company owner, mortgage broker or anybody else with a message, you need to spend some time with this document.
You need to sort out how this applies to you and your endeavors.
A quote from the Cluetrain Manifesto:
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
Does this apply to you? You better be sure about your answer.
If you’re a business person, a politician, a pastor, a neighborhood activist, part of an interest group, a political party leader, then you need to know about the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Without getting into all its background, it’s a document put together more than a decade ago by the big thinkers at that time who could see the changes taking place in the way consumers process information. These thinkers could also see that the Internet was moving these changes a head at break neck speed.
Just about anybody over 30 years-old knows the old way of communicating with consumers. Keep in mind that these are consumers for any kind of message, all the way from business, to politicians, to the church.
Go to the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto and read the first few points. Number one says that the marketplace is now a conversation. People don’t want one way messages. They want to be able to respond, ask questions, express concerns and share their point of view.
Don’t miss that point: The marketplace is a conversation.
This is so important that I have a link to the Cluetrain Manifesto in the right margin under the category heading, Resources.
