I read with some interest today that Wisconsin lawmakers are thinking about legislation to help curb our Drinking and Driving epidemic.
As usual, our representatives are trying to reinvent the wheel.
If anyone is serious about reducing this problem, it simply requires stiff penalties and strict enforcement.
Want to see how it's done north of the border?
Occasionally, I watch morning news shows, a part of which involves the hosts holding up the front pages of the New York and Washington newspapers and calling out the headlines.
Here's a far better method of determining what's going on.
It's called newseum.
A clever mashup of newspaper headlines and google maps showing the hometowns of the newspapers.
Photo credit: www.artsjournal.com/
We had a brief debate last week on the value of printed newsletters. We've done them forever and in fact also do "scaled down" (best of) electronic versions as well.
Being the stubborn minded person I am, my "inner-geek" was arguing for the demise of our printed Newsletter.
This morning, over a cup of coffee I decided to list the reasons why printed newsletters should die out.
Here they are:
1. Printed Newsletters are not "green". Even when printed on recycled paper, they still require lots of energy to print and distribute and end up having to be recycled by the recipient or worse yet, end up in a landfill.
2. Printed Newsletters have no direct and easy opt-out feature. Most don't contain any information on how to stop them from being sent and if they do, most customers find it easier to simply throw it out every time it comes.
3. With a printed newsletter, it is impossible to tell if your message is being read. If you can't measure the effectiveness of the campaign, why are you continuing it?
4. Printed media does not easily support a dialogue. With an electronic version, you can contain an email reply link. Best you can do with a printed version is supply a phone number or an email address. But if the person reading your message in print form isn't close to a computer at the time, you might lose out on that idea because of immediacy. Electronic versions have the advantage of being read on a computer where a reply is only a click away. (Advocates of the printed form would argue that being able to read it away from a computer is an advantage.)
5. Production cost is much higher with printed media. At our work we take a day or two to generate mailing lists, then coordinate getting the Newsletter printed, addressed and mailed. The entire effort involves three or four internal people, plus two outside vendors. The timeline is measured in days. With email newsletters, your list is already available. Your aren't restricted to a specific number of Newsletters (budget constraints) and once the content is generated, you're good to go. Time, from conception to delivery is measured in hours, not days.
6. Cost of list cleaning is far higher with printed newsletters. You have to pay for return receipt, then manually update your database. The electronic counterpart is a bounce back email address, which can be removed/corrected quickly without the cost of returned postage.
7. Printed Newsletters contain only static content, print and images, whereas their electronic counterparts can contain audio and video as well as dynamic links to other resources and websites.
8. Electronic versions can be short articles, with links to more comprehensive stories. I argue that this offers an advantage to both the reader and the producer. The electronic format isn't limited by page size, whereas a 4 page newsletter is just that. And the electronic content can easily be re-purposed on websites, microsites, blogs and video channels.
So these are my arguments for killing off the printed newsletter. But all marketing departments should be aware that regardless of Newsletter format;
This recent article at ReadWriteWeb concludes that small businesses are clueless about cloud computing.
I'm not sure that's true.
I work in a small business and know about cloud computing. We don't take advantage of it for a variety of reasons. (Full disclosure, we have an internal I.T. staff.)
We do have some of our services hosted in the cloud. Our website and a company extranet are both externally hosted (at different locations). At one point we even toyed with having Exchange hosted.
When it comes to our proprietary data, our small business has a couple of concerns
1. Privacy of the customer data on a hosted service. For the most part this is simply a concern that once you leave the data under the care of others, how can you be absolutely positively sure that no one else can see it? It's a trust issue.
2. As a small business owner, one always thinks about vendor contracts. What happens if I'm unsatisfied? What if I want my data back? How easy is it to move to another hosting service?
3. Finally, once you've outsourced your I.T. it's difficult to bring it back in house. This is usually a one way decision and for a number of small business owners, one they don't want to be locked into. For very small businesses, the decision is probably much easier.
4. Hosting companies need to make it easier for business owners to commit. They're used to marketing to I.T. types and need to start speaking business people language. Put together bundled packages for the 10 person company, the 100 person company and the 250 person company. Charge a base rate for email, a website, a virtualized application server and 500 Gb of disc space, then charge a per user/month maintenance/support/management fee. Even offer to host/manage their IP phones.
My advice to Rackspace (and others)? Think about marketing your services in a different way.
Not a paid advertisement!
As more and more colleagues are looking for new positions, I'm advising them to develop their business networks, since more than likely, their next opportunity will come from someone within their network.
I've been a member at LinkedIn for over a year, and today just discovered that it has become a much more powerful tool with which to market yourself.
Watch:
Like most application users, I typically use about 10% of the features of any application. Until yesterday, I used LinkedIn to post basic profile information only. I added a few contats and requested a few introductions. That was pretty much it.
I plan on adding the blog webpart into my profile and plan on playing with other features as well. I'd encourage anyone who's serious about building an online profile to check these features out.
Let me know what works for you and what doesn't!
Jason Rothbart at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting perspective on the effect that workforce reductions have with respect to the body of Corporate knowledge.
And some ideas as to what you can do to prevent corporate knowledge from walking out the door.
