Hey there, Parker here. I've had several blog-worthy moments pop-up over the last few weeks, but I've been too busy to write out my thoughts. Today truly is no different, but I am taking a moment to talk about a growing annoyance: e-newsletters.
Everyone is an expert. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone knows the strategies or techniques to drive more traffic or embrace social media. Everyone knows best practices (though few employ them), everyone has a say on which metrics should be used to gauge online success and everyone has an e-newsletter to convey their thoughts.
Well, I've had enough. There are too many e-newsletters fighting for readership and pushing information just to push it. Some of them are useful, others, meh. The ones that regurgitate the same content over and over have already been removed from my RSS feeds.
I subscribe to iMediaConnection because their main stories are very useful. It's all of the other stuff in that e-newsletter that makes me frown. For example:
A recent article "9 Social Media Questions You're Afraid to Ask" - iMediaConnection, 5/27/11, grabbed my attention. Catchy headline and keywords go far. Naturally, I continued reading to learn the scary questions I am afraid to ask. Is social media a fad? Will Twitter and Facebook be around in a few years? Should I stop advertising on other media just for social?
(Record scratch) What?
I'm afraid to ask those questions? If you've decided to stop advertising on other channels and only push social media, you shouldn't have the marketing job you have right now. If you're wondering if Facebook is a fad, think back to that time in your life when "Google" was a weird word to name a company.
There was a question about ROI that I addressed one of my concerns. How do I determine ROI for social media? I have to balance a variety of online and offline data to gauge the success of social media efforts and folks, it ain't easy. There is no hard or clear-cut metric I can use to prove the value of social media versus other traditional channels. So the advice offered for ROI was valuable to me.
Those other questions were just filler text to squeeze out the e-newsletter edition before the morning deadline. I'm not blaming the author, she handled the article very well. I'm peeved at the e-newsletter in my mailbox. There was simply too much content. Coverage of events, upcoming events, latest comments, most read articles, links to other blogs, membership sign-up, job listings, advertisements, photos, RSS, Twitter and Facebook icons.
