At Your Request

Thanks to those who answered last month's survey on newsletter improvements you'd like to see.

While there wasn't much interest in whole brain communications per se, most of you want more information on effective communications.

At your request I'll stay on the lookout for additional sites with complimentary content to mine, especially video and audio (neither of which are planned for my blog until the second half of 2010). Here's a good one on how not to use PowerPoint (prepare to laugh).

Feel free to hit "reply" and give me the benefit of your thoughts and requests any time.

Low-Jargon Blogs & Newsletters

Everyone faces the challenge of writing thorough-yet-understandable communications from time to time.

Here are writing tips for newsletter or blog writers who aspire to communicate without using jargon on one hand, or dumbing down the message on the other.

Also included: how to calculate the educational level needed to understand what you've written.

Engage Me, Emailers!

Here’s the exciting news for legitimate emailers: ISPs have added a new metric to the reputation measurement – level of subscriber interaction and engagement.

ISPs can tell who opens and clicks on a message and who ignores or deletes it. More importantly, they monitor how many subscribers click “this is not spam” if the message is delivered to the junk mail folder instead of the inbox.

Monitoring subscriber engagement lets the ISP know which senders are delivering relevant content that subscribers want and which ones, like spammers, are continuing to blast out message after message even if no previous action has been taken.

Good takeaways in the full article.

Communications Roadmap for 2010

Exhortations to “publish, publish, publish” forget the most important advice: publish something worthwhile. To communicate in a meaningful way, build an editorial calendar and stock your content pantry.

The full article gives a example of how one of my clients followed this process with great success.

Editorial Calendar Building Blocks:

• Seasonality
• Key Messages
• Political Calendar
• 24x7 News Cycle

Content Pantry Contents:

• Case Studies
• Top 10 things every client should know
• Top 5 mistakes your clients made before working with you
• The three most expensive errors your clients make when trying to go it alone
• Specialty calculators and other tools

And speaking of 2010, my goal is to provide you with information that helps your business grow. We could all use some positive growth, for a change, eh?