miércoles, 28 de enero de 2009

WHAT GOOD CAN COME OF A NEWSLETTER?

What good can come of a newsletter? (Long drum roll begins here.) Much-if it's done right. (Enter crash of cymbals stage left.)

A newsletter is a great way to get information out, in any organization, and virtually every large organization uses them. The problem is that not everyone reads them. That is fine if you just want the prestige of sending newsletters out and you don't care if anyone soaks up whatever information is inside. But what do you do if you want people to read what you have to say?

If you want to actually have your newsletter read, first it has to be interesting-something people want to read. How do you do that? Easy. What is more interesting, a dull, dry business meeting, or sitting around the coffee pot having a lively, chatty conversation. Yeah, the chatty stuff is more interesting, definitely. You absolutely have to engage the audience if you are ever going to have one.

Use a newsletter like the coffee pot conversation. Get everyone involved. Don't spend eight or ten pages spouting off a steady stream of statistics and facts. Your newsletter needs personality. What provides personality? Humor probably smacks a person's interest gene more than any other thing you can do. As one newsletter reader put it, "If it ain't funny, they ain't no one gonna read it."

The editor of one monthly newsletter kept his readership's interest by including a funny account of a screw up by a member of the organization each month. This, to be sure, is not something you'll want to do if the newsletter is distributed to the general public. This was done in an in-house newsletter only. The editor never included anything distasteful, slanderous, libelous, or anything that might bring a civil suit to the organization. Nevertheless, the members of the organization looked forward to the newsletter because of that one monthly inclusion.

Of course, things change. Eventually the newsletter editor received a new supervisor, who for unknown reasons didn't like the monthly jape. The new supervisor ordered the monthly anecdote to cease. What happened? Mass protests from the readers. Most threatened to quit reading the newsletter altogether if the anecdotes weren't restored. The supervisor, being one of those with the classic dominant personality, one who considered most ideas poor ones unless he came up with them himself, still refused to allow the anecdotes.

"So what happened," you ask indignantly. The answer is that the editor resigned from the newsletter. The paper was turned over to a secretary-the standard data doling type. She continued to pump out monthly newsletters, but hardly anybody ever read them. They were just too danged boring. Eventually the newsletter died a slow agonizing death.

What happened to the original newsletter editor? He began writing newspaper articles and eventually got his own newspaper column in which he wrote humorous anecdotes about real life situations-mostly situations that happened to him personally. They were self-deprecating stories for the most part. No, he never got rich at it, but he did have a loyal following who were disappointed when the newspaper went belly up. Nevertheless, he had a lot of fun while it lasted, and he still has people comment to him about how much they loved his column even though the paper went out of business over two years ago.

Of course, humor is not the only way to build readership in a newsletter. But whatever you do, keep it lively and keep it as informal as possible. If you don't, you'll lose your readers long before the bottom of page one.

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