Permit me to start 2010 with a e-moan…
I started the year the way you probably did too, by clearing the hundreds of emails that had settled like a heavy electronic snowdrift against the walls of my inbox.
And something struck me in between shift-deleting the hundreds of offers for body augmentation and random seasons greetings from anyone I have ever given my email address too: It was the number of blogs and news sites that sent out bog-standard daily newsletters on the 25th of December.
Not a big one, I know, and it’s not as though I’d like every email and site to be Christmassed up with silly snowflakes and baubles on logos, it just that it says something to me that on the 25th of december, I received a daily update from Forrester entitled “Retailers Boost IM Spend To Drive Online Sales”.
Not exactly peace on earth and goodwill to all men is it?
Now I know that not everyone celebrates Christmas, and I’m not saying brands should try and commandeer Christmas to shoehorn some sales opportunity.
But I do think that if these sites talk about understanding users and and having a personal rather than a corporate face, why do they think I want to receive an update on every single day of the year?
I worked on a large daily news site a while ago that also had a policy of sending out newsletters every day, irrespective of the days of the week. and yet when we looked at the numbers, it was clear that the majority of our readers didn’t read them on non-working days.
So what did I think when I saw that dreary Christmas update from Forrester?
I thought of the poor wage slave out there on Christmas tasked with finding some content. And if, as is probably the case, it was set up a week previously to auto-send, well that just irritates me even more. Then I try to imagine who would want to read that on Christmas morning. Was it relevant? Nope. Did I want it? Um, not really.
So what do I want? Well, sometimes daily doesn’t have to mean absolutely every day. Every now and then, a little silence speaks so much louder than ‘normal, standard service every single day of the year’
Right, rant over. Now here are five of my favourite daily digests:
Mashable – http://mashable.com/
Fast company – http://www.fastcompany.com/newsletters
Digital Buzz Blog – http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/
Trend Watching – http://trendwatching.com
LS:N Global – http://www.lsnglobal.com
Filed under: Uncategorized, insights rants
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