Ten reasons why blogs are more useful than email newsletters

Sometimes it surprises me how much some organisations like using email newsletters over other tools like blogs.

They spend weeks or even months crafting news items, bundle them together into a single email and then send them out to a subscriber list - sometimes without even using a system to measure the response rate or manage the bounces, making it impossible to prove a return on their investment.

I've long been a fan of blogs over email newsletters, here's some of the reasons why:

1. You only have to publish one story in a blog at a time
   Email newsletters tend to be an collection of stories all published at once. With a blog, each post is a new 'story' so you can focus on one at a time rather than having to work on three, five, eight or ten different stories all at once.
   
   
2. You can publish blog posts at your own pace
   Often with email newsletters there's a 'need' to publish regularly - every week, month or quarter. That often means uncovering some kind of 'new' content on a topic, even if there's no new information.
   With a blog you can spread out your posts over time, giving the impression of more regular updates and building your audience's engagement habits without necessarily writing any more content.
   In other words, four blog posts posted over four weeks is more effective than posting a newsletter once a month with four stories.
   
   
3. Blogs boosts your search ratings
   It is very valuable to have results high in search engines and blogs, unlike email newsletters, get listed. In fact as blog information changes regularly (as often as you post), this means that search engines often rate blogs higher than static websites which rarely change. That's an enormous boost to peoples' ability to find and make use of your information.
   
   
4. Blog posts can be available forever
   Sure you can keep an online archive of your email newsletters, however a blog is much easier to search and reference for people who wish to read back in time as well as forward.
   
   
5. An email newsletter is a soliloquay, a blog is a dialogue
   Email newsletters are almost always one-way outwards communications tools. Blogs, on the other hand, are multi-way. Sure you can have a blog without comments - just like an email newsletter - however you can also support active public discussions. That provides more flexibility and options for how, why and when you communicate and allows blogs to support a wide range of inbound and two-way engagement strategies.
   
   
6. You can leverage your blog's reach through syndication and social media
   With blogs you can provide an RSS feed that can be used by blog aggregators, news sites and other feed reading mechanisms to greatly amplify your reach. You can also leverage social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to increase your footprint even further.
   On the other hand email newsletters are largely bound by the limits of their subscriber lists. They may be re-emailed by a few recipients, however cannot tap into broader syndication or social media channels to amplify their reach.
   
   
7. Blog post approvals don't have to tie you in knots
   The classic reason email newsletters are late is that they are waiting on lots of approvers - often different people for each news item. This complex process can mean that even if nine of your news stories are approved, you're left waiting three weeks for approval on the tenth before you can email. By then the email is a month late and your audience has lost interest and trust in your ability to deliver to deadline. With blogs, if you have nine posts approved and one still in approvals that gives you nine posts you can publish over the next three weeks while waiting for the tenth. That means you can maintain regular activity and keep your customers informed and engaged without any loss of reputation.
   
   
8. People can subscribe to your blog
   Just like with email newsletters, with the right blog tools people are able to subscribe to your blog for updates by email or by RSS. This is more of an equaliser than an advantage, however it does mean that blogs, with their other advantages, aren't at a disadvantage in this area.
   
   
9. A blog isn't restricted to being a blog
   Email newsletters are good at being email newsletters, providing synopses and links to news stories, but aren't usually able to provide other functionality. A blog isn't necessarily only a blog, it's a highly interactive website. You can use a blog to also deliver static information, multimedia presentations, social media tools, web services and anything else you'd provide on a 'normal' website.
   
   
10. Your blog can be an email newsletter too!
    With the right blog tool, or with a small amount of work, you're able to bundle up your blog posts for the last week or month and send them out as an email newsletter as well. This basically allows you to have the best of both worlds - the targeted alerts of an email newsletter backed up by the flexibility, search ranking and longevity of a blog.

Now I'm not saying that email newsletters don't have their place. They are very effective at 'push' communications. When you're confronted by a newsletter every month in your inbox you're quite likely to read it.

However why limit yourself to just that email newsletter when you could build a blog and use an email newsletter as one of your push tools?

The blog gives you the advantages of multi-way communication, greater leverage and amplification, more flexibility in when and how you publish content and the content becomes much easier to find.

Build a blog and use your newsletter to drive traffic to it. That way you'll get the best of both worlds, targeting and flexibility.

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How will states adapt to true telecommuters?

Today telecommuting often refers to people who work from home, logging into computer networks to prepare documents and exchange information remotely.

However across the world we're starting to see examples of much broader and more intense forms of telecommuting.

Warfare
Take for example the RQ-1 Predator, an unmanned aerial vehicle that has been used since 1995 by the US Air Force. First used for reconnaissance and armed only with a high resolution camera, the Predator is now routinely equipped with missiles and used to attack ground targets. Predator operators may be hundreds, or even thousands, of mile away and operate their UAVs through video screens like modern computer games.

Similar unmanned devices are being developed for land and sea-based conflict, allowing operators to work normal shifts from bases close to their homes (or even from their homes), while these devices are employed in combat theatres around the world.

Emergencies
Unmanned vehicles are also being adopted in the emergency management field, with controlled robotic devices used to explore hazardous environments ahead of human teams. These devices have been used to map the Chernobyl disaster and recently the CyberQuad was introduced into Australia to support the fire brigade in mapping and fighting large blazes.

Space exploration
Many people will be aware of the Mars Rovers, two robots sent to explore parts of the red planet, seeking signs of surface water and life while expanding our store of knowledge. These robots, similar to those used in emergencies, have been used as a low-cost means of exploring a hazardous and remote environment.

Health
There are pilot programs in a number of countries exploring the potential for doctors, particularly specialists, to remotely diagnose and treat patients. In a world with too few doctors and many remote regions, the ability to have a specialist diagnose patients from a distance is an enormous cost and time saving tool, providing improved health outcomes.

Even more so, the potential for videoconferencing during surgeries, where experienced surgeons can view and collaborate with an on-the-spot colleague during a procedure - or even conduct surgery remotely, employing robotics.

Adult industry
While an area that some might find less delicate, the adult industry has a long history of innovating and employing new technologies. Much of the early innovation on the world wide web had its roots in adult pursuits. Similarly adult operators are exploring the opportunities for remote controlled devices. In fact the field even has a name, coined in 1975, 'Teledildonics' - for computer or remote operator-controlled devices for sexual pleasure.

Entertainment
Virtual worlds and Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMPOGs) have been around now for a number of years (since 1974 in fact), some as games, some as social entertainment experiences and some as business tools. These worlds are growing in immersiveness and flexibility, providing more and more opportunities to conduct mass meetings remotely, demonstrate designs and working (virtual) prototypes and educate students.

Looking forward
With all these forms of 'telecommuting' developments there's three trends I think are important to note.

• We are increasingly able to control physical devices and perform complex actions at great differences.
• Our virtual environments are improving to the extent whereby almost-physical interaction is becoming possible, and
• we are entering a time where an increasing number of people will be able to conduct their business remotely from other states or nations, significantly complicating how taxes are assessed and laws are interpreted and enforced.

With increasing broadband speeds, such as via Australia's National Broadband Network, it will become possible for a range of telecommuting scenarios such as the following three examples.

• Remote mining exploration and analysisA geologist sitting in their Brisbane office will be able to take control of a contracted robot in the Northern Territory, remotely guide it to an exploration site and conduct a surface analysis and even a seismic survey to assess the mineral potential of the area.
  
  The information and analysis could be immediately visible to their employer, a Perth-based mining company. The site could be mapped digitally and then have geologists from around the world explore the area virtually - literally 'walking' their avatars over the landscape and discussing specific areas in real-time.

• Global industrial design
  Equally an industrial design team operating out of Newcastle as a semi-autonomous unit of a Swedish furniture manufacturer could develop new designs for bookcases and chairs and trial them via virtual worlds with other designers and potential customers around the world.
  
  When a final design is approved it could be automatically loaded into the systems of an offshore manufacturer and produced, either in a fully automatic or manual factory, then shipped to customers around the world.
  
  As a side project, the designs could also be made available for virtual sale into a range of virtual worlds and games, like the Sims - providing a secondary income.

• Remote entertainment experiences
  A resident in a nursing home in Wagga Wagga could remain an active gardener through participation in a robotised market garden in the Adelaide Hills. Every day they could go online and check how their plot was developing, using robotic devices to plant seeds, pull weeds and water. When their vegetables were grown they could be harvested and sent to market collectively, with the profits going to offset the costs of the market garden.
  
  Through virtual technology the resident could walk around, or even fly over the garden with complete mobility. Integrated sensors could simulate the smells and even the feeling of digging in the soil, keeping the resident both entertained and productive, raising their self-esteem and enjoyment of life.
  
  Residents from nursing homes around the country and overseas could work together, sharing their experience with plants and making collective decisions on how to manage the garden. (The original Telegarden was operational from 1995-2004 as a university experiment)

In all of these situations the data would pass through a variety of Australian states and through international jurisdictions. The individuals performing the actual work do not necessarily own the work, it could be a collaborative effort by individuals across different nations.

We're seeing the inklings of this process now with the increasing digitalisation of products. No jurisdictional restrictions on written, audio, visual or digital interactive material can be effectively and universally enforced when they can be transmitted almost instantaneously across the internet to virtually any country in the world.

The creators of these digital works may also be located anywhere in the world. Collaborators may each live in a different jurisdiction and be subject to different laws and regulation. Whose jurisdiction takes primacy for taxation purposes for a truly virtual organisation? What happens when a digital product is illegal in some jurisdictions and legal in others?

It is even hard to enforce regulation or taxation over physical products, unless governments wish to inspect every single mail item - adding enormous time and cost burdens to an economy.

Identifying which jurisdiction's guidelines apply can already be difficult - is it in the jurisdiction that the work originates, where the servers storing the information live, where the organisation is registered or where the goods and services are sold (at least for physical products, who taxes and regulates virtual items)? What if jurisdictions don't agree?

As teleconferencing becomes more prevalent and more global in nation, governments will increasingly have to reconsider their state-based laws, regulations and taxes to contend with hyper-mobile individuals, workers who can deliver a service using remote assistance anywhere in the world, from driving a delivery vehicle to performing operations, without leaving their own home or neighbourhood.

Perhaps governments should already be taking great strides towards normalising their regulatory approaches,to reduce inefficiencies and ensure that their laws and taxes will remain enforceable as telecommuting rises.

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Gov 2.0 lunch with Chris Quigley of Delib - Canberra, 8 Feb 2011

I'm delighted to kick off 2011 with a Gov 2.0 lunch featuring an international speaker, Chris Quigley, a co-founder of Delib from the UK.

Chris's experience crosses viral marketing, social media and e-democracy. He has an ongoing interest in how people, business and government interact, and how the internet (especially social media) are changing relationships.

He has been working in the Open Government space for almost ten years across both the UK and the US. He was involved in some of the earliest crowd-sourcing projects in the US, under the former President George Bush.

Chris's company, Delib, was asked by the current US government to build an ideas-sharing website to "crowdsource thoughts" about how to design a portal that would monitor the US's $787bn (£510bn) stimulus plan. The result was recovery.gov.

Chris was also involved in the design of the UK government's 'Your Freedom' website, designed to allow UK citizens to discuss laws they wanted to see changed or removed. The site received 11,546 ideas, 72,836 comments and 190,175 ratings.

Alongside his Open Government work, Chris is also a co-founder of The Viral Ad Network, a specialist automated syndication platform for branded content and of Rubber Republic, a specialist viral ad agency (which also has a strong interest in socks).

Learn more about Chris in The Guardian's article, "The man opening up government".

If you are able to join us at Café in the House in the Old Parliament House for lunch on 8 February 2011, Chris will be providing an overview of the Open Government experience in the UK and US.

Register for the Gov 2.0 lunch at http://egovaufeb2011.eventbrite.com/

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NSW electoral commission asking citizens to geolocate their own addresses

In a initiative to improve electoral records, the NSW electoral commission is asking citizens to geocode their own location.

The initiative relies on the prevalence of GPS units in peoples' smartphones and other devices, coupled with an online system which allows people to locate their homes online and confirm that they have been mapped correctly in the electoral database.

Details on the initiative are available at the Elector Geo-Location System pages of the NSW electoral commission's site.

I hope this initiative won't remain limited to NSW, there's application for this approach across all Australian electorates.

What will be interesting after the collection of this data is how it will be used, beyond mapping electorates.

For instance the geomapped locations of Australian addresses, appropriately de-identified, could be used to supplement other geolocational records, improving the ability for emergency services to reach addresses in a crisis.

They could also be released freely as open data - after all the government isn't paying citizens for the data.

That would certainly be a better outcome than locking up public data in an organisation such as PSMA Australia Limited, a government-owned corporation, which collects public data and then resells it back to Australians.

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How do we keep the idiots at bay?

I read an excellent article today in the Harvard Business review by Bill Taylor about Why Do Smart People Do Such Dumb Things?.

Taylor explores why good ideas go disastrously wrong, why innovation often appears to lead to disaster, concluding that Warren Buffet had the right of it,

Leave it to Warren Buffet to offer a thoughtful perspective. In a memorable, hour-long PBS interview with Charlie Rose during the 2008 crisis, Buffet gave a master class in how the world got into its economic mess and what we can learn from it.

At one point, Rose asked the question that scholars, pundits, and plaintiffs attorneys will be debating for years: "Should wise people have known better?" Of course they should have, Buffet replied, but there's a "natural progression" to how good new ideas go badly wrong. He called this progression the "three Is." First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don't and champion new ideas that create genuine value. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. Sometimes they improve on the original idea, often they tarnish it. Last come the idiots, whose avarice undermines the very innovations they are trying to exploit.

This progression from innovation to imitation to idiocy is not limited to the finance market. We've seen it occur in advertising, in property, in fashion, toys and engineering. In fact it occurs in virtually every industry and profession - including in government.

So how do we keep the idiocy at bay, keeping innovators and (effective) imitators in ascendency?

Taylor doesn't answer this question, so I thought I might throw in a few thoughts.

Firstly we need to train people to distinguish between imitation and idiocy. Provide them with the skills and experience to draw a line in the sand, resisting ideas and approaches that would fail.

Secondly we need to benchmark and share in-depth case studies. Share not only what worked but why it worked and how it worked - or why it did not. The psychological, economic and engineering principles that were applied to turn an idea into an effective execution. This builds greater understanding of the principles underlying success or failure, not simply the 'bling'.

Finally we need to foster continuous innovation. When people have the skills and experience, coupled with ready access to examples of success and failure, they are better equipped to create new concepts and build on existing ideas whilst identifying the paths that would lead to idiocy.

Of course, at the same time, we need to educate upwards and outwards - help senior managers, political offices and external stakeholders understand what works and why. While this mightn't totally prevent them from getting caught up with a novel idea, or rejecting an effective one, it at least helps them understand afterwards.


In Gov 2.0 we're already seeing the imitators attempting to mimic innovative successes from the past few years. That's fine, it can appear safer to go second or twenty-third - although rarely does an imitation aim to reach exactly the same audience, exist in the same environment or get executed in the same way, by the same people.

In the end, I expect we will never be able to completely keep idiocy at bay, but we can, at least, contain it.

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