Introducing my newsletter (July 26, 2015)

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter.

I for one have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox from the American Press Institute, Quartz and MediaShift than to the marketing junk gushing from social media. 

In particular, I love how API & Quartz serve up not just their own stories, but curate the best reading they’ve found around the web. Because the best algorithms for surfacing quality content will always be found between someone’s ears.

I’ve been auto-curating and sharing useful resources on my TumblrHub as part of my morning and afternoon GTD routines for a year or two now, so a weekly enewsletter highlighting my Top 3 (or so) links seems a natural next step, and gives me the chance to play with the form.

This first edition is, of course, a first stab in the dark, stealth-launched as everyone goes on holiday. Expect experiments (as well as some copying of best practices), starting today.  All comments welcome below. 

You can subscribe here and from the button above, and browse all issues.

- Mathew

The eNewsletter revival, semantic web & Facebook - my week’s Top3ics

While on the topic of enewsletters, last week I enjoyed a great in-depth look at an email marketing success story: What Startups Can Learn from Watsi’s Wildly Successful Email Campaign (First Round Review). There’s too much here to summarise, but if there was one resonating point for me it was: 

“Don’t assume you know who your customers are until they’ve had a chance to show you.”

You may have missed: Publishers are treating email newsletters as a platform of its own (Digiday); What FirstFT tells us about email newsletter culture (Media Briefing); Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated (NYTimes.com); and Quartz’s use of their enewsletter as a Home Page (Quartz); plus a dozen more resources tagged enewsletter. 

See also: courtesy of the above quote: audience (research).

The coolest tech I saw last week was Prismatic’s Interest Graph API, a semantic analysis tool which promises to:

“analyze text or web pages, extract metadata and classify them with both topics [ie tags] and aspects (review, news, product, video)… “

It’s not the first and won’t be the last, but I’m giving the tyres a kick because of its relevance to the Hashtag Europe project, which would really benefit from the additional ‘aspect’ taxonomy.  Stay tuned.

You may have missed: my latest post on Hashtag Europe on Medium; and 27 other resources tagged semantic.

The social media platform I love to hate, Facebook, is actually this decade’s AOL, according to Christopher Balfe on Medium in Publishers: Give In To Facebook (For Now). 

His advice to publishers (and anyone else trying to use Facebook as a marketing channel)? Use it for now, but keep your options open because the Open Web will always win in the long run. Evan Williams, writing in response, is not so sure of the logic, but admits that, yes, everything ends.

You may have missed: 

• How To Grow Your Company: Don’t Use Facebook (Rodrigo Tello, Medium);
• Why the Hell Are You Even on Facebook? (Content Marketing Edge, Medium);
• two from my vault:
  • How Facebook’s ‘Like’ ruins your world 
  • Blogging on LinkedIn, or Paying on Facebook?; 
• and almost 90 more resources tagged Facebook.
  See also: filterbubble.

Other tags added to this week include design, audiovisual, digital transformation, presentation(s), and taxibot.

You may have missed my post on taxibots: Do android cars dream of electric streets?

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