Blogs And Social Media Make Newsletters Outdated?

For many years Peter Kalmstrom, CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, has sent a monthly newsletter to customers, evaluators and others who have been interested in it. Now we have begun wondering if these e-mails are becoming outdated. Has this blog and social media taken over the role of the newsletter? We think so, and Peter is considering stopping sending these reports.

Info about products and branch news
In his newsletters Peter informs about what happened during the past month when it comes to product update and development. He also mentions important events in our business and gives his view on how they will affect the kalmstrom.com products. He often also writes something personal, to show that there is a real person at the keyboard.

Newsletters more important earlier?
The newsletter has for a long time been a good way of telling news and keeping contact with customers and others. It started with the relatively  long-winded procedure of sending out snail-mails, but when we got the e-mailing possibility  there was an explosion in the number of newsletters. Nowadays it sometimes feels as if we are bombarded with all kinds of e-mails, and many of them are not even read.

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Blog and social media
During the last few years the number of readers of the kalmstrom.com Blog has increased considerably, and as we are now present on four social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, some opt to follow us there instead. All new blog posts are announced in the social media, but if you want to be sure not to miss anything in the social media noise you should subscribe to this blog directly. And it seems as if that is exactly what many do! You can either subscribe to the RSS-feed or ask for an e-mail each time a new blog post is published.

Blog news are fresh
If you are familiar with the kalmstrom.com Blog, you know that I write about product updates and development, important events in our business and how they affect us. Sometimes I also tell you things about the kalmstrom.com team members that I think can be of general interest. As you see, the content is the same as in Peter's newsletters, but in the blog we can write more and go deeper than in a newsletter. Furthermore the news are fresh, as I write new articles here two or three times a week.

The wave has calmed down
As late as a couple of years ago each newsletter brought a wave of e-mails to the kalmstrom.com sales and support departments, and the number of visitors to the website increased remarkably. The day after the newsletter had been sent we did not have time for much else than answering e-mails.

This situation has changed, and today the day after a newsletter is only noticed in the great number of automatic answers - many of them sent from one of our helpdesk applications, Folder HelpDesk for Outlook or HelpDesk OSP for Outlook and SharePoint. We believe the change is due to the increased blog reading. What Peter writes in his monthly e-mail is already old news to most of the receivers, as they have seen it here and in social media!

Blog and social media require active choice
To subscribe to a blog or follow an organization in social media is an active choice that requires a bit more interest than reading a newsletter that drop down in your e-mail inbox. If Peter stops sending out his newsletters, it might mean that we will loose some of these occasional readers, but the active ones are more valuable to us.

What do you think about our reasoning? As usual I welcome comments! If we don't hear anything that will make us change our minds, the newsletter for July will be the last one, at least for now. We will of course evaluate the situation after some months, and if we then see that we made a mistake I will tell you why here in the blog - and the kalmstrom.com Newsletters will be revived again.