Hello all,

Let me update you today about a local marketing initiative: the French newsletter dedicated to Peer Media!

We came up with this idea because it was for us the most cost-effective solution to meet the following objectives on the long run : demonstrate our expertise in the peer media industry, and raise our brand awareness.

Format

Of course, the question of using a newsletter (push tool) rather than a blog (pull tool) was raised, but we thought in final that most of our clients an prospects were not educated yet to the usage of RSS feeds. So we are being pushy, indeed, but with information and not adverstising, which is not that intrusive. So far, only one person required to be taken out of our mailing list – because she couldn’t read French !

So, it may sound like a paradox to use a newsletter for peer media matters… but this is probably the best way to evangelize our contacts about Web 2.0.

Targets

This newsletter was sent to a total of 250 contacts, including clients and prospects : the current ones + the ones we had already identified when organizing our Peer media roundtable, + all the ones we had identified by ourselves, based on our Top 20 and Top 100 targets.

Results

We received some nice comments from PR Managers from TomTom, Orange, Adobe, Intel, Creative Labs and Yahoo, who all said that the contents were very interesting (happy happy!)

Contents

Of course, it is in French…

But just to give you an overview of the contents, we chose to talk about:

– the Social Media Release (thanks to Disruption blog’s contributors who gave us this idea 🙂
– traffic figures of the online media
– RSS feeds : how does it work ? (with video)
– The “buzz” video of the month : Electronic Arts made it!
– A blog review – theme : marketing & communications oriented blogs
– A stat : “38% of investors are sick of green PR”
– And a mention about the Peer media theory and “bible”, the Cluetrain Manifesto

If you read French and want to have a glimpse at the articles, you have 2 options: we can send it over to you by email, or you can go to: http://text100.typepad.com/lemeilleurdupeer/

People / time spent

Our first newsletter was a bit long to prepare because we had to set up the team and prepare contents + format at the same time, but we are now 5 people working on it, and we expect to keep their participation down to 3 or 4 hours per month.

Machinery

We leveraged the text100.typepad platform as an article repository. Indeed, having a newsletter is nice, but having a footprint somewhere on Google is all the more important. Obviously, all the articles of the newsletter can also be found on the text100.typepad.com platform.

Next steps

improve the overall design, and mostly keep our readers captive 🙂

Any comment or suggestion on one of the points mentioned above?

Cheers!

Hélène Delannet
Text100 Paris