I went back to my Alma Mater for a reunion over Memorial Day weekend.  The school sponsors seminars for visiting alums and parents, and they are a great way to mix intellectual stimulation with eating and drinking.

At a session on "Mass Media in Transition," I learned that young media leaders spend their days scanning for "disruptions."  The concept seems to be defined in various ways, as buzz words often are. Essentially, it means that what someone else is doing may cause a tidal wave of change that affects your business. The concept is interesting to play with because it has broad implications.

Disruption

One source suggests: "The cycle of change often begins with disruption. New information, players, relationships or objectives disrupt the status quo." Because of our tightly coupled, highly interactive global environment, any change anywhere can cause change somewhere else.

The presenters, I learned, get their news each morning from several bloggers in the field. If they read the news in the afternoon, the changes wrought by the blog comments might already have begun to take place. Whew! It reminds me that years ago in a South American country (I think it was Brazil), inflation was so volatile that residents did their grocery shopping in the morning because prices would likely be higher in the afternoon.

Fareed Zakaria  in his June 11, 2007 Newsweek article "How to Restore America's Place in the World" uses the term somewhat differently when he says that the US should not focus on preventing the next terrorist attack, because that's impossible. Rather we should plan to minimize the disruption, thus disarming the terrorists. If their acts don't cause massive disruption, they are much less impactful. The article is an interesting read.

Favorite E-zine

So what has all of this to do with e-zines? Consider this. I don't know about you, but the number of electronic newsletters coming to my inbox has grown geometrically in the past few months. All right, you say, but you're in the business. Right, and many of them are from my own clients and customers, which is a good thing. 

What this tells me is that e-zines are catching on. That, in turn, means that there is more competition for your subscribers' "reading e-zines" time budget. I'm joking, of course, because no one really budgets time this way. But when there are more electronic newsletters, the numbers of e-zines that escape the dreaded "delete" key are fewer.

You want yours to be the chosen disruption. Your readers ideally will say, "Ah, here's my favorite e-zine. I'll take a quick break and read it from top to bottom." Understandably, your most loyal readers will sometimes be on deadline for a project when your newsletter arrives, and they will either read it later or never get around to it. But, hopefully, even then, they will want to read it.

How do you make that happen? Provide great content superbly written with valuable, actionable copy in a pleasing format. You can do that, right?  If you'd like some help, contact me.