5 months ago I tanked Mango Media Caribbean's  bi-monthly email newsletter. 

Sure, it was a well produced piece of collateral. The problem was there was no conversation, no feedback, no viral sharing, no Web 2.0 buzz.

About the same time that I flushed our newsletter down the tube I began noticing  the way people communicated with each other was changing.  

The Net Generation used email less and less and facebook-ed each other more.  My friends were putting videos on youtube and  sharing photos on flickr and bookmarking cool stuff they liked on delicious. Mango Media Caribean’s blog,  which was first  published 9 months ago, got 1,000 unique hits during its debut month (today we have over 22,000 unique visitors and a 3.9 comment  rate per entry).  Without being in constant touch I was suddenly and  inextricably involved in the lives of folks who I cared about and people were interested in what I had to say.

Then along came Twitter, a microblogging network which is set to make emailing a thing of the past.    

What does this all have to do with our newsletter? A better question may be what does this all have to do with marketing?

All these tools are changing the way we communicate and market and brand.  If you are in PR, advertising or marketing know that you won't get much results if you continue to push your  information to people who don’t care and who would more readily get their  news and information  from the people that they know or to whose network they  belong.

You’ve got  draw people in,  befriend them on the social networks, sign up for  RSS feeds  follow them on Twitter in other words, you must offer value and merit, and build trust and relationships. Our newsletter has evolved into a more interactive product and we can measure the way conversations are spread.

 It's the new way to market and it's not going away anytime soon.