So, like most other people, I too find myself these days on maybe a dozen mailing lists or so, some of which are ones I voluntarily joined, others which are just too big a pain in the ass to actually quit. And naturally, most of these mailing lists are being delivered through the internet these days, and most concern getting short notices out to their recipients regarding upcoming performances, store sales and the like. One of the mailing lists I belong to, though, is the Les Bourgeois winery in Rocheport, Missouri, this great little place about half an hour east of where I went to college (Columbia, that is, home of the University of Missouri), situated right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Missouri River. (A good friend of mine from college is their head winemaster, which is how I ended up on the mailing list to begin with. Yes, old Mizzou chums, it's "Beautiful Cory!")

Les Bourgeois is the only mailing list left in my life that sends out an actual quarterly paper newsletter to everyone on their list. You know, newsletters? You remember those, right? With the candid photos of company employees doing their jobs, and stories about how their latest winecrushing festival went, and news about their upcoming vintages, and announcements about mid-Missouri bike rides along the Katy Trail, etc etc? You know, a newsletter!

I just got the latest one yesterday, in fact, and it reminded me of a really embarrassing confession that I've been meaning to share here - that I love reading Les Bourgeois' newsletter, and always get a little kick out of it every time I do. God, how goofy is that, exactly? But it's true - I love checking out the photos of all the unattractive middle-aged customers, and I love reading up on how things have been going with the winery, and I love their occasional reports about things going on at my alma mater, and I even love the occasional recipes the head chef of their on-premise restaurant puts together for it.

Now, let's not kid ourselves - I don't love the newsletter for its writing quality, or its production values, or for anything that has to do with the newsletter itself. I love it simply because it gives me a chance to catch up with the latest going on with the winery, and to feel like there's a legitimate sense of family and community going on with them. And see, this is different than if Les Bourgeois did a blog, because frankly, I don't care about the winery enough to check into a blog every single day. What I love, though, is the chance to catch up with them every three months or so, to read through the highlights of what's been going on with them, to read about the fun stuff they have planned for the upcoming season.

I was just thinking about all this again yesterday, and ended up asking myself a natural question about it all - just where have all the newsletters gone in our society? I don't mean the actual physical documents themselves, because let's face it, it's infinitely cheaper and more efficient to deliver newsletters over the internet anymore. No, I mean newsletter-style content - of a single document that simply collects up recent news about a company in a candid, informal way, and that really does help create a community between the employees of that company and their customers.

It had never really occurred to me before, but we've lost that newsletter mentality in the age of internet mailing lists we're now in. Most of the other mailing lists I belong to, for example (er, actually, all the other mailing lists I belong to), are event-specific mailing lists - their posts are always about a specific show coming up, or a specific item that's gone on sale, or a specific promotion the company is running. And it's a shame, I think, because I don't have nearly the kind of relationship now with these organizations as I did back before the internet, back when I was regularly receiving newsletters from companies like TSR (the original owners of "Dungeons & Dragons"), my local hobby shop (where we actually bought all our TSR crap), my local comics store and the like. There's a real and undeniable pleasure, I think, in the traditional newsletter format (which of course is why millions of people still send them out with their annual Christmas cards), that we are simply starting to lose in our internet-dominated society.

This is one of the customized mailing lists I'm planning on offering our customers when my own arts center is open, actually - not just a daily list for upcoming shows, not just a weekly list for calls-for-artists, but also a monthly email newsletter-style that simply talks in this casual way about everything that's been going on with the center over the last month, as well as candid photos of our staff and customers. It's an old-fashioned yet still incredibly powerful way, I think, to maintain a relationship with one's customer base, far removed from all the talk these days about "customer relationship management" and "search engine optimization" and the like. It's a way of not only getting necessary information out to your customers, but of building an actual community - of building a story, in other words, as marketing expert Seth Godin is always urging companies to do. It's the same thing as a blog, of course, in what you're talking about and how you're talking about it; but it's different from a blog as well, in that it requires much less of a commitment on the part of the customer, and that it's delivered to the customer instead of the customer having to go retrieve it themselves.

Anyway, not much of a point here - it's just something I've been meaning to mention. And thanks again, Cory, for putting me on the mailing list to begin with - maybe one of these days I'll actually make it to mid-Missouri again, and will be able to actually visit the winery for the first time in twelve years or whatever.