Find The Boots

I noticed that a newsletter (click the link to subscribe) was now available to keep Jericho fans up to date.

This is a good development, because it means that the movement is getting a little more organized. The CBS board is almost useless now since every time a new recruit joins they feel compelled to write an "Isn't it terrible that Jericho was canceled?" post. It's a sign that they're growing, but everything scrolls off the top page so fast it's very hard to see the important items. I don't have time to spend hours on the site looking for things, so I'm falling out of touch with what is going on. The summary in the newsletter was invaluable.

This should be a very good mechanism for getting information to the troops, as long as it isn't abused. They ought to talk Jeff at Nuts Online to put a sign up link on his page. And if you're interested enough in the movement to be reading this, then you should sign up.

It's one thing to say that they've broken that 100K mark on the petition. But they'd be in a much more powerful position if they had the ability to email 100K people with a call to action. Their efforts are spread out across a lot of different fronts, and it's much more powerful to put all of your wood behind one arrow. Politicians view their fund raising mailing lists as one of their most important assets. This could be one of the most important assets of the "Save Jericho" campaign.

They would have the power put out a newsletter that said in the first paragraph "Today's mission is to send the following email to xxx. Click this link to do it." They could prefil the subject and body of the email. And then 100K people would blast that email address within a day or so. It would almost be a denial of service attack if the other side didn't have a filter on.

I also think they've missed the chance to make the newsletter viral. If someone forwards it to 50 friends, there's no obvious way to then sign up for the newsletter. Popular email campaigns tend to be extremely viral. They should provide an explanation for how to subscribe, and also how to unsubscribe. People are more willing to subscribe to a newsletter when it's clear that you can opt-out at a later date.

This morning when I opened my email I had 4 different updates from the Jericho team. Either they have a bug in their mailing list processor, or much more likely several readers of this blog decided that I needed to sign up. Ok, I've got it. So if anybody reading this can do anything about it, I'd like just one copy to go to boondoggi@gmail.com. I wonder how many copies Nina and Les receive?