In short, the answer is “yes.” They’re not dead, and here’s why: company newsletters have been redefined, and can be leveraged across new platforms to expand their reach and cross-communicate in various channels. That’s a big payoff and great ROI on content that otherwise would have been sequestered in a printed piece. If you plan strategically, today you can get more bang for your buck out of newsletters than you ever could before.

Here are five tips to keep in mind to set your company up for newsletter success:

Content is king. No matter what form a newsletter takes–printed or email–content is still the most important element. Develop stories that help, encourage, and inform the audience with timely information. Expand the content out beyond just you and your company to include industry trends, case studies, and tips that readers can benefit from. The best content is brief enough to engage those with short attention spans and not too self-serving. As the news media shrinks, this approach is an opportunity to tell your story directly to customers.

Plan, plan, plan. Organizing a successful newsletter takes planning. The first step is setting a purpose for your newsletter. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish for all the effort and expense. Next, establish deadline and publish dates to keep everyone on schedule, and evaluate timing to coincide distribution with trade shows, product launches, or other timely opportunities that can support the brand message. This has proven to work for both printed and email newsletters.

Leverage social media. Newsletter content makes great fodder for a company’s social media channels. For example, post newsletter stories on your website and distribute links via a Twitter account to your audience. Or post on Facebook and ask customers to comment. By doing so, you reinforce your message and get more mileage out of your efforts. Social media is also a rich environment for gathering content. For instance, we use one client’s Twitter account to conduct quick survey polls using SurveyBob on industry topics and run the results in the company’s quarterly newsletter.

Appoint an in-house publisher. CMD works on newsletters for several clients and the most successful ones are those that have a single, internal contact who acts as publisher. Our experience shows that bringing too many people into the newsletter process is like inviting too many chefs into the kitchen. Everyone has an opinion and the end result usually isn’t that good. Plus it never goes out on time.

Survey says. Have you asked your customers recently what they want to read about, or do you just think of story ideas that sound interesting? Remove the guesswork and survey your audience about stories, frequency, distribution method, etc. You can’t give them what they want if you don’t know what it is. This step could save you time, money, and improve your odds of positively connecting with customers.

No. Max Kerning is a pundit, poet, and pontificating paragon of design. Spend a few minutes at http://www.maxkerning.com/ and you’ll hear it straight from Max himself. Max expounds on perfect letter spacing, organization, and the scourge of sloppy people. You’ll agree that whatever Max has to say is, by definition, “beyond reproach.”

Max also happens to be a resounding success. Which is remarkable since Max is a figment of imagination. He is pompous, opinionated, and fastidious to the point of absurdity. He is the ultimate typography nerd. And that was the whole idea.

Create a virtual, viral spokesman for a new release of font management software for, well, typography nerds. Strategically placed rich media Web banners introduced Max to the world. Within days, Max was accumulating Facebook friends and followers of his “Maxisms” on Twitter. Bloggers quickly picked up on Max and encouraged more people to check him out. At last count, Max had over one thousand FB friends and even more followers on Twitter.

But for the first month of his existence, Max wasn’t “selling” anything. And that, too, was the whole idea. Max is about changing the perception of a brand. Because Max says the kinds of preposterous things that every creative person has heard—from overbearing creative directors or their own inner fussbudgets—he connects with the intended audience. In a transparently exaggerated way, he’s been there and done that. He speaks the language of the creative craft. And we’re all in on the joke.

But the reasons Max works serve as serious lessons for engaging the Web and social media to connect a brand and a product to a target audience.

It’s not about where you are, it’s who you know. Max works because we have an intimate understanding of the people we’re trying to reach. Granted, this is a rare case of creative people marketing to creative people but the point is: the more deeply you understand your audience, the more your message will resonate. In other words, the best way to be interesting is to be interested.

—Don’t “talk at” the audience, talk with them. And allow them to talk back.

—Check your ego, and your logo, at the door. If you’re trying to sell—and, of course, we all are—adopt an attitude of “we know that you know that somewhere along the line, we’re going to pitch a product.” That pitch will be better received if you first establish a level of trust.

—Let your friends lead the way. And listen to the feedback you get.

—Be courageous. In the not-too-distant past, recommending Max as a corporate spokesperson would have sent a creative presentation into an uncomfortable silence. Our client was willing to take a risk. Agency and client were of one mind strategically. And tactically we agreed that, “This is so crazy, it might just work!”

It’s a line that’s become a cliché, but in the age of social networking and the ensuing rush on the part of many clients to capitalize on this phenomenon, it could well serve as the world’s shortest creative brief.

Metrics? Glad you asked. Simply search for Max Kerning on Google and you’ll see.

Have more questions about Max? Feel free to contact us.