JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Monday, September 18th, 2006

Hi Folks,

Ah.. another day. I spent all of it sending out emails to nominees to check and see if they had even heard about their nominations. About 1/3 have responded and nearly half of those weren't even aware they'd been nominated. I am only half way through the list (and I am not contacting those who I know are aware). I guess if I don't hear from half of them I may have to pick up the phone and start calling them. We did a lot of work on this for nominees to not even know they were nominated. Email is the culprit (either by it not getting there, going into a spam folder or not being read or deleted by the recipient). I have to guess that our entire member list suffers the same fate. We used to be able to check the status of all the AOL members on our list via AOL. Back then about 75% read the newsletter.. about 20% didn't open it and about 5% deleted it without reading it. I had always assumed that ratio stayed the same. AOL would tell you if an address was bad immediately but now we rarely learn that something is going nowhere. It's pretty discouraging. We're doing lots of work and folks aren't even seeing it. Ack.

Another GREAT TV series for you all to check out. It's probably the best written and directed show on TV and barely anyone knows about it. It's called The Wire and it's on HBO. It's all about the police and criminals and everyone in between in destitute Baltimore. Amazing cast.. amazing writing.. everything about it is brilliant. As songwriters, I think a lot can be learned on character development as these guys develop over 50 characters simultaneously and get you to care about them or be repelled by them almost instantly. Truly amazing TV.

Back to emailing. Sending personal notes to 1380 people 1 person at a time is a SLOW process.

Brian