Different companies obviously have different strategies when it comes to staying in contact with customers, possible future customers and the business world generally.
Scala have criticised me in the past for making fun at the amount of press releases that they send out (sometimes I feel a press release about nothing) but hey that is their strategy for staying top-of-mind with our business community and it certainly works.
In terms of regular email communication, YCD [1] and 3M I think are the best at the moment.
3M produce that incredibly well laid out monthly newsletter in PDF format and now since Barry Salzman has joined YCD as CEO based in New York, we have been getting regular emails from him on activities with the company.
At the moment a lot of the news from YCD is very insular – apart from the announcement in their latest email communication that they had finally received US patent approval for Dynamic Volume Normalizing™ technology (when you encode or source your audio tracks, the volume levels can be all over the place and this technology technique pretty much helps you balance them all) – most of their other announcements are Israeli related – Glare [2] as a partner for example and their audio installation in the Paz petrol station convenience stores across Israel.
Normalization is an analysis previous to playback that gives you the overall amplification or dampening you need to apply to make sure the track sounds at the same level as the previous and following ones – one track could be very loud, then followed by a quiet one
The folks at YCD have a very good music offering but have got a lot of work to do to get out of their humble Israeli based origins.