Meat + Poultry - October 2009 - 100

tion's main Internet home. The newsletter was printed and mailed; it was
not until 2000 that Lean Trimmings
was published electronically. But even
then, NMA's Internet Service Provider (ISP) at the time was hooked.net,
which tended to get caught in company spam fi lters. "Spam fi lters are
still our number-one problem with
distribution, though it has diminished
somewhat," he says. "I realized that
at some companies, their ISP would
create a spam fi lter on its own that
the company didn't even know about.
When we switched to a headline-only
format earlier this year, it was a way
to get around spam fi lters." Readers
can click on a weekly headline menu,
which arrives by e-mail, and choose
to read "Lean Trimmings" in either
an HTML or PDF format. The association also out-sourced its Web
design and programming, and added
two new in-house-administered Web
sites, meatexpo.org and nmascholarship.org, to provide information
about NMA's suppliers exhibition
and scholarship program.
NMA, like other industry associations, also has a password-protected
section on its Web site for membersonly. Russell says he has mixed feelings about it and about password-pro-

S i n c e 1907

"The flood of
information that
swamps me daily
seems to produce
more pain than
gain."
tected information in general. "To be
honest, it's only useful for information
that people are really desperate for. It's
a premium service."
Tom Super, who manages online
information services at AMI, says that
even though some industry executives
may feel overwhelmed by the abundance of information pouring in to
their digital In-boxes every day, the
revolution has come and nothing will
ever be the same again. "We recently issued our new Economic Impact
Study, and we did it digitally," he says.
"Ten years ago, we would've printed it

up in a binder and mailed it out, and
to be honest, it probably would've sat
on a shelf. Now it's an interactive online study and people are really taking
advantage of it."
Paul Hemp in the Harvard Business
Review states that in any case, companies and organizations have more to
grapple with than simple time-management when it comes to information overload - there is, he says, an
ethical dimension. "One person's urgent e-mail request for information,
of unquestioned value to the sender,
usually comes at a significant price for
the interrupted recipient, for whom the
request may be neither urgent nor important... In looking for ways to reduce
the burden of information overload,
an organization must strive to balance
sender benefits against recipient costs,"
he writes. "And leaders need to ensure
that a solution doesn't simply shift the
burden from one group to another,
whose shouldering of it will come at a
net cost to the organization." ■
Steve Bjerklie is M&P's East Coast correspondent,
based in Franconia, N.H. He has worked as a
journalist covering the meat and poultry processing industry for more than 25 years
We would like to hear from you - to comment
on this story or to request reprints, contact us
by e-mail at meatpoultry@sosland.com.

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www.MeatPoultry.com * October 2009 * Meat&Poultry * 101

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Meat + Poultry - October 2009

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