Panic mongers claim the only way to eliminate spam is to stop using email and switch to another technology. That’s like stopping telemarketing calls by telling the phone company to haul away your phone line or telling the post office to stop delivering mail to your house or office, because you are tired of dealing with junk mail. While these drastic measures may solve the problem, they are impractical.
Business people typically receive 50 emails a day. A good chunk of the day involves sorting through spam and weeding out the desired messages, which is a real time guzzler. To streamline the process, IT folks set up a spam filter. What happens next is an all too familiar story; very little spam comes in and important messages don’t make it either, because they’re eaten by the spam filter, which is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Technology email pundits say:
RSS is the answer to the dilemma faced by legitimate e-newsletter publishers; the dilemma being, getting your message read by newsletter subscribers.
RSS is the new kid on the block, like the telephone and the airplane once were. Surprisingly, it took 50 years before Alexander Bell’s invention stopped being considered a luxury item. Remember when long distance calls were beyond the range that most consumers could afford? It was possible, but not widespread. There was even a time when flying in an airplane was an occasion to put on your Sunday clothes, even in coach. The point is that just because we have technology and promote it does not mean the majority of people will embrace it. Change is hard for people. Just look at the current rumblings about RSS.
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication and is a publishing format for syndication of weblogs, news feeds, and other content.
With RSS it’s all about subscribing to different sources of information. It’s like getting 100 channels on cable, you can do it, but in reality the consumer is not going to watch all the channels, therefore the marketer has to find ways to get the buyer’s attention. E-mail comes to the prospect. With RSS, the prospect has to remember to go to the store or to get software that picks up weblogs from Web servers like an email program picks up e-mails from an e-mail server. E-mail is effective because it is part of our daily routine. We get up, grab a cup of coffee, take a shower, get dressed, go to work, log into our email for messages. With RSS the buyer has to add a new kind of ‘channel surfing’ to their daily routine. It’s probably not going to happen any time soon, if at all.
eNewsletter Journal interviewed Meryl K. Evans, editor of eNewsletter Journal and writer for Lockergnome a publisher of nine e-newsletters with a technical audience of 1,554,000; Hank Stroll, publisher of InternetVIZ.com, a custom publisher of 21 eJournals that go out to over 344,000 business executives; and John Blossom, president of Shore Communications, Inc., a research and advisory firm covering content and related technologies to get their perspectives on RSS news feeds.
eNewsletter Journal: Are prospective buyers going to embrace RSS news feeds?
Hank Stroll:
Look at their behavior towards using web browser ’Favorites’ feature as an indicator. Initially, ‘Favorites’ are chosen with great interest, but days or months later, they forgot all about the Web site they bookmarked. I have to go through mine about once every four months and get rid of the links I don’t use - or don’t remember why I chose them. Plus, I do it so infrequently I’ve forgotten how to delete them. I use favorites from only maybe four to six places on a regular basis. I want the easy and soft way.
I like e-newsletters coming into my email box and being pleasantly surprised that they are here. It’s like watching the turning of the seasons. If I had to remember to look at my e-newsletter subscriptions each month they wouldn’t get read. It would become a chore vs. a pleasant surprise that just shows up. Studies show that the average business person subscribes to five to ten e-newsletters and considers them to be one of the most trusted sources of information.
The biggest drawback to RSS is I have to do something. If you don’t think that is a big deal for the average American, ask your tech support team about the number of times, they teach callers about Computing 101.
While the average consumer or business person uses computers more than ever before, they do not install much software themselves. In corporate America, many companies have policies about what can be installed on a system, because IT has to support the desktop.
RSS technology is not a killer application like email and word processing. Build it, they will come, won't happen, because it's not the way we do business today. If the proponents of RSS think that this new technology is going to take over any time soon, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell them.
Meryl K. Evans:
I second Hank’s sentiments about bookmarks (Favorites). My bookmark file is so big, it takes a long time to search it, plus there are many duplicates I haven’t been about to weed out.
I jumped on the RSS bandwagon early and loved the concept at first. However, as more and more places made their content available in RSS, I fell into the bookmark trap again. I have tons of RSS feeds in my newsreader, but I hardly ever open it except to add more RSS feeds. It’s still a cool idea, but I wouldn’t want my e-newsletters to come solely through RSS because it requires people being proactive… opening the newsreader program and finding the e-newsletter among hundreds of feeds.
eNJ: Is it good for e-publishers?
Stroll:
From a marketing perspective, it’s a disaster to be put into a big bucket that the business buyer may or may not want to use. Consumers will dread going into the RSS feed because of information overload.
According to eMarketing, 82% of business executives choose newsletters as their number one source of information. A newsletter that’s not in an inbox is a big problem. It’s all about attention. If the buyer spends most of their own time choosing to be in the in box, that’s where they should go vs. an RSS feed that contains hundreds of other RSS feeds.
John Blossom: RSS is an extremely powerful tool for enabling individual publishers, but the ability to forward and annotate incoming content for peers easily will keep email on top for some time to come. Publishing is not just about getting content to audiences; it's also important to empower audiences to republish and amplify content easily and fairly. RSS is great, but its feature set is still very young.
Publishers servicing professional markets could help shape RSS publication and stream subscription standards that will work for both existing sources and for new sources with new capabilities.
Evans: As a business wanting to communicate with customers and prospects, if I had to choose between email and RSS newsletters, email would win by a long shot. Offering both is nice, but I wouldn’t want to advertise the RSS link because readers who unsubscribe to the newsletter and switch to the RSS feed will forget to check for updates in their newsreader.
However, when we speak of e-publishers from a journalistic, academic, and researcher perspective, it’s another story and it has great potential there.
eNJ: How are RSS feeds are being used?
Blossom: RSS feeds are primarily used in professional circles for weblogs by businesses to disseminate information and by journalists offering day to day reporting and coverage of news that didn’t make it into the news paper or TV news broadcast. Some companies are using RSS feeds for publishing press releases, and many news organizations with online presence disseminate their primary content via RSS.
For companies that already take in news feeds to support their operations, RSS is a simple and natural channel for a wide variety of content sources. The impact of RSS on news operations is key. During the most recent Gulf War bloggers on the U.S. side and civilians in Iraq reported on events adding a new "real time" chapter to war journalism from the front.
Evans: John is right. Most bloggers have RSS feeds. I have many friends and business feeds in my newsreader, but I don’t remember the last time I checked them. Like bookmarks, I know it’s there for when I really, really need it. When I miraculously have time or in dire need of an article or resource on a particular topic, then I go to the newsreader and scan around. But that rarely happens.
RSS feeds are also being used by ecommerce and news sites to provide product and news updates. Amazon and Yahoo News have feeds. Recently, I’ve discovered journalists and academies using it to dispense information so that readers, students, and researchers are receiving the latest information. Business e-newsletters aren’t part of the breed.
eNJ: Can you filter using an RSS feed?
Blossom: Yes. You can sort by topic, or by author within each weblog. Some of the more popular newsreaders can be installed as a plug in into an email environment like Microsoft Outlook.
Evans: I created folders based on my needs. If I need an article on handheld devices, I’ll look in my PDA folder for updates. I know one fellow who gets his feeds via email as John mentioned. When he finds an entry of interest, he posts it in his blog.
eNJ: Is there much feedback from RSS feeds?
Blossom: Weblog communities form easily via hyperlinks from one weblog to another, and to other forms of online content Weblogs are a direct extension of Web publishing that fits somewhere between email and a community forum.
In a forum you don’t know who is publishing with you, for example: if you say Volvos are great, next thing you know someone says you idiot Volvos stink. That form of communication can be too personal for many people. When you go to a weblog you find out what the viewpoint is and if it fits into a correspondence model. The blogger is the news correspondent. With weblogs there is no required communication it is a means for receiving news.
Evans: Some blogs allow visitors to comment on an entry. When in RSS, if you find an entry of interest, you can click it and go right to the blog entry and comment on it, if the option is available. A few blogs are lucky enough to have a huge following and receive many comments, but that’s rare.
eNJ: Where are RSS news feeds/weblogs heading?
Blossom: There is an article in the September 10th issue of Editors and Publisher Magazine which mentions that the great thing about the blog concept for breaking news is that it puts online news organizations on the same speed footing as radio and television; which makes alert systems critically important -- to "push" news out to interested consumers. Web publishers should be thinking about setting up e-mail or RSS feeds to alert readers about new content and breaking news blogs.
Evans: Two to three years ago, only a handful of people had blogs. Today, blogs have become so commonplace that everyone and their computer literate Aunts have blogs. With that many blogs available, the audience is spread thin. In the end, only the best will be successful.
RSS is still unfamiliar to the average Internet user, but the topic is appearing in more and more articles. I think like bookmarks, RSS will overwhelm people and not become a reliable source for businesses that wish to stay on customers minds, provide value, and build relationships. It will flourish in other areas, just not for the newsletter business.
Stroll: RSS may not be the great spaminator like many technology email pundits want it to be, however, it may have a home between Web site forums and email. Will it stay around? Only if the consumer or business buyer makes it part of their everyday routine. Be careful, RSS may be a ‘build it and they will come’ type of technology. The jury is still out.
