I've been on a whirlwind travel tour these last few weeks: The DMA's B to B conference, MarketingSherpa's Email Conference, ad:tech in San Francisco, and the eMarketing Association conference also in San Francisco.

The first conference I attended, MarketingSherpa's conference, was the first of it's kind - a dedicated email marketing-only conference focused primarily on companies who use email for relationship marketing (e.g. permission and anticipation). Bottom line, the conference was great. While there were some first-time conference logistics hiccups, the content, the attendees and, most importantly, the discussions outside the meetings were all top notch. The conference covered the usual hot topics from deliverability to design/layout to list building. But given it's exclusive focus on email, the depth and breadth of those topics reached a new level. I was also pleased to see that the conference was not a "vendor fest". There seemed to be many more practitioners than there were vendors. Like Shop.org, this keeps the dialog far more interesting and everyone walks away learning a great deal more (and spends less time selling).

I had the privilege of hosting a panel with IBM, Vail Resorts and Air2Web were we discussed next generation communications technologies (RSS, desktop apps and mobile, respectively). A lot of these topics were new to the audience and I thought some of the follow up questions were great.

For a more in depth review, I recommend reading the wrap up from Anne Holland, the Publisher of MarketingSherpa: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3238

Posted by Bill Nussey at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I received some great comments about my recent blog entry on the difficulty of measuring traditional RSS, and my belief that marketers will move toward Individualized RSS as a result. (You can check out the post and comments here.)

Padraig McGourty from Nooked pointed out that his application also supports IRSS. Nooked, along with the other IRSS feed systems I mentioned, can also support a single, broadcast-type feed as well.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and an investor in FeedBurner, said creating unique RSS feeds for every user would be a scalability nightmare. Only time will tell how difficult this proves to be, but I believe it will be fairly manageable. For instance, FeedBurner already responds to each feed request uniquely by returning an XML file tuned for the specific RSS reader making the request. From there, it's not a huge leap to respond with different feeds for each user. Although working with any system that supports millions of unique content experiences can be complex and challenging, companies in the ad banner, Web-site and email marketing world have been doing just that for five years. Large emailers like Silverpop regularly create and deliver tens of millions of unique messages every day. Using existing platforms like Silverpop's email solution for an RSS system enables similar scale, and companies should have no problem meeting any realistic growth in IRSS demand over the next few years.

Finally, Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner, took the time to share his thoughts on why he believes the current RSS approach (one feed for all users) has advantages over IRSS. His points are well-taken, and I recommend reading them in their entirety. In the meantime, I've taken the liberty of addressing each one here:

1. Individualized feeds are hard to migrate and manage. I agree that managing high volumes of unique pages and indexes can be difficult -- especially if you want to move them around or change them. Fortunately, Web-site content management techniques have been addressing this very same issue for years, so IRSS shouldn't have to invent too many additional solutions in order to be equally as manageable.

2. Readers may copy each other's unique feeds rather than get new unique feeds, thus impacting the accuracy of metrics. Dick makes a great point here, and I do believe this affects the measurability of IRSS to some degree. Nonetheless, I believe an audience spread across IRSS and broadcast RSS feeds will always be more accurately measurable than broadcast RSS alone.

3. Aggregators won't accept the burden of so many unique feeds and they'll find ways to work around them. The biggest RSS aggregators most often are also the biggest email inbox providers. These companies already deal with massive volumes of unique email, so technically, doing the same for RSS is feasible. Silverpop's ongoing conversations with many of the largest aggregators suggest that they will take the same approach to IRSS as they have to email -- they'll support what their customers ask for, even if it's harder than they'd prefer.

4. A single source for feeds is required for aggregators to remix into custom feeds. First, not every RSS feed benefits from being public, and not every marketing feed is targeted at a wide audience. In the world of email (which I believe will drive much of the IRSS adoption), more and more messages are either private, such as receipts, or highly targeted, such as up-sell promotions based on prior purchases. Second, most IRSS systems also generate a generic, public feed that can be used for the purposes Dick outlines.

5. IRSS throws off search engines by creating tens of thousands of similar content links. This was indeed an early concern among IRSS providers and search engine companies. However, standards quickly are being developed and deployed that allow content creators to tag individual feeds in a way that won't confuse search engines. And, as long as a single, public-facing feed remains untagged, the search engines will work just as they do today.

RSS today is most commonly viewed from the publisher's perspective -- share your content as widely as possible. As such, it may appear to be at some odds with IRSS in the near-term. However, the real promise of IRSS lies in the ability to offer more personalized content. Targeted promotions like Travelocity's last-minute deals, personal account updates like Netflix's RSS queues and customized newsletters are already making IRSS a reality. And, custom keyword search feeds by companies like NewsGator further illustrate how IRSS is expanding on the original vision of RSS and changing how marketers must think about the channel. These companies all appear poised deliver the scale, manageability and measurability that their customers will soon demand.

Personally, I don't think standard RSS will ever go away any more than I believe text email and static Web pages will disappear. However, for sophisticated marketers and content creators, IRSS offers an opportunity to benefit from the emerging base of RSS readers and RSS-savvy consumers without giving up the targeting and 1:1 nature of the communications they currently get with email and through their Web sites.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In its April 11 article, "Podcasts: Is Anybody Listening?" eMarketer picked up nicely on the firestorm raised by Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li's latest metrics on current and future usage of podcasts.

A lot of smart money has bet on podcasting, and I've met few people who don't find the idea appealing. However, the question raised by Charlene's research can't be ignored. Interesting as it is, will people actually do it?

To me, this is like 1998 all over again, when pundits were suggesting that we'd all be watching episodes of Seinfeld on our Web-enabled computers. For a while, it seemed inevitable. A few years later, the idea seemed outright dumb. But look at us today, with Disney, AOL and others posting countless TV shows on the Web. Although adoption of this latest round of TV-on-the-Web is still low, I think the lesson here is clear: if a new media idea sounds interesting, it will probably drive real adoption over time -- just don't try to predict how that adoption will work because you'll probably be wrong.

P.S. Yes, I've tried podcasts on my iPod/iTunes and no, I don't listen to them anymore.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had an interesting conversation recently via email with a marketer who is using RSS. He's using Web beacons -- tiny 1x1-pixel images also used by email marketers -- to count the number of times a message is viewed, but he's running into two common problems. One is that Web portal feed readers such as Yahoo! and AOL don't support images in RSS feeds. The other is that some RSS readers that do support and display images in feeds, cache the images, making tracking impossible beyond the first view.

He asked if I knew of any solutions for improving RSS measurement. The fact is, first-generation RSS faces the same challenge today as first-generation Web and site analytics did in the late 1990s -- it relies on incoming page requests and attempts to decipher IP address and other indirect information. I believe these methods are reasonably accurate, but they are nowhere near 100-percent accurate.

I advised him to take a look at the emerging new generation of RSS feed systems based on Individualized RSS. Companies like Silverpop, SimpleFeed and Syndicate IQ already have commercial IRSS applications that are worth taking a look at. IRSS works by creating a unique feed for each subscriber (rather than a single feed for all subscribers). With IRSS, pixel tags are individually-named, so they don't get cached. And, even if a feed reader doesn't support images, you can still infer a great deal about behavior because you are able to measure individual click-throughs, which gives you real insight into how subscribers are responding.

For marketers who want to stick with the current RSS technology, companies like FeedBurner and others have invested huge effort into maximizing the measurability of traditional RSS. Since their services are free, you really can't go wrong using them.

But in my opinion, marketers need far more information than they can get with RSS. I believe this will drive an inexorable move toward IRSS over the next five years. Since the consumer experience is identical, it's only a matter of marketers getting their heads around the technology and the slightly higher costs.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I was at a social event the other evening speaking with a friend of mine who works in a consumer-facing business. He told me his company's online business growth had surpassed its brick-and-mortar business, but that the company was really struggling to capitalize on its online growth. He said the television-advertising budget needed to give way to a better online marketing effort.

There's been so much talk about the state of TV advertising I thought it would be worth a little research. Here's what I found:

• 78 percent of TV advertisers feel that the medium has lost a lot of its effectiveness in the last two years, according to an Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research survey cited in a March 30 eMarketer article.
• Online marketing grew 23 percent last year, while TV actually fell 1.5 percent, according to a recent study by Nielsen Media Research, also cited in the eMarketer story.
• The Internet is redefining the political landscape, and television-based political ads simply aren't as effective as they used to be, according to a great article I read in the New York Times Sunday, April 2.

My two cents: not by a long shot.

Take magazines and newspapers. It's always been easy to skip over the ads, but they continue to work. And what about banner ads? Many filter them out, and most ignore them, but they continue to work well. That being said, I do see two trends taking place in TV. First, the 30-second spot will have to give way to 1950s-style content sponsorships to some degree if the consumer adoption of digital video recorders (DVRs) continues at its current pace. And second, advertising in any form will no longer be enough to drive consumer preference.

The bottom line is that traditional interruptive advertising is no longer a transaction that results in a purchase. Instead, advertising is an invitation for consumers to begin a dialogue. It's a way to pique their interest and encourage them to learn more. In a world where consumers are gaining all the power, engaging in dialogue often is far better than a one-time sale. And, for those of us in the email business, consumer dialogues are best conducted online and are best driven by -- you got it -- email.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dana VanDen Heuvel of Pheedo uttered a great quote while speaking at the recent Chicago DM Days & Expo.

"RSS is the new email, blogs are the new white paper and podcasting is the new Webinar," he said.

While I don't take this to mean that email is going anywhere soon, his words really got me thinking about how the new, emerging marketing channels promise to profoundly change how we do business.

You can read the March 30 DMNews article here.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)