Email Marketing Strategy

A reader recently commented that it would be handy to be alerted, rather than having to check, whenever a new post appears on my blog. As many of you know, I’m a big fan of RSS. For the uninitiated, RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technology that enables you to subscribe to a Web [...]

I managed to sneak in a great two-week vacation this summer, but my blog posting frequency dropped off a bit. Not to fear, I’m back now and my blogging will once again be streaming forth across cyberspace <grin>.

TechCrunch, a group-edited blog about new Internet products and technologies, referenced a blog posting by the author of [...]

Feedburner, one of the earliest players in the RSS world and one of the most well known, was recently purchased by Google.

You can read the first-hand account in the official Feedburner blog.

This is a huge endorsement for RSS.

Between Microsoft’s strong support for RSS in Outlook and Vista, coupled with Google’s endorsement of RSS via [...]

A recently released report from Forrester Research shows a sharp rise in the use of RSS among marketers.

According to the report, “Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch in 2007,” 40 percent of marketers surveyed by analyst firm in December and January say they will use or test RSS this year, up from just 10 percent [...]

Jupiter recently released another study on RSS entitled, “RSS Comes of Age” – it really caught my attention.

While it sounds like self-reported usage of RSS users is fairly low (below 5%), the rate at which sites are adopting RSS is occuring at an astonishing rate.

They polled several hundred popular sites to find out their plans for RSS. Sixty-three percent (63%) of large companies plan to introduce RSS within 2006! Seventy-one percent (71%) of those plan on spending over $50,000 and 23% plan on spending over $1 million.

These numbers are amazing and even if they are double the actual 2006 deployments, there’s no question that RSS content will soon be flooding the internet. To be clear, the study doesn’t differentiate between RSS publishing, marketing, service, etc. However, the fact remains that RSS content will be available from a majority of well trafficed web site in a year or less.

RSS is exploding onto the landcape – readers are appearing everywhere from Google Mail and My Yahoo to Microsoft Vista and the next version of Outlook. And, from Jupiter’s report, the content world is embracing RSS just as quickly.

There is a brand new internet channel being born. Even if only a fraction of the users know the name of RSS, they will all be using it before you know [...]

RSS is going to be big.

I have been a true believer for a long time. And, apparently, the rest of the world is starting to get in line with this thinking. You can’t turn around without hearing about blogs or RSS these days. These topics are no longer confined to niche news or trade media.

Over the coming months, I am going to start talking more and more about RSS – both its opportunities and its challenges.

To kick things off, let me focus in on one of its most interesting challenges. The little orange box. You know the one, it says XML or RSS. Microsoft has created quite an uproar as they’ve started talking about changing the icon yet again. Blogger Ed Bott was quoted in Microsoft Watch and hit the nail on the head. He pointed out that the real problem isn’t the choice of button but: what happens when a novice user actually CLICKS on that button?

In case you haven’t tried it, you generally get XML code. Since the average consumer can’t tell XML code from a mainframe core dump, the only thing a consumer learns about the XML button is: DONT TOUCH IT!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem we need to address. And, even for sophisticated users as well as cutting edge marketers, the problem isn’t any easier. What if the customer is using one of the web-based RSS readers that has its own little icon like +MyYahoo, +MyMSN, Bloglines, Pluck, etc., etc., etc? How many icons do you display? Which ones are most popular? How many are too many? You get the idea.

I’ve seen some discussions on approaches to unify this including some nice JavaScript used by companies trying to support multiple RSS readers but none of the approaches seem simple enough for novices. If any of you have ideas on this, please send them my way.

You’ll see a lot more about my interest in RSS very shortly. In the mean time, I am super-excited about RSS and topics like this are near and dear to my [...]

As a long time consumer of The New York Times’ RSS feeds, I was delighted to see just how successful it has been for them. According to this article, over the twelve month period of March 2004 to March 2005, The NYTimes saw a 342% increase in page views associated with RSS feeds. Given that a large number of people (like me) probably just scan the summaries and only read a fraction of the articles, I suspect the actual impact their RSS program is much [...]

A friend of mine passed along this interesting piece of news: a new venture fund has been started exclusively to invest in RSS based businesses.

Even though RSS is a game-changing idea, having spent several years as a venture capitalist, I’m not sure an RSS fund is a slam dunk idea. The value proposition behind blogs, [...]

Blogging is a wonderfully confusing concept. It is important to point out that the world of blogging really exists on several different levels.

The first level is technical. Blogs are simple text or multimedia articles that are written and stored in a way that is easily organized and accessed.

The second level is also technical but it [...]