I recently traded emails with Fergus Burns of Nooked.com. Among other things I ended up soap-boxing a little (sorry, Fergus) about RSS and marketing, especially in regards to email. Here is an excerpt of my, erm, diatribe:

(August 20, 2005) “I think the deck is fairly well stacked for RSS/Atom being The Next Big Thing. The technology is there, the buy-in from the big guns (Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, etc.) is there, and the media is getting there. Granted, the big user base isn’t there… yet.

… [For marketing,] email as a viable way to reach people is on the decline. Email lists are falling out of vogue. Websites are plagued with users giving phony email addresses to avoid getting spam. Even Yahoo Groups lets you opt-out of email distribution and opt-in to an RSS feed instead. That’s the future of communication… heck, that’s the present.

The problem is, a lot of marketing techniques are still largely stuck in the past. Any advertising or direct marketing in email is considered spam by users these days, even if it isn’t …. Commerce via email is dying fast. Website advertising is doing better lately, but audiences have also gotten better at tuning out the banner ads. Unless the ads are related to the content of the website, as in Google Adwords or the like, effectiveness drops off pretty fast.

The beauty of RSS and Atom feeds is that they reach only the people who want them, thanks to the anonymous “pull” subscription model. This strikes me as a marketing dream come true. If you can couple a guaranteed perfect audience with context-appropriate, unobtrusive advertising… Google Adwords at the end of a feed comes to mind as such an easy win.”

Some of these sentiments are echoed today on eMediaWire in an article called “RSS Marketing Studies: Is RSS a Replacement for E-mail Marketing?” The article notes that RSS still has a pretty tiny audience, but everyone is betting that will change. Rok Hrastnik, arguably one of the most prolific authors on marketing with RSS, explains:

“Even though RSS is yet to reach mainstream usage, marketers need to start exploring it and implementing it in their strategies now. While some research studies can be interpreted as a ‘keep away’ sign for marketers, we need to take in to account that even right now 87 percent of influencers, such as journalists and analysts, are using RSS to collect key information and are adopting RSS as an information gathering and tracking tool, according to a recent Nooked survey. Furthermore, Microsoft has already announced full RSS support in the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and Internet Explorer 7, which will ensure mainstream RSS adoption. If marketers do not master this channel now, their competitors will certainly get an upper hand, just as we saw happen in the early days of e-mail marketing.”

If you have had any personal experiences where you have abandoned email subscriptions in favor of RSS/Atom feeds, feel free drop me a line or comment below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 17:54 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.