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Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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 Tuesday, October 18, 2005
started 10/18/2005; 8:09:51 AM - last post 10/19/2005; 1:44:20 PM
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Doc Searls - Tuesday, October 18, 2005 
10/18/2005; 12:09:51 PM (reads: 5862, responses: 2)
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Question 
Constructive feedback
| | Not sure how it happened, but I find myself subscribing to the email feed of Tom Hespos' OnlineSPIN ("Controversy Served Fresh Daily") from MediaPost Publications. And appreciating it. |
| | Tom is a funny guy, and he gets How It Works. For example, |
| | Over a Chinese food lunch, I solved all of the Digital Rights Management woes of all online research companies who release information online (eMarketer, Jupiter, Forrester, etc.). Here's the gist of it: |
| | 1) Completely fabricate 50% of your releases. ("Mobile Devices Reach 15.7% of U.S. Adult Population," "Google Unknown Brand to 74% of Internet-Connected Men," etc.) |
| | 2) Release all reports to the Internet-At-Large |
| | 3) Announce that a certain percentage of reports on your site have been pulled out of your ass. |
| | 4) Simultaneously announce that a subscription entitles you to know which reports are real and which are fake. |
| | You'll note that this takes care of the problem of what levels of detail need to be released to potential customers in order to give them enough of a "flavor" to actually PURCHASE the research. You can give them the whole thing! Except that they don't know whether it's fake or not... |
| | This strategy also has the added benefit of creating situations in which freeloading agencies and marketers will base entire presentations and marketing plans on erroneous intelligence, which will result in funny stories for industry insiders to mull over at the bar after work. |
| | THERE'S BEEN A RESURGENCE OF discussion about RSS and how it may change how content is consumed. These discussions invariably turn toward how publishers and marketers can leverage the channel. I've heard a lot of noise in the trade press recently about what publishers need to be thinking about when they decide to develop an RSS strategy. |
| | Surprisingly, a lot of what I've been reading lately hasn't focused on the RSS value proposition to the consumer, and what the consumer expectation is concerning RSS. And unless marketers and publishers understand these things, they can't hope to monetize RSS. |
| | For me, RSS has taken the place of what used to be several hours' worth of Web surfing in an average week. It condensed a tour of a couple dozen marketing trade sites, which used to take at least two hours, into a process that takes anywhere from 15 minutes to a half hour. The content is delivered to me on demand and in a format I control, reasonably free of clutter. |
| | Consumers also have a sense of pride in having a high degree of control over the content that reaches them through RSS. Forget about e-mail. The consumer never really had control in that medium. After all, once spammers and unscrupulous marketers latched on to an e-mail address, it's pretty much impossible to get them to let it go. By way of comparison, anyone getting content they don't like or want from an RSS feed can unsubscribe immediately and never receive anything from that feed again, should they so choose. |
| | I'd argue that this highly controlled, highly personalized environment can provide something of a learning opportunity for publishers and marketers.Unlike, say, a consumer's roster of e-mail newsletter subscriptions, I think a list of RSS feeds represents content that a consumer is truly interested in and engaged by. Given that publishers have some visibility into how often feeds are requested, which story abstracts are clicked and how consumers interact with feeds, there's a good deal to learn. For instance, by understanding the frequency with which consumers request feeds, how they request them (with or without search parameters, within which categories, etc.) and how often they drill down into story abstracts, a publisher could gain a much greater understanding of how to engage readers. One can see how an RSS test might also solve the often-asked CRM question --"How often do my subscribers want to receive new information from me?" |
| | There are a number of steps to take before trying to monetize RSS. One such step involves understanding what consumers expect from RSS. Another involves listening to what consumers are telling you through the medium. Consider these two at a minimum before you formulate any strategies to make a profit from your RSS subscribers. |
| | Good advice. Now for mine. |
| | First, get the Powers That Be at MediaPost to take down the annoying registration wall. Not sure if that's why, but I just looked up a unique word string and Hespos on Google and found nothing. Not sure if the registration wall is why, but the effect is Not Good. |
| | Second, syndicate the newsletters on the Web and not just via email. I see no RSS feature for OnlineSPIN. Maybe it's there somewhere, but I'm missing it. The RSS feed link (and little orange XML symbol) should be obvious. That way, OnLine Spin will show up in the RSS search engines. A search for Hespos on Technorati today yields results, but mostly just about the Contractor Issue. One more reason I suspect there's no RSS feed there. |
| | Third (this is old advice, but it bears repeating), drop the old-media jargon: "consumers", "consuming" and "content", for example. It's a rare writer who gets up in the morning and says "I need to produce some content for consumers in my medium today". We have readers and writers here. Publishers and subscribers. That's what makes us more powerful, and selective, than we were when all we did was passively watch TV and "consume" similar one-way "media". Or, when we got active, write a letter to the editor that might get published. |
| | Other than that, keep it up. And good luck with the construction project. |
In case you're sprinting a marathon
| | Here's a handy rule for startups: competitors are rarely as dangerous as they seem. Most will self-destruct before you can destroy them. And it certainly doesn't matter how many of them there are, any more than it matters to the winner of a marathon how many runners are behind him. |
Be prepared
As the Miller told her tale...
| | Meanwhile, the tune keeps running in my mind... |
| | That her face at first just ghostly... |
A question
| | If not, what do we call it? Tendvertising? |
The name alone is cool
| | Gada.be is working. Having fun playing with it. |
Breaking out of the box, through the bottom
| | What Doc's really talking about here is that as the value of each and every link falls with a proportionate rise in noise, then the very business model of search-and-find (as we know it) and advertising (as we know it) and rank (as we know it) have to change. That means the strategy, the model, the tools, the money, the everything.... |
| | And I'll get even more prophetic: Link-based search was neat. It's a good thing they gave it to us when they did. It made the web 1.0 fly. So did RSS. It's not going anywhere, but someone's going to find a way that is even more intuitive, that skates across spam but doesn't further silo the conversation by paving over neighborhoods that don't SEEM to matter. |
| | I don't want to be fed. I want to feast. |
| | SO, what's next. And quit looking to Google for the answer to why all of your also-ran stuff isn't working right now, fellas. Stop striking a pose long enough to innovate. I mean, it's gada.be you guys. Right? |
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Mike Warot - Re: Tuesday, October 18, 2005
10/19/2005; 7:44:14 AM (reads: 715, responses: 1)
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Doc... I just don't get RSS. What does it do that Gopher didn't?
--Mike--
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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, October 18, 2005
10/19/2005; 5:44:20 PM (reads: 804, responses: 0)
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Well, you might as easily ask, "What does the Web do that Gopher didn't?
Okay. You say What I'm looking for is something that can watch all of these sites, and just download the lastest articles on each into one place so I can read them. It would be nice if I could read them offline on the train during my commute, but that's not essential. It would be very nice if it tracked which ones I actually read.
For that you need an aggregator. Some aggregate RSS feeds in places other than browsers. Newsgator, for example, puts them in Outlook for you. I think that should show you what RSS does.
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