They form the essence of what we are, of what we aim to become and of what we wish to help other businesses with.

Their development is based on personal experience, exemplary business cases and proven marketing approaches as developed by other successful marketers. You may as well regard them as a collection of marketing concepts and ideas that have been proven in practice by many successful marketers.

The Pillars contain the essential marketing elements that can be applied to every business, carefully weighted and customized for the business' unique circumstances.

Instead of being tactical by nature, their importance is strategic, thus making them easily adjustable for any modern company that embraces change as the only reliable constant.

The Pillars are not to be used blindly, but rather with deep concentration on how they can be applied to a specific business in order to increase its marketing results and profits.

Consequently, all activities that include communication fall under marketing, especially sales, advertising and promotion, public relations and customer relationship marketing, as well as other communicational activities not generally associated with marketing, such as presentations, communication with government officials, communication with employees and similar.

All these must be integrated under the marketing function, all portraying the same image, gradually building it to one day become what the company envisions. Again, all communication a company has with anyone or through anyone builds its image.

Image is the combined result of all communication, whether be it for the purpose of sales or simply for the purpose of purchasing equipment or similar.

In addition, marketing should also be a process, not a one-time activity. Combining all communicational activities, setting guidelines for them and adjusting them accordingly to the marketing strategy will gradually form the wanted communicational process, where every activity will eventually lead to a sale or increased profits.

While specific marketing tactics are needed as well, they should be based on the long-term strategy, integrating all key marketing areas: sales, advertising and promotion, public relations, customer relationship management and complete external and internal company communications.

The strategy should especially include the following:

• Company mission statement and vision
• Target audiences definition and evaluation
• Company identity
• Purpose of marketing
• Market evaluation
• Business environment evaluation
• Long-term strategic goals
• Key competitive advantages and their further long-term development
• Marketing models
• Marketing process
• External and internal communication guidelines
• Client relationship management guidelines
• Evaluation and role of key marketing areas (sales, advertising and promotion, public relations, customer relationship management, complete external and internal company communications)
• Allocation of marketing resources, including the marketing budget
• Controlling guidelines

One sales and marketing myth needs to be addressed. The myth is: Mass marketing eliminates (or replaces) the need for personal, one-on-one sales.

Few marketers realize that sales and marketing are built on the firm foundation of successful ?one-on-one? sales of the product, in which the sales representative is selling ?in-person? to the customer standing before him. This is the essential element and often the real missing link in marketing.

Successful one-on-one sales give the marketer the information that is needed to implement a complete marketing campaign. They help establish a process or a system that can eventually (taking in to consideration the product/service and the actual business circumstances of the business in question) lead to successful sales even without the physical presence of the sales representative or the customer.

Not knowing what critically influences the prospect to make the buying decision makes any marketing approach or medium useless.

The key is in knowing how the prospect will respond when standing in front of the sales representative during a sales presentation. Only after this knowledge is acquired can it be applied to all other means of delivery of the actual message.

This needs to be done: identify and apply a process we can clearly define, support and maintain, re-establish, upgrade and duplicate every possible way, all the time, at every place, with anyone.

Successful marketing originates with a sale. Once you know (based on the experience of selling in-person) what influences your customer's decision to contact and buy from you, you simply send this message through various media into space.

Summing it up: Yes, you can run your business successfully without physical ?one-on-one? selling, but you usually can?t establish a consistently successful process of selling (even with a great marketing strategy) without first knowing the ?one-on-one? process.

Or you can ? but it won?t be based on an actual process, but rather on ?blind luck?. This means, you can?t use this knowledge to reestablish or copy your success, because circumstances ? customers, competition, market etc. ? will probably change and you have to know not only what is going on ? but also why.

That?s why everything begins and ends with the one-on-one experience.

a) Information spreads faster than ever.

b) New markets constantly rise and fall.

c) New market players are constantly entering existing markets or creating new markets.

d) New marketing techniques are introduced nearly daily.

e) Political and economical stability no longer exist.

f) Consumers are changing brands faster than ever before.

g) Technology is constantly improving --- thus making technology based competitive advantages nearly nonexistent.

This is the world we market in.

Marketers must embrace change as an advantage, exploiting it and finding new opportunities in it. And with change, marketers must change as well, adjusting to it and taking advantage of it.

Marketing strategies should be eternal. Today, they are not. Keep in mind your principal strategy, but don't be afraid to adjust it to change.

Become a fast moving business, ready to change if change so demands. Sooner or later it will ... grow with it, do not let it destroy you.

However, regardless of change, if something works, do not change it. Build on it. If you predict it will stop working, carefully evaluate, changing it only if it becomes evident change will bring greater results. If possible, test before changing.

Simply copying and implementing a marketing strategy or tactic of another company will not work. It takes in-depth modification, adjusting every facet to the unique environment the company operates in, to the unique situation it faces and to the unique areas that influence it.

A company is not only defined by its current activities and relationships, but also by all of its past activities that brought it where it is today. Every activity created a consequence, which had its part in making the company what it is.

If nothing else, a company differs from its competitors in regards to the values and attributes its clients, partners and other public segments give it. These values and attributes should not be described as better or worse, but simply different.

Consequently, not even two companies are alike, meaning each and every company requires a different marketing approach, a different strategy and a different set of tactics and tools.

Key success factors of a specific company originate from this company's current position, direction and all other defining elements.

The informational approach to marketing requires:

a) Acquiring information from target audiences.

b) Marketing to target audiences based on the acquired information.

c) Marketing to target audiences using information that is relevant to the audience or even more specifically to an individual prospect or client (educating them and supplying them with the information that is relevant to them).

d) Constantly improving each segment of the marketing process based on detailed statistical data and acquired information.

Client retention requires thorough client relationship management:

a) Gradually developing the relationship.

b) Attaining insight in to the client.

c) Attaining relevant information from the client.

d) Rewarding the client.

e) Adjusting marketing and communicational activities to the client and his preferences.

f) Finding what the client's needs and expectations are and then exceeding them.

g) Increasing the value of the client.

h) Increasing the client's satisfaction.

i) Keeping constant contact.

j) Listening.

Customer service is one of the basic elements of developing client relationships. Companies should continuously work on improving their customer service, thus increasing the client's satisfaction.

Customer service is not only a helpdesk or having an on-line support center, but is expanded to meeting every requirement of the client, as long as financially feasible. Customer service is about getting the company closer to the client --- doing the way the client wants it, without aggression or unwanted intrusion.

Without a precise plan marketing will only rarely work.

Furthermore, a precise plan will do no good unless it is precisely executed and followed.

Although this sounds natural, the picture in reality is different. Most marketers develop an excellent plan, but then implement it too loosely ... if at all.

2. Marketing is, in effect, salesmanship. Its only long-term purpose is making a sale. In order to achieve this it uses various vehicles, such as branding, relationship management, lead generation, etc. However, marketing does not work if it does not generate sales.

Anyway, I hope that John still changes his mind and contributes to the debate again, especially because of the changes it's facing.

And now to my responses to John's article ...

"First of all, as the title of one of Rok's articles which was published in WebProNews, so clearly states, he is working on the premise that email marketing can and should be "saved." I am of the opinion that email marketing cannot be saved, nor should it be. I see nothing all so special about email marketing that makes saving it all that important."

Actually, the title of that article was changed by the editor. I agreed with the change, but I however do not think that RSS will save e-mail. It is simply not designed to do so --- but it definitely will add to the content delivery mechanics in many ways most cannot imagine today.

I'm sorry if my articles sounded as if I am again RSS, because I'm not. If I were than I wouldn't be publishing in RSS, would I?

But more on this in some of the future articles ...

"I think that the reason we disagree is that we have two very different definitions of what constitutes email marketing. Rok is looking at the kind of email marketing done by large corporations or corporate wanna-bees. People like ClickZ. the various iEntry newsletters, or the big "bulk" mailing services like PostMasterDirect. BTW, WebProNews is an iEntry newsletter and so they have a vested interest in disparaging any competition to their kind of email marketing."

I wouldn't agree with John's statements here.

1) I am not looking at the kind of e-mail marketing done by large corporations. The e-mail marketing I'm talking about is being conducted here, in Slovenia, all the time, some even by me.

I don't think this is a "corporation VS entrepreneur" issue. It is however a content delivery and communicational issue and as such it touches everyone marketing in the modern world.

Yes, e-mail has some problems, but no business can turn away from it without risking powerful content delivery, communication and marketing disadvantages. E-mail simply is one of the most important media of the present.

E-mail in itself is not bad, but unfortunately most of its uses are, due to irresponsible and uneducated marketing. That however does not mean that e-mail is bad.

2) WebProNews actually, contrary to what John is saying, has no problem with RSS, which you can see for yourself if you browse their web site and their educational articles on RSS.

"These companies have huge budgets and in-house programmers that allow them to utilize technology in their email sending not readily available to the small independent entrepreneur. One of Rok's complaints about RSS is a lack of personalization. However, if you use a basic list server (either a script on your own server or one of the third-party services commonly used by the small independent publishers), the only customization you can do is name and email address. Heck, any spammer with a good harvester can get that information from your web site, I get a ton of spam that has my name and email address in it. but I never signed up for their list."

I disagree. Many of the e-mail deployment service providers offer advanced e-mail capabilities, but they of course do come at a small fee.

It all comes down to what you are ready to invest in your business. Every small business running a profitable operation can afford some of the better e-mail systems tailored to small publishers.

The problem is that most small publishers really don't want to spend any money on such services, at least not in the US. In the end we'll all have to realize that making something requires investing something. And yes, I have to realize that as well ...

Furthermore, when I talk of personalization I do not mean only personalization by name, but other advanced things we can do with e-mail today, such as choosing what content we wish to receive from a publisher (this is more of a customization issue, but still), etc.

What I'm talking about is making use of one of the most important benefits the Internet has to offer --- tailoring the information feed to our own needs ... and the publishers' capability to personalize communication in such a way that it becomes more effective marketing wise.

"So, basic RSS feeds do not allow you to put the recipient's name in it. So what? I don't know about you, but I'd rather receive information I wanted without my name on it, than information I have no interest in with my name."

John definitely got this right. Content is still king, as is sending your content (and receiving) only to people that want it. In the end the only real benefit we can provide to our subscribers as publishers is the content we offer them ...

But, if you want to see how personalization really works for the benefit of the subscriber, go to www.babycenter.com and subscribe to their newsletter ...

"When I did my newsletter via email, the script I used to send (provided by my web host) allowed for personalization of name and email address in the message. But that made little difference in the click-thrus or the sales I made. I think Rok overemphasizes the importance of doodads like personalization. Unless you have the wherewithal to afford the very sophistacted and expensive technology that allows for you to personalize the content in your email messages, then this point is worthless."

Again I disagree.You do not need very expensive technology for advanced personalization. In effect that is the least of your worries.

It's far more difficult preparing the various pieces of content for personalization and making personalization actually work than it is getting the technology puzzle together ...

"Also, this technology requires a lot more technical ability than even the average RSS aggregator. Most publishers are not programmers, nor do they have one on staff. I doubt if most entrepreneur publishers could even afford to hire a programmer to set this up for them."

This is probably one of the largest points of difference between me and John ... and probably the reason why we shouldn't have started this debate in the first place.

I focus (my content and everything I do) on the small and mid-sized businesses, but not on the home-based businesses and people trying to make a living on the Internet.

John on the other hand focuses on home-based business and helping individuals succeed.

From my point of view both of our approaches are valid, but we each focus on our different target audiences.

Perhaps the terminology above is wrong and it might be better saying that I focus on groups of people building a company and John focuses on individuals trying to better their lives through the Internet and trying to build small individual home businesses to quit their jobs.

Again, both of our approaches are valid, but they are respectively targeted at the people we serve.

John, please correct me if I'm wrong ...

"The best way for small entrepreneur publishers to personalize their newsletters is by developing very focused niches and providing content targeted to that niche. We cannot and should not be everything to everyone. Independent publishers need to focus their content and focus it very tightly. If we provide tightly focuses high quality original content, our reader will not care whether we put their names in our newsletters. The only time we need to worry about including their names is in private communications."

I do agree.

"Another issue that Rok raises is that anyone can subscribe to an RSS feed. Well, last time I looked very few free email newsletters had any restrictions on who subscribed to their lists either. I have no idea what email lists he had in mind when he made that comment. All the lists I belong to or have ever belonged to, and that has included ClickZ, a number of iEntry newsletters, and several lists maintained by PostMasterDirect, none of them have ever restricted me from subscribing to their lists as long as provided them with an email address and my name. So I do not see the problem here."

This issue perhaps even better paints the differences between our target audiences.

When I speak of e-mail publishing and marketing I think about all the target audiences a company should focus on, including your employees, business partners, sales reps, etc.

When you communicate with these you naturally do not want everyone to see your communication. You want to send your messages only to the people that qualify.

For instance, a company I'm consulting in Slovenia uses different e-zines to separately communicate with their prospects, customers and sales reps.

John on the other hand is speaking only about mass e-mail communications targeted mostly at a company's prospects and customers.

On the other hand I do admit to giving RSS and its future development less credit than it deserves. You see, during this debate I perhaps took a wrong approach and mixed together content warehousing and content delivery. RSS is only the medium of delivery, what we do with the content in order to deliver it in a targeted manner we must do before actually delivering it --- RSS is not a part of that puzzle ...

More on this in some of the future articles ...

"Rok sees small independent publishers and marketers as insignificant and of little consequence in the future of marketing. He feels that the future of marketing will be determined by the large corporate entities like those listed above."

I wouldn't agree with this statement, but that's not the actual point here. I am not writing about the future of marketing in a general sense, but about what companies can do to better market themselves.

"So, having said that, my participation in this debate is over. I see no point in continuing this discussion. We are arguing from two different basic paradigms and neither of us will change any time soon. I wish Rok well preaching to the dinosaurs. And I will continue preaching to the ourtcasts. Only time will tell which of us is right."

John, thank you for participating in the debate. I do hope you will take the time to read some of the forthcoming articles and will yet decide to partake in the debate again.

I wish you all the success.

The Death of eMail Debate: My Final Comments

by John Botscharow [web site]

Rather than continue the exchange ad infinitum, I am going to make some final comments to summarize my own views on this discussion and then move on to other topics. Rok and I could continue this discussion from now to the Second Coming and neither of us will convert the other because of some fundamental differences I will explain below.

First of all, as the title of one of Rok's articles which was published in WebProNews, so clearly states, he is working on the premise that email marketing can and should be "saved." I am of the opinion that email marketing cannot be saved, nor should it be. I see nothing all so special about email marketing that makes saving it all that important.

I think that the reason we disagree is that we have two very different definitions of what constitutes email marketing. Rok is looking at the kind of email marketing done by large corporations or corporate wanna-bees. People like ClickZ. the various iEntry newsletters, or the big "bulk" mailing services like PostMasterDirect. BTW, WebProNews is an iEntry newsletter and so they have a vested interest in disparaging any competition to their kind of email marketing.

These companies have huge budgets and in-house programmers that allow them to utilize technology in their email sending not readily available to the small independent entrepreneur. One of Rok's complaints about RSS is a lack of personalization. However, if you use a basic list server (either a script on your own server or one of the third-party services commonly used by the small independent publishers), the only customization you can do is name and email address. Heck, any spammer with a good harvester can get that information from your web site, I get a ton of spam that has my name and email address in it. but I never signed up for their list.

So, basic RSS feeds do not allow you to put the recipient's name in it. So what? I don't know about you, but I'd rather receive information I wanted without my name on it, than information I have no interest in with my name.

When I did my newsletter via email, the script I used to send (provided by my web host) allowed for personalization of name and email address in the message. But that made little difference in the click-thrus or the sales I made. I think Rok overemphasizes the importance of doodads like personalization. Unless you have the wherewithal to afford the very sophistacted and expensive technology that allows for you to personalize the content in your email messages, then this point is worthless.

Also, this technology requires a lot more technical ability than even the average RSS aggregator. Most publishers are not programmers, nor do they have one on staff. I doubt if most entrepreneur publishers could even afford to hire a programmer to set this up for them.

I used to have a script I bought a few years that cost me about $50 which was designed to automate my personal email tasks and personalize the content in those automatic responses I gave uo in the program because you had to have more techical skills to set up and run the program than I, or most independent publishers, had or have or ever want to have.

The best way for small entrepreneur publishers to personalize their newsletters is by developing very focused niches and providing content targeted to that niche. We cannot and should not be everything to everyone. Independent publishers need to focus their content and focus it very tightly. If we provide tightly focuses high quality original content, our reader will not care whether we put their names in our newsletters. The only time we need to worry about including their names is in private communications.

Another of his objections is a lack of advanced metrics. Here again the reason for this complaint has to do with his basic assumption of what email marketing is. I certainly would hope that those people who pay the kind of money that the big corporate mailing houses charge are getting advanced metrics. But the basic list servers used by small independent publishers do not provide those kinds of metrics. Actually, the service I use now for my newsletter, which is RSS-based, provides better metrics than most of the services used by independent email publishers.

Another issue that Rok raises is that anyone can subscribe to an RSS feed. Well, last time I looked very few free email newsletters had any restrictions on who subscribed to their lists either. I have no idea what email lists he had in mind when he made that comment. All the lists I belong to or have ever belonged to, and that has included ClickZ, a number of iEntry newsletters, and several lists maintained by PostMasterDirect, none of them have ever restricted me from subscribing to their lists as long as provided them with an email address and my name. So I do not see the problem here.

To sum all this up, the reason Rok and I do not agree on the future of email marketing is that we have a very different understanding of email marketing. Rok sees small independent publishers and marketers as insignificant and of little consequence in the future of marketing. He feels that the future of marketing will be determined by the large corporate entities like those listed above.

I see those corporate entities as the problem with marketin g, not the solution. To me, the people who will determine the future of marketing on the Internet are the small independents. They are the ones who will provide the high-quality content that people are looking for, they are the ones who will be the driving force behind the technological advances in marketing.

So, having said that, my participation in this debate is over. I see no point in continiuing this discussion. We are arguing from two different basic paradigms and neither of us will change any time soon. I wish Rok well preaching to the dinosaurs. And I will continue preaching to the ourtcasts. Only time will tell which of us is right.

"But you can also use RSS to receive personal messages without spam. As a publisher or affiliate of Q, you get your own private QMTP channel for personal messages. Here's the link to mine. For more information on how the QMTP private messaging system works, click here."

Yes, you can use RSS to receive personal messages without spam. You can do that with other technologies as well ... and quite easily for that ...

But the other question is do you really want to do that? Do you want to force people to use some web form to communicate with you?

The point is that every other option for easy communication falls short in many areas, still keeping e-mail on top. Whether RSS will replace e-mail as the preferred content delivery tool is yet to be seen, but it cannot and will not replace e-mail communications. Believing that it will is not only naive, but goes against all logic.

Communication requires at least two parties - this means that both parties need the same communication technology. Right now (on the Internet) that's e-mail and IM.

You could say that every communication enabling technology has to start somewhere - and give the telephone as an example. That's true, but only if the need to use the new technology is immediate and if the new technology offers huge improvements. When it comes to personal communication and e-mail this simply is not so.

And even is something does replace e-mail as the preferred communication tool, it will need to be something that is easier to use, not more difficult.

To conclude: is RSS adoption anywhere near enough the critical mass needed to use it as a communication tool? No.

On another hand --- new e-mail clients should ease the problems with e-mail, and some future version of e-mail just might take them away altogether.

"And honestly, what the casual Internet user is doing is irrelevant to me or my target market. They only matter to us when they become non-casual users - when they become entrepreneurs."

That might be the case with John, but not with every other internet publisher out here. Please do remember that this is a discussion on a topic that influences the complete Internet market. We cannot simply isolate a single market segment and debate on that ... This is a much larger issue.

At more than 16 million, the self-employed and owners of "microbusinesses" (10 or fewer employees) make up more than half of all businesses in the United States, produce more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars in annual economic activity and make astounding tax contributions ($33.4 billion in 2000) --- Bahl's Business Communications

Yes, but will all these switch to RSS? What we forget is the fact that most of these are not really computer savvy ... and will stick to what they know and already use ...

? RSS usage and news aggregator adoption is very limited at this time. Hence, the reach for your RSS feed is currently shallow.

"So was the use of HTML in email at first. Then HTML became the format of choice for email marketing, but now, thanks to the spam filters set up by your ISP, the only ones who consistently use HTML email are the spammers and scammers and the sheep-shearers. These filters are forcing legitimate marketers to go back to the Stone Age of eamil. The sorry thng about all this is that it has had little effect on the volume of spam."

This is not a very appropriate argument, because when HTML e-mail started being used most of the e-mail clients supported it. HTML e-mail (for the majority of users) did not require new software and a whole new way of receiving content. HTML e-mail was the natural upgrade of the e-mail medium.

It is also not true that HTML e-mail is used consistently only by spammers, scammers and sheep-shearers. Most of the largest (and best reputed) e-mail publications are produced and delivered in HTML.

? RSS is only text. Those great images you put on your site and in your e-newsletters are lost in an RSS feed.

"Excuse me? Take a look at the Daily with a good aggregator like Awasu. I've got lots of graphics. Every artcile has a picture. And RSS is capable of lots more. That's why it's called Rich Site Summary."

This is not exactly correct. The articles John's is referring to are actually HTML and not RSS. RSS is only used to deliver the headline, summary and link to the actual article, which is an HTML based document (or .php, .asp, etc.). In this case the aggregator also functions as a browser and displays the web page.

The actual content is normally accessible through the Web and has no connection whatsoever with RSS.

? There is currently no way to know how many people use your RSS feed and what the open and click-through rates are on RSS syndicated content

"Again, he is quoting the received wisdom about RSS. The stats I get through Quikonnex give me almost as much information as my Webalizer does for my web site. And if I felt it was important, I can set up each article to give me click-throughs very easily. The stats I watch are the number of unique uses of the XML feed (actual RSS subscribers) and the number of people using the online page for the Daily, as well as how may PHPNuke sites are picking up the feed. Being a Nuker, that is important to me and Q set up a separate feed for us Nukers that takes into consideration the specific code requirements of Nuke sites."

Yes, some statistics are available, but not nearly enough to allow for advanced usage metrics.

You don't know the number of your subscribers, you don't know the number of your unsubscribes and you cannot get a reliable open-rate (which you also cannot get with e-mail).

The actual clickthroughs in the articles are not relevant here - that's the Web, not RSS.

When talking about metrics it's very important to distinguish between the metrics you can get from your RSS feed and the metrics you can get from your Web page (which is where the RSS feed takes you after you click on the desired item).

Well, he said yes ... and sent me the very same article I'm talking about above.

Actually, the article says just about everything about RSS ... well, not everything, but comes pretty close to it. That at least makes my job for my next article easier:)

It's a great read ... so go ahead ...

The Future of RSS - Is E-Mail Publishing Dead?

RSS-based Information And News Feeds: Pros and Cons For Content Distribution Through RSS

by Robin Good, http://www.masternewmedia.org/

RSS is good because it gives back to individual users the power to choose and select content. This, along with timeliness, portability and cost-effectiveness, are probably the best reasons why you should understand how and why RSS is going to change the way you select and receive your information, news and updates.

Is RSS Going to Replace E-Mail?

As my first and most immediate answer I must say that the question has been wrongly posed. E-mail is a two-way communication medium while RSS is only a distribution one. From that simple realization, you can immediately derive that e-mail is here to stay, while RSS may well poised to substantially challenge e-mail in its ability to be the best and preferred distribution/subscription mechanism for newsletter publishers on the Internet.

The issue is still hot and being discussed in many online forums and discussion lists, though, until now, reserved to an audience of veteran computer users, Internet pioneers and geeks. According to several industry analysts, researchers and technologists writing in the noosphere, email is soon to be dead and RSS will be the prince coming to mourn at her death Web. Unless you go and read carefully what is being written and sometimes easily skipped over, it would appear as if RSS was not coming by to save or resurrect email, but to replace her with a new way of messaging and communicating with each other.

Much of the confusion and misunderstanding stems from the fact that RSS is an acronym that few understand, and one that has multiple meanings (RSS stands for "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication" or "Really Stops Spam," depending upon your preference). RSS is also something that once you have read its description, you know less about it than you did before. In essence, very few understand what RSS is and why it is something of relevance to many of us. In such an eco-confused information space, readers, information seekers and independent publishers are somewhat confused about how to proceed, how much hype is in the RSS news, and what is in store for them in this fast-changing communication formula.

One way out of this confusion is to start adopting terms that would allow popularization of the term and easier understanding of what benefits it provides. The terms information and/or news-feed appear in my opinion to be the ones best suited for this task.

What is RSS?

RSS is an old technology that originated with Netscape. RSS allows readers to sign-up and to receive news, headlines and short summaries from websites, weblogs, and online newsletters. In order to do so, RSS subscribers must download and install a so-called news reader or aggregator (not to be confused with the more traditional type of newsreaders used to access Usenet forums and discussions).

Newsreaders and News aggregators - Where to find them

Many newsreaders and aggregators exist today on the market. The most popular ones are: Newzcrawler, AmphetaDesk, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator, Newsmonster, and Radio Userland.  For more resources, please see: Lockergnome RSS Resources, RSS Resources, RSS Readers, or
RSS Info.

To simplify your task of evaluating and better understanding RSS, I have summarized the key positive aspects of RSS-based information feeds for email publishing and distribution.

The Positive Aspects of RSS-based newsfeeds

Using RSS as a source of timely and up-to-date information is a positive evolution and a definite step forward from where we are now. The advantages of RSS over traditional emails are:

1) RSS is timely. Subscribers get updates and breaking news as soon as they are published and not on the date the newsletter is due. RSS allows us to plug into selected sources of information, like independent reporters, researchers and industry analysts and when they disseminate or report some new information, it allows us to be the first to get it, without having to subscribe to any newsletter, or having to disclose our email address to a new, unknown company.

2) RSS is cost-effective. Cost of delivery and distribution is reduced dramatically. No more paying a mailing list distribution provider, nor having to format and layout news and articles for a different media than the website.

3) RSS is standards-compliant. (If wanted) Maximum compatibility is preserved allowing email subscribers with text, HTML, AOL or MIME Multipart preferences to all receive well formed news updates perfectly compatible with your email client.

4) RSS is email independent. Email client not required. RSS news and feeds can be easily read online, aggregated into a web page journal/portal, sent out to SMS clients or managed to create new online content.

5) RSS can be fully integrated fully in your email. Yes, no one forbids the final user from using new services and tools which do allow perfect integration and receipt of RSS feeds inside your email Inbox (e.g., NewsGator, BlogStreet Info Aggregator).

6) RSS facilitates organization of content. Relevant messages can be easily archived, sorted and organized according to topic, in a fully automated way, something impossible with previously non-standard newsletters.

7) The subscriber is again in full control. Subscription and removal from a news feed is totally under the control of the user, unlike now where users may receive many newsletters that make it very hard or unintuitive to unsubscribe.

8) RSS is private. Privacy and security protection. RSS subscriber never have to provide an email address to their selected information provider. Publishers cannot as a consequence easily resell those emails to unscrupulous marketers and email spammers. RSS is hardly spammable as you always know the source of each news item received, and there is no easy way yet to easily hack into the system.

9) RSS is fully resuable. RSS is a structured, re-usable content protocol that allows the content to be reused for many other purposes: feeding of other news channels and Web pages, integration into dynamic libraries and learning objects.

10) RSS is searchable. RSS can be fully indexed and searched just as Google does with the HTML content on the Internet. See Feedster for a great live example.

11) RSS is secure. RSS cannot yet carry viruses or trojans like a newsletter or email attachment can. If it did, you could easily isolate and identify the source of your infection.

12) RSS is modifiable. Even after it has been sent out. Nobody forbids your ability to change a current posting, or revise an errata, and thus RSS subscribers indeed seamlessly receive that posted update. As a matter of fact, RSS posts can be also removed or expired, and while some would argue that this is not completely feasible, there is certainly a wide open opportunity to explore further in this direction.

13) RSS will be seamless to use. While not yet so, we are getting closer and closer to having news readers and aggregators fully integrated in email or so easy to use that it will not be a problem anymore suggesting their adoption to novice and non-technical users.

14) RSS feeds are not blocked by spam and email filters. As newsletter publishers know very well, the battle to overcome the spam barriers raised by spam and email filters is getting harder everyday while RSS-based news feeds have no such problem.

15) RSS can be monetized. RSS can support free as well as paid content distribution. Some publishers have already started text ads into their RSS-delivered news feeds. The good news is that if you don't like it, you can unsubscribe in a matter of seconds, without having to ask anyone's permission.

16) RSS adds value. When RSS provides an easy to use complement to your site, it clearly becomes a free value-added service. As a matter of fact, this is already happening. Lockergnome's RSS Resource and Amazon.com Syndicated Content feeds are two great examples of this.

17) RSS paves the road for true ethical marketing. As RSS feeds provide a simple and effective way to create specialized subscription channels for your customers and potential clients. As RSS allows them to receive the specific kind of information they seek, it is perceived as a tremendous bonus and as an opportunity to simplify and reduce readers effort to reach, filter out and access the type of information they are looking for. As a consequence, there is no need for the publisher to utilize advertising to become sustainable, as the publisher HAS all of the user attention and need only to provide what the user is looking for.

RSS Cons: RSS-based problems and possible limitations

1) RSS tools may be trojans for malicious software. Pre-assembled aggregators and newsreaders that contain spyware and other malicious code.

2) E-marketing through RSS. RSS marketing may soon be the new trendy buzzword in e-marketing circles. If you come to think of it, there is no embedded mechanism inside RSS that prevents me from posting plain marketing and promotional news items and having them sent out via RSS to anyone subscribing to my feed. While this is not a problem per se, it may be possible that much of our present day pure news feeds will soon be enriched with advertising and other non-related items. The good news is that if and when that happens, unsubscribing from any newsfeed will just be one click away from you.

3) Limited formatting options. You can have images, yes, but you certainly can't choose where they are going to be positioned on the page. Forget also about having Verdana 12 point in bold in one section, versus Times New Roman in another one.

4) RSS cannot be easily measured, tracked and accounted for. For now, there are no simple or automated ways to account for how many RSS subscribers you have to your own feeds, unless you set up private access and you control it through a registration or subscription mechanism.

5) RSS is hard to grasp. It has been difficult to popularize as a "concept," as many people can hardly make any meaning out of an acronym by itself. Once we find a good way to popularize its role and function and identify a label to better refer to it, we may also see a tremendous jump in rate of  adoption. ("Newsfeed" is already a good step in this direction.)

6) RSS requires us to adopt yet one more tool. Currently, accessing RSS-based news feeds requires a separate software tool. This may prevent novice and non-technical users from easily adopting RSS as a format that they can fully leverage to stay updated on their favorite sites.

7) RSS restrains editorial abilities. Publishers are limited in the ways they can organize and prioritize the coverage of their news content through this new medium. Their ability to showcase, summarize, introduce or open up a newsletter is mostly unusable when distributing news and info via RSS.

8) RSS leaves online publishers with no mailing list. Publishers do not have a mailing list of those seeking information from them and it becomes harder for them to introduce advertising and promotional messages not strongly related with their focus as these will strongly affect reader interest and willingness to keep reading/subscribing. As subscribers to RSS-based information feeds do not need to share their private emails with content publishers, they indirectly force information publishers to maintain higher quality standards of publication and to have a strong focus on their selected topics of interest. On the other hand, publishers can still grow marketing lists by offering selected "premium" channels only to subscribing customers.

9) RSS offers no "reply" button. As of now, RSS offers no way of replying or communicating directly to your information source. It is likely that this limitation will soon be overcome by complementary features, plugins and services filling in this critical gap.

10) RSS is a bandwidth hog. Some criticize the fact that RSS readers and news aggregators have to visit a news address frequently to check for updates and new posts. The critics argue that this utilizes an enormous amount of bandwidth uselessly as supposedly newsreaders and aggregators would attempt to pool info from those sites several times a day. (If you look at the issue from a different point of view, you can see how a much larger bandwidth is actually used when Internet users seek information by surfing to unknown sites and online resources which, rich in images and other bandwidth hogs such as Javascript, tables and visual ads, require much more bandwidth to display than any RSS information feed I have seen so far.)

11) RSS comes in many flavours. Recently RSS has seen a number of different versions of its specification appear, and therefore it should come as no surprise to see listings indicating support for RSS 0.9, 1.x, 2.x. There is indeed a set of different possible implementations of RSS with differing qualities and capabilities. Suffice it to say for now that most news readers and aggregators read all of these different formats, making the issue not critical for end users. It is rather on the part of both content publishers and subscribers to activate and engage themselves in understanding which of possible standards may best benefit their specific needs and requirements.

Conclusion

In the wake of the quickly spreading rumour, Email is Dead, long live RSS, the superficial, non-technical reader lost early reference to the fact that what is being really touted is the death of e-mail publishing such as newsletter distribution and mail discussion lists. It is these type of email communications that according to these authors would be soon succumbing to an RSS flavoured distribution medium, and not the whole email-based exchange universe.

So we are in effect not talking at all about the possible death of email as we now know it (though a good review of it - how we use it and misuse it - is way overdue) but about the raise of RSS-based news feeds as an effective and efficient distribution medium for news, newsletter type content and other selected and highly focused types of information. Jon Udell writes to support the need for a more reliable email system: "Of the various proposals floating around, the RMX idea -- a DNS-based solution that enables a receiving mail server to verify whether the sender's IP address is authorized to send from the domain within the sender's address -- seems particularly interesting."

Electronic inter-personal and business exchanges will still largely utilize traditional email, although for the vast majority, this is becoming harder and harder to manage in an effective way.

Email is Dead -- Long Live RSS:  With mailboxes overflowing with junk mail, users have stopped reading email or have imposed spam blockers, which often block legitimate mail as well as junk. According to a survey by ReturnPath, an email list hygiene company, "17% of permission-based e-mail -- mail that users previously said they would like to receive -- was incorrectly blocked by the top 12 Internet service providers during the first half of 2003."

I have been able to verify that unless specific precautions are taken in the distribution of an email newsletter, over 50% of them may bounce off spam filters, be deleted or never reach the final user. And that is a lot of valuable resources put to waste. When I see that over 3,000 of my newsletter copies are not reaching my own long standing subscribers, I can certainly empathize with RSS promoters and can fully see the advantages and benefits I and some of my readers would get out of leveraging RSS to its fullest.

Three points to avoid RSS confusion syndrome

a) Newsreaders and aggregators
A news aggregator is a dedicated software program capable of contacting and gathering pre-selected news items posted at specific addresses on the Internet. What the news aggregator does is simply to go out to the URL/addresses you have specified, collect the information stored inside an auto-generating file that sits invisibly next to certain Web pages (and which contains all of the most recent updates to that page) and bring that information back inside the newsreader/aggregator while storing that information in a specific folder you have specified. So, as long as you know how to write the syntax and grammar of that invisible RSS/RDF/XML file(s) that sits idle on your server, you are in full control of what subscribers to your RSS feed will see/read. Since few people enjoy creating an RSS feed by hand, new publishing tools have been developed to facilitate this task.

b) Will RSS replace email even for personal communications?
Most people interested in finding out more about RSS and its future have been wondering how RSS could ever supplant altogether email and how we would then go about sending a message to a friend, work colleague, customer or business prospect in such RSS-enabled future.

Though I may raise a ton of suspicious eyebrows with this affirmation I am prone to believe that solid and certified individual authentication maybe the only solid answer to this digital communication problem deriving from the fact that people can act with absolute anonymity. Take away the anonymity from the education and the problem is easily solved. While this does not mean that I must surrender my complete ability to stay anonymous online, it establishes the option for those needing to carry out serious business online to do so by allowing themselves to be authenticated and certified for who they really are. Then we need not worry anymore about SPAM.

The level of authentication required in this vision would allow anyone who wished to obtain a personal identity token by utilizing a combination of digital authentication technologies (fingerprinting, voice, iris-scan, etc.) complemented by the intervention of a trusted and certified human notary who would have to take under his responsibility and good name that the person being authenticated is actually the one he or she declares to be. Once a solid authentication mechanism is in place the road to block everything not coming from trusted or "known" sources becomes extremely easy to implement.

Now imagine having an RSS feed address that is not available publicly. You could have such an RSS feed reserved, for example, for all of the information you need to pass onto your team. If you assume that email was not there, it would be apparent to you that you could indeed post all of the information relating to team work and assignments on a non-public page on your site, generate an RSS channel and send the URL/address channel to all of the people in your team. You can easily see that once they have set-up their news aggregator to read that special address you have provided, they all have a way to receive all of the information you want them to receive without having to use traditional email.

c) Potential for independent publishers to offer Premium content information-feeds
If you have been wondering how to obtain the maximum gain from RSS feeds while being able to maintain a growing list of subscribers my suggestion is to consider creating "private," premium, fee-based RSS feeds to your preferred paying customers.

Simply offer a subscription box that collects for you the names and emails of those who want to benefit from this free service. Then send them a small newsreader preconfigured to read the RSS feeds your customer has requested. (Send out in exchange for a reader email both an effective newsreader and a list of RSS feeds to receive automatically as soon as the tool is setup.) In this fashion, you get to keep your growing mailing list, which remains of critical importance to build business and marketing opportunities, while simplifying the subscribers job of having to download a newsreader, having to set it up and having to configure it to receive your feeds. A bit too much indeed to ask from your patient and often non-technical readers).

Overall, RSS is the best method available today to receive news updates, site changes and information feeds from your selected sources while avoiding the usual amount of search, navigation and ancillary interruption advertising required to receive most valuable content online.

References

Email is Dead -- Long Live RSS

The End of E-Mail?, September 1, 2003

Is RSS the Answer to the Spam Crisis? by Ryan Naraine

RSS Feeds are the Better Email Newsletters

Is RSS Email's Savior - Or Just Overhyped?

RSS replacing email? email dead?

RSS and email(ing lists) links and references

RSS definition
Short for RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary, an XML format for syndicating Web content. A Web site that wants to allow other sites to publish some of its content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. A user that can read RSS-distributed content can use the content on a different site. Syndicated content includes such data as news feeds, events listings, news stories, headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums or even corporate information. ]]> 2007-02-19T23:25:38Z 2003-10-20T12:47:34+00:00 tag:www.marketingstudies.net,2003:/blogs/database//3.51 2003-10-20T12:47:34Z