written by John Botscharow, 3R-Marketing.com
[contributing columnist]

I want to start a serious discussion about marketing without email, focusing on using channels. For those of you not familiar with that term, by channel I mean an RSS feed that goes direct from a database on a server to your computer. The only think that you the reader need is a piece of software called a news reader in order to decode the specially coded feed in XML,which is a simplified form of HTML.

The advantages of RSS feeds is that they do not go through any spam filters, so you and the publisher can rest assured that the content you want, which he is providing, will get delivered. Secondly, as far as I am aware, there is no spam. You cannot receive a feed without asking for it. Readers can subscribe or unsubscribe very easily without any participation by the publisher. The reader is in total control of what feeds he or she receives.

RSS was developed and has traditionally been used as a very efficient and highly effective syndication tool. By syndication I mean making content available from your site so it can be used, in summary form, on other people's web sites. It's a way of sharing your articles without resorting to email and this is what my new Headlines channel is going to do for me. But that assumes that the site using the content has the ability to translate XML code into HTML. Setting up that service is not difficult, but it is not a general practice as of yet. More on the subject of syndication in the near future.

What has happened in the last six months or so, is the development of a community of publishers that were tired of all the problems associated with email publishing and who wanted an alternative way to publish their newsletters. I am speaking of Quikonnex, of course. These publishers, along with the founders of Quikonnex, have been pushing the envelope of what can be done using RSS in combination with other technology. I am not going to explain the detailed technical mechanics of how this all works, because, quite frankly, I don't understand it all myself. But the way I see it, I do not need to. I do not need to know the inner workings of the gasoline combustion engine and all of the other mechanical parts of a car to be able to drive it. The same goes for my channels. As long as I know how to get from point A to point B safely and efficiently, I do not need to understand the physics of the vehicle that got me there. All I need to know is how to drive it.

So, my discussions of the various ways to use channels in marketing will not be the geeky stuff that you see when you click on the links most people provide when they try to explain RSS. That's neat stuff, perhaps, but you can do a channel easily without ever reading one line of the tech talk. I tried to read it but did not understand it. I do understand how to drive my channels though!

It's like driver education in high school. We learned the basics of how the car works. This is the engine. You put gasoline into the car to feed the engine which makes the car go and more simple stuff like that. Then you learned the rules of the road. You learned about stop signs, traffic lights, the markings on the road, which side of the road you drive on and all the preliminary stuff that you need to know before you get behind the wheel. Well, let me qualify that - not all of it. IMHO, there seems to be a serious lack of the rules of etiquette when it comes to driving based on my experience with driving here in the USA. I've never done much driving outside of the US, so I cannot comment on the situation in other countries.

The information superhighway is much the same though. Lots of stuff on how to drive your marketing vehicle, but very little on online etiquette. Most publishers learn online etiquette the hard way - through the college of hard knocks.It is etiquette that separates channel publishers from email publishers more than anything else. How, you ask?

Email marketing really is an offensive, in the sense of a bad odor being offensive not in the sense of offense versus defense, way to market. It is, IMHO, the online equivalent of the pushy telemarketer or the stereotypical used car salesman. It is, to use an American slang expression, in your face marketing. It is pushy and insistent and demanding of your readers, even if you are sending good information. I never was all that comfortable with marketing that way. Being pushy is not my style and, admit it, email marketing is pushy!

The onus is on the subscriber. They have to download your email when you send it. Granted they have to open their email clients first. But the reader has no control over what is in his in box unless he chooses to use those quasi-reliable filters. All email publishers are quite familiar with stories of filters deleting messages that should not have been deleted. We are also very familiar with getting messages that we did not want. I still check my email a couple of times a day, because some people and companies still insist on using email to send information I want. But well over 90% of the mail I get is garbage I never asked for, have no interest in, and find extremely offensive. I am a male and my wife has no complaints about my penis. I do need Viagra or any of the other products like Viagra. I am not at all interested in increasing my breasts nor is my wife interested in increasing hers. I am not interested in meeting someone new. I do not need nor have a mortgage. I am not interested in avoiding bankruptcy. Nor am I interested in helping the widow of the late president of some African country smuggle money out of the country for a small fortune. I could not have won the Scottish lottery since I did not buy a ticket. I do not invest in the stock market, so why do I need stock tips? The list goes on and on and on and on.

The point is that our in boxes have become cesspools of slime and filth. I am sick of it. And I am sure you are too.

When you open your news reader, there is none of that there. If any channel I have added to my reader does send that kind of stuff, click! They are gone. And they stay gone unless I choose to add them back.

Marketing with RSS is good etiquette because it puts your readers in charge. It lets them control what they read and when they read it. You can not do in your face marketing on a channel to people who do not want it because they can shut you off very easily. If you offend a reader, they can leave. That means a channel publisher has to take a whole different approach than an email publisher. You have to learn a whole new set of the rules of the road. We will start there next time.

If you want to be an in your face marketer, by all means stay with email. But if you truly want to put your readers in control, then definitely check out channels, and most especially channels by Quikonnex.