The Virtual Handshake

My last notes from the conference

Dana VanDen Heuvel, Pheedo

You can download the slides from this presentation here: Heuvel

RSS is a channel.
MSFT is integrating RSS in next version of Internet Explorer

+ Right Spam Solution—100% deliverability
+ RSS is self-organizing.
+ True permission—easer to unsubscribe than e-mail.
+ Does not need to be part of a blog. RSS is simply an XML file that’s formatted properly to be read by a client. Any type of website, information can be RSS-readable.

Steve Semelsberger, Pluck
You can download the slides from this presentation here: Pluck

Launched in 2003. Consumer web 2.0 services. FeedFinder, Shadows, Easyjournal.
Mainly work with publishers & web companies . helping with content syndication , aggregation, and generation. Editorial controls, community management, and site integration.

They have data on 300,000 RSS users via Pluck

12% of Internet users are aware of RSS. 27% of users consume RSS via portal start pages without realizing it.

Browsers offering built-in RSS reading
Portals help you find & subscribe to RSS feeds.
Convenience is driving adoption.
We’re early in market overview & adoption timing.

Publishers’ question: should I aggregate or solely be aggregated?

Five years ago only a big firm like yahoo could do a deal with Reuters to incorporate their feed into Yahoo platform. Now, anyone can be an aggregator.

Case study: Austin-American Statesman. 300K registered users, 1M unique views/month.
Community blogging went live in Sept.
Initially launched around major events
Two sites: statesman.com and austin360.com
Four tiers of bloggers: staff, official, featured and community
One month later: hundreds of bloggers covering 1000s of new pages
Business case based on : increased registrations, new ad/sponsorships

Make it easy for people to use your user-gen. content

Elaine O’Garman, VP Strategy, Silverpop.
RSS Marketing.

You can download the slides from this presentation here: Silverpop

Historical product was ASP for sending email.

RSS is more than a distribution technology for blogs & syndicated content; it is a channel.

Jupiter estimates RSS usage has grown 83% year/year. Even faster than Internet browser in terms of adoption. Only 6% of markets unaware of RSS as a marketing tool (Nov. 2004)

How can marketers use RSS?

-corporate blog
-Syndicate web content
-Advertising in other people’s blogs and newsfeeds
-Newsletters
-Promo content
-Transactional content

What are obstacles?
- Adoption—but not for long

- Immaturity:
- standards for reading and rendering still evolving. Today, readers are very inconsistent in how they render RSS. Check at different rates. Don’t know who’s caching and who’s not.
- Bandwidth intensive and conservation methods not widely adopted

Broadcast orientation: measurement, targeting and segmentation, serving individualized content

Jupiter’s criteria for success of an alternative messaging distribution solution:
- Security
- personalized and relevant
- measurable
- guaranteed delivery
- end user control including permission support
- ubiquity
- open technology

RSS meets all of these requirements but two:
- personalized and relevant
- measurable

New generations of RSS content creation/distribution solve these issues by changing the paradigm. Separate feeds are created by subscriber. Jupiter has dubbed this, “individualed RSS, or IRSS”. Basically, it’s giving people a unique URL. Silverpop, SyndicateIQ, Subscriber Mail, are doing this.

Consequences of this shift: measurable, targetable, personalizeable, gather profiles, connect with other data (transactional, profile, account history)

Some more ideas on using IRSS for marketers:

Corporate blogs: reliable measurement, what is of interest, who are evangelists

Newsfeeds: what gets read, what gets passed on, better monetization

Advertising: targeted buys, reliable impressions

Newsletters: untapped audience, wide variety of platforms

Promotions: no PII needed, spam-proof

Transactional: no deliverability issues, non-refutability, phish proof.

Jupiter: 50% of population would subscribe to more things if they had to give away less personal information.

Spam-proof (so far)

Dana VanDen Heuvel, Pheedo

Four cornerstones of an integrated campaign: RSS, blogs, podcast, demo.

Monetization models for RSS: audience not expecting to pay subscriptions. Selling own ads not scaleable. Alignment with podcast networks and ad networks profitable and scaleable. 6-11% clickthru on RSS. Therefore: use a service like Pheedo.

RSS ads are stand-alone and clearly labeled & identified.

Integrated campaign example: Citrix (GotoMeeting) advertising on Chris Pirillo Show.

RSS Analytics are steadily improving.

Ipro.com is moving into the RSS analytics space.

RSS Advertising Best Practices:
-ads must fit the environment
- must be relevant and informative
-watch the content to ad ratio and unsubscribe rates
- Tell, don’t sell: create relationship
- be patient: RSS feeds don’t demand to be read.

One of their advertisers put an ad in every single post, and unsubscribe rates shot thru the roof.