Chris Pirillo on RSS and Email
Chris Pirillo: Email Marketing is Dead.
Email is a powerful media. It's essential, and it's also easy to use and explain to people. It used to be very difficult to distribute email to a large number of people. In 96 Chris had a lot of trouble finding a good way to do it.
Email can provide a One To Many communication. One message, hundreds of recipients. But email is different than a website bookmark, because it always reminds you to check the site. It's an active reminder as opposed to a passive reminder (seeing it on your menu). Back in the early days, spam and confirmation messages weren't problems. That went to hell when some marketing people got ahold of it. But it was still viable. You can capture a lot of demographic information.
But now we're beyond that. We're hosed. Filters are killing delivery. People don't trust companies. Companies don't often respect legitimate relationships if their customers might construe it as spam. It's just that way now. Too many people have had their email address sold and spammed. That's a problem. The channel is polluted. People are guilty before proven innocent. This makes email work Hard. Conversion rates are down. Challenge-Response is causing problems for emails like this. Things aren't getting better, they're getting worse. People are getting more frustrated about giving out their personal info.
What now?
Blacklists continue to grow. We pay for Whitelisting. The fight with ISPs escalate. Users begin to gather information in other ways. Whitelisting gets expensive. Email is becoming cost and brand prohibitive.
Outlook 2003 will allow people to block HTML messages. (bout frickin' time!)
So we need something else. A new way, an open cross platform way, to deliver content. Make it cheap, or make it free. Just because you pay, doesn't mean you get what you pay for. When I send something, it has to be easier than email currently is. It can't suck. It can't be hard.
RSS.
This is where it's at.
This is a "tectonic shift"
It's either Really Simple Syndication, other Rich Site Summary. it's an XML document. It's a webpage, I swear, but not HTML webpage. It contains the latest headlines. It's easily published and easily subscribed to. It's valid, it's simple, it's important.
So we need this middle man to handle the code. The aggregator. NetNewsWire on the Mac. It takes the feed, transforms it, and makes it viewable.
Where did RSS come from? UserLand, vice Netscape. Then they grabbed Slashdot's feed and it took off. Blogging software automated it. Aggregators appeared. Then it developed from there. It's not a short process but the old standard seems to have won out.
Chris thinks the Windows market has better readers. I disagree.
It's push without the proprietary. It complements email now. Tomorrow it replaces news services. RSS works everywhere. It's not just for bloggers. It's for the Washington Post and Wired and everyone else. This is where it's at. Get the CNN headlines as RSS.
The process for using RSS for content is a lot shorter. Half as long. Make the feed. Provide a link. Promote the feed. Post the Content. Done.
RSS is unspammable. Subscriptions imply confirmation. It makes the user sign up. But it doesn't require them to give out personal information. This is the important part. It's self purging, so it's easy to opt out.
You can password protect a feed. There are always thousands of existing feeds. It's always growing.
You can monetize it. Ads. Premium Feeds. Traffic is still measurable.
It's easy to make. Very easy.
But how do you market it? It's not hard. How did you market email? Think about it in the same way.
There are some negatives. Aggregators are still growing. We're coming out of the early adopter stage. And there's no control over presentation.
There's a future here. Desktop aggregation integration. It handles push better than anything else.
Time to buy Ben's book. I think.
It's now time for a group Feedster hug.
Chris is now taking questions
How do you get your people to download the client?
You have to put it in their hands. You have to show it to Chris and Rich and explain it. It won't be overnight yet. But it's worth doing. rss.blogstreet.com changes rss to IMAP. That's a start.
Is this the death of web design? No. Not at all. Web design is just as important as it was yesterday.
If RSS is about user control, should we be trying to decide how things look? No. Doesn't work that way.
In the meantime, read my great idea for RSS: http://radio.weblogs.com/0116463/2003/03/17.html
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