Marketspace Advisor

Still Early For RSS

I'm giving a lunchtime talk on the use of weblogs for business at the September 29 meeting of the Boston's KM Cluster group.  The talk is titled, "Weblogs:  Affectation of the Digerati, or Mainstream Business Tool?"  The talk reprises a presentation of the same name I gave last year at a meeting of the local chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, and revisits my conclusions based on my experiences and other developments since then.  In prepping for this, I came across some very interesting research on RSS penetration  and associated demographics by Forrester. 

RSS will be big eventually for a number of reasons:

1. RSS is a huge time-saver.  I use NewsGator's add-on aggregator for Outlook, which collects updates to RSS feeds from blogs, news sources, and other things I subscribe to.  I can plow through a month's worth of stuff I try to keep up with for both professional and personal reasons in just a couple of hours.  

2. RSS is spam-free (although Google has now filed for a patent on including ads in RSS Feeds).   You opt into what you want to see, rather than having it pushed at you.  Over time, this will allow further tightening of spam filters.  This will accelerate the adoption of RSS, on both the user side as well as on the commercial side as marketers respond to this adoption, and the concurrent decline in the effectiveness of email.

3. There's lots of innovation going on here, and someone will break through.  However, I think it will be extensions to RSS  that will drive commercialization, more than efforts to leverage the existing standard.  Success of these commercialization efforts will hinge not only on the intrinsic value of the extension idea, but on the popularization of the extension – i.e., the degree it becomes as popular as the underlying RSS standard. 

4. Just as Apple just added podcast subscription support into its iTunes client, RSS subscription support is an obvious next feature for Outlook.  Outlook's practically total market penetration provides lots of gasoline for when this match is struck.

Notwithstanding the value of #'s 1-3 above, it's really #4 that will be the key to adoption.  My scan doesn't suggest Microsoft is moving too quickly on this, and others are skeptical too. 

Basically, as easy as it is to buy and install NewsGator, and as useful as it is, doing so is still an "Affectation of the Digerati" :-) So, I figure it's still at least three years too soon for RSS as a mainstream channel for marketing and service.

Aftermarket Postscript

Re our recent musings on extending the customer experience to the aftermarket, certification of products susceptible to fakes seems like a good idea.  What other services add value without creating undesired channel conflict?  Repair?  Alteration?  Modernization? 

Some luxury goods companies have begun to certify preowned fashion and accessories for resale on secondary markets.

[NYT > Circuits]

"The State of the Blogosphere"

The first of Cesar's four rules for when a technology will take off is: "covered in mainstream business publications."  Perhaps a related test for when a technology has truly reached the mainstream is: "is the topic of a New York Times editorial." 

Today's NYT has an editorial on Measuring the Blogosphere, discussing Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" report.   A few stats: "Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 percent of which remain active. Some 900,000 new blog postings are added every day."

Extending the Customer Experience: Embracing the Aftermarket

In this article, "Reading Between the Lines of Used Book Sales", Hal Varian at Berkeley's Haas School comments on recent research showing how used book sales are not just a significant boon to Amazon, but to society as a whole when Amazon's and consumers' gains are netted against publishers' losses. 

    The Internet has allowed the book market to become larger and more efficient, and that has upset a number of publishers and authors.

    [NYT > Technology]

This prompted me to think: why must publishers -- or for that matter, any other manufacturer of a re-saleable product -- lose?  and, what can they do to recapture some of those losses by extending the customer experience into the aftermarket?  When does it make sense to try? 

There are obvious cases where firms already do this, like automakers selling parts into the aftermarket.  But in cases like books where products don't necessarily degrade functionally (especially when students never open them), and where the cross-elasticity of demand is as low as the researchers suggest, what are the limitations?

Missing capabilities and channel conflicts typically prevent this.  But there are special cases that allow more creative approaches.  For example, six years ago, in an embarrassingly breathless whitepaper, I knocked Mattel for missing the opportunity to exploit the aftermarket for collectible Barbie dolls.  Fast-forward to 2005: with Barbie Collector, the folks at Mattel have gone one better than getting into the previously-owned Barbie business -- they now sell new copies of vintage dolls.  We are prohibited by the terms of agreement on their website by linking to anything other than the home page (!), but if you click on "start shopping" and then "vintage repros" you'll find them.  I'd be curious to know more about how the revenues and profits here compare with the revenues and profits in, say, eBay's analogous ecosystem.  (There are similar automotive examples to consider as well, like the VW Beetle, BMW's Mini, and the Plymouth Prowler.)

Closer to home, I drove by a little store yesterday selling re-filled printer ink cartridges at 80% off.  I'm sure that using them violates the warranty on my printer, but ink-jet printers are sold today at price points that make them virtually disposable (if not easily recyclable).  Even if the quality's not great, I'm not using it for important stuff 95% of the time anyway. This must be a big threat to the profits of printer manufacturers.  Maybe if you can't beat 'em, join 'em somehow?

 

 

Identity Theft or Fair Game?

I had an interesting experience with AOL and Google  which I have written about on my personal weblog.  The most relevant part is thinking through how advertisers can improve their odds of purchasing the right keywords, especially if they use automated programs to do so.  We're clearly early in this game, but with booming spending in this category, it's worth thinking about a little more.