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05.14.07
What If No One Came To Your Site?
 By Mike Moran
Web feeds, such as RSS (and e-mail before that), are part of a new wave of information integration-content that is part of your customer's daily experience.
Just as marketers have always depended on television and radio to slip their messages into a customer's day, now Web feeds can do the same. More than ever, interactive content will come to your customer just as offline messages do today-you no longer have to wait for customers to come to your Web site.
But just as customers can choose your content, they can also cancel their subscription.
Because the customer can immediately cancel if unhappy, your marketing message must be far more subdued-the softest of soft sells.
To reach busy, hard-to-reach people, you must make it easy for them to consume the content they want, when and where they want it.
Sun's Vice President of .Web Properties Curt Sasaki notes, "We may have zero people coming to sun.com [someday] because they subscribe. We want to make sure all of our content is subscribable."
Because those customers use feed readers to closely control both what they see and when they see it, it's challenging to know exactly which content they actually looked at.
Depending on how technology advances, it might become harder yet.
You might have heard of the concept called the Semantic Web, in which software can understand the meaning of content. Such software would allow customers to take in thousands of feeds and have the most relevant information extracted for viewing.
It's possible that you might not know whether your message was seen. You might even have to pay customers to read them.
Semantic software might put pressure on marketers in other ways. If your customers prefer messages that are "real"-rather than bombastic-a semantic filter might serve as a "hype meter," eliminating anything a bit too "sales-y."
Google's Eric Schmidt has spoken about developing a "truth detector" that discerns the honesty of politicians, so marketers might not be far behind.
So the short of it is that subscriptions mean that customers don't have to visit your site to get your message-you can reach them just as you do with other media-but they have control at every moment.
The marketers who provide messages that customers consider valuable will be given continuing permission to send those messages.
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