E-venting.net

Cause Related Initiatives

So it's officially 'Holiday Season' again, the time of year when the call to do-some-good-in-the world is a little louder and more frequent than usual. But this year to me feels a little different - like more people are listening, and accepting the invitation. Maybe it's just me and a case of Yellow VW Beetle Syndrome (once you notice one, you suddenly see them everywhere), but it seems like a bigger movement than ever this season.

I could list a dozen examples, but will refer specifically to what Shop.org is doing with Cyber Monday. They coined the term a couple of years ago to designate the online equivalent of 'Black Friday' - the day after Thanksgiving that officially kicks off holiday shopping, and on which retailers move from the red to the black for the year. Cyber Monday is the following Monday - Today - and is the day that traditionally posts huge online shopping numbers. Largely a PR initiative, Cyber Monday was created to call some attention to the rise in e-commerce and certainly to position it among shoppers as a stress-free alternative to mall madness.

But what's interesting this year is that Shop.org has coupled the initiative with a cause. CyberMonday.com is an online mall created by Shop.org which features deals by over 400 retailers. Shop.org receives a commission for everything sold through the mall, and the commissions all drop straight into the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund. Ray worked at Shop.org until a battle with cancer ultimately claimed his life. The scholarship was set up in his memory, and funds students embarking on Interactive Marketing and E-Commerce careers.

Shop.org is a former client of mine, so when Scott Siverman (Shop.org Executive Director) asked me to mention the initiative here, naturally I wanted to comply. Apologies if it's off-topic a bit, but I'll try to tie it back here:

1. If you've got some holiday shopping to do, start at www.cybermonday.com.
2. Consider a cause-related initiative to your next event. Not because you can legitimately ask bloggers to write about it, but because you could actually do some good in the process.

Why You'll Lose if You Compete on Content

I came to a discouraging conclusion yesterday when talking to one of my clients about marketing their conferences. They want to stay on the high road and be known for having the best content in their industry. In fact, the main reason they hired me was to achieve for them exactly that - Rule by Content.

The trouble is, I can't give it to them. My principal job with show producers is to help them create the best possible content at their shows, and use this superior content as a meaningful point of differentiation against competitors. And I'm unable to do it.

I'm not one for shirking responsibilities, but I don't think my failure is entirely my fault. I think you can't win on content. Why? Because there is nothing unique about one show's content over another. Sure, sessions can have more interesting titles and precise panel composition, and program directors can use feedback forms vigilantly to weed out poor speakers and re-engage stars. But there's nothing you can labor and sweat over that your rival can't simply copy, and quickly. I've programmed shows with 4-tracks and 20+ sessions in two months. If I'm nimble and connected (which I am), I can skim the cream off any show out there and stir it into mine. And launch before the shows I'm poaching from.

I don't do this, of course. But the way conferences within an industry work with and against each other almost ensures that the content is about the same. You see, programmers select their speakers and content from a few different sources:

1. Speaker and Session Proposals
2. Sponsors who buy their way in
3. Past experience

But all of these sources draw from finite and duplicated pools of potential speakers. Any company sponsoring your show (2) is also sponsoring your competitors' shows, and buying their way as speakers into all of them. For many companies, it's cheaper and more reliable than a PR firm retainer. And your past experience (3) is comprised of who you've seen speak and speak well at your shows. Think they got to be good speakers only speaking at your shows? Even speaker proposals (1), which are often the best source for finding speakers and companies not heavily on the circuit can backfire. When they submit to your show, you can be sure that the exact same proposal (or a near copy) is going to rival programmers. Believing that you're the only one who sees the potential in this speaker or company or topic is to underestimate your competitors, which is foolish. If you invite them in, know that your rivals will too.

I'm almost using "speakers" to be synonomous with "content"' and that's not entirely fair. They're very different to the people who attend the shows and diligently sit through the sessions. But the vast majority of people who learn about your show through your marketing will equate content with speakers. If they've seen that list of speakers before, they're likely to believe it's the same old thing they've heard before. It's rare when you hear a conferee remark, "Oh, she's speaking in that session? I saw her at a show last month. She was great. I'll go see her again." Instead it's, "Nah, already know what she has to say. I'm gonna go into the lobby and make some calls."

I've thought for a long time on this next point, and it's almost too simplistic to be true, but I believe it:

The only meaningful point of differentation a conference can achieve is through networking. Everything else is the absence of a negative.

When I was a Marketing Manager at a Fortune 500 company about 10 years ago, I was proud to be able to tell my then-boss that I was working towards my MBA part-time. Satisfied but unimpressed he remarked, "an MBA is the absence of a negative." What he meant was that you didn't get points for having one, but you'd lose points if you didn't. It was a cost of doing business in marketing departments then.

I don't mean to discourage everyone who toils and tears over all aspects of show production - operations, programming, sponsorship sales, vendor liaison, and on and on. I've done it all and I know these functions are important. But only inasmuch as they don't give the audience a reason not to come back. Nobody will rave about your show if they're sped quickly and efficiently through registration, but if they have to wait 30 minutes to get their badge it will color their whole experience. And I've never seen a response on a feedback form inquiring into the attendees' favorite things about the conferece, "The chairs in the general session were super comfy!" But make someone who spent $1100 stand in the back because you over sold (or under set) and you may have lost them for good.

Sadly, I believe the same thing holds true with content. If it's the same pool of speakers on similar topics, how can it not?

But there is a perception that content at one show is better than another, and here's how that happens, and what you can do to put your content's best foot forward:

• Manage expectations. The greatest disappointment I've heard from conferees is not that the content isn't any good, but it's that it's not what they were expecting to hear. Make certain that the speakers discuss the topic exactly as it's presented to the audience. Your attendees are evaluating not what they hear in an absolute sense, but what they hear relative to what they expected to hear, even if it's less interesting to you. It's like when you bet on the ponies - if you bet a horse to Show (come in third place or better), you win more if that horse comes in third than you do if he wins. (I'm conservative - I always bet to show.)
• Remember my blog, E-venting.net. This is an absurdly narrow blog on a topic important only to a few hundred people in the whole world (most of whom seem to be in Canada, strangely). But you're one of them, and you're reading it. And the reason you are is because I'm producing the content I'm uniquely qualified to produce, and letting the audience for it (however small) find me. When you program your shows, be very conscious of as narrow an audience as you can. If you want 1000 people to come to your show, and try to find topics relevant to all 1000, you'll be so watered down that you'll get 200 if you're lucky, and send them all away unsatisfied. This means conscious segmentation, and swallowing the bitter pill which is the realization that you can't program a show for everyone in your industry. You can't. There is too much diversity of company type, company size, seniority or tenure, functional responsibility and domain expertise. No matter what industry you're in. What's that? You run a show now that brings in all those people? Harvest it, now. As your audience becomes increasingly demanding for specific content and interactions in all channels, there's no place to go but down from where you are.
• Start, but don't finish, conversations from the stage. I would have put this in the point above about the blog, if I had enough comments here to make a point. Many programmers think their objective is to create ALL the show's content. It's not. They should be focused more on catalyzing conversations than wrapping up points nicely at the end of a session. Good blogs do this, where a post of 200 words spurs conversations in the comments of several thousand words. I don't know what the right ratio is for conferences, but it sure isn't 50 minutes of panel discussion / 10 minutes of audience Q&A. Let your conferees take some responsibility for what they came to learn - they'll do a better job than you can, and cement their loyalty to the show in the process. Think of this: let's say you run a 45-minute session on 'Best Practices and Case Studies in Hoozenfaffer Ubbaglub,' a topic of particular interest to your attendees given the pending Hoozen legislation. And let's say that in your 45-minute session, each of your 3 presenters sucks. And by "sucks" I mean that they're good, but not rock stars (because that's "sucks" means to someone paying $1100 to be there and taking 2 days off from work). Session ends; grumbling audience files out, complaining of wasting 45 minutes. Now let's say that instead of going to the next session, there is a 45-minute structured peer networking session on the exact same topic, where everyone joins tables of fellow conferees and even the speakers to vet the session topics. Even if someone says, "Well that sucked. I didn't learn anything. Here's what I know about Hoozie-Ubb..." and someone else says, "I agree that it sucked. But I disagree with what you just said because..." Suddenly the content as catalyst has redeemed the time invested.

So you see why I think the networking is the most important part. But it shouldn't be separate from the content, as it usually is. It's not the 45-minute break in the exhibit hall, or the cocktail party in the club that's so loud and social that you feel like a jackass by even asking someone, "So how do you handle your Hoozie-Ubb situation?"

The other point I'd make about networking is that it's a quality game, not quantity. If 200 of my peers are at a conference, mixed in with 800 people who aren't, I suppose I can find someone like-minded, though it's no guarantee. But if I have lunch next to one person who has a really provocative point of view and inspires my work in some way, then the conference is worth it.

I believe the show producer's objective is to facilitate that serendipitous meeting, not obviate the need for it.

Dos And Don’ts For Your Next Annual Sales Meeting

A few weeks back I wrote an article for MediaPost entitled "Dos And Don’ts For Your Next Annual Sales Meeting." Have a look at the article on MediaPost for the full text, but here are the 8 tips:

DO's:

• Do kick off with a provocative keynote speaker who can speak to some of the biggest issues in the industry - especially, forward-looking issues.
• Do program the event to include lots of networking. Consumer-generated content exists offline as well; creating a context for dialogue, and letting your salespeople learn from each other, can be highly profitable.
• Do invite partners and vendors to attend, and even exhibit at the event. Giving your sales force firsthand en-masse access to rich media, research, measurement and other partners is expedient to both you and your partners, and gives everyone more depth in your offerings.
• Do budget appropriately for the event. A two-day conference at a major hotel can easily run $500/per person, and is rarely less than $250 per person. In addition to your staff travel expenses, your budget should allocate for everything from venue and food and beverage, to A/V, on-site signage and collateral, shipping, photography or videography, Internet connectivity, gratuities, even speaker honorariums. Sound like a lot? Calculate the cost of taking your sales force off the street for a day or two, and it's easily justified.

DONT's:

• Don't think of the event as having "mandatory attendance." Maybe it does, but if you program it that way, you'll fulfill the event's promise of being an "insipid time suck." Program a show you'd take a day or two out of your schedule to attend yourself.
• Don't limit speakers to your own executives, or even to the sell-side. Round out your agenda with every perspective that might contribute to a more productive and valuable event.
• Don't focus exclusively on sales force education or professional development. An annual sales conference is a powerful way to solidify internal culture while transferring knowledge throughout the organization.
• Don't invite clients. No matter how much work you put into the agenda and the environment, all attention is lost if there's media budget in the room. Make the day about your sales staff, and keep the dialogue with them wide-open.

Very few events are aimed at the sell-side, placing an enormous educational burden on the Annual Sales Meeting. Many of the heads of sales I've spoken with see this project as hazardous duty, or the cost of doing business in a sales organization. Instead, I think it's immensely valuable and a huge opportunity - with the same potential as any other industry event.

And The Winner Is...

If I had an inbound link for every person at OMMA Hollywood who complained about the overlapping schedule between OMMA, iMedia Breakthough and/or Digital Hollywood, I'd be well on my way to breaking into 5-digits on Technorati.

I've posted before on building an Interactive Events Calendar Wiki, and shopped the idea around a bit at the show. Unwavering support. Which is great, although I should have asked for a written commitment. Still, now that I'm through OMMA and have some breathing room, I'm plowing ahead with the idea and hope it gets some traction. If you can spare bandwidth of any type to support, please raise your hand.

Because I'm competitive, I did some hunting around today to see how well OMMA Hollywood fared against the other shows running simultaneously. I know in absolute terms the show was a success: over 2000 registrations, 1200+ folks at the show just on the first day, packed rooms throughout, and really strong speakers. I couldn't have been (much) more pleased with the way it shaped up. Thanks so much to everyone who contributed a voice to the show - 120+ of them, in pleasant discord. What a conversation!

But to see how the show fared in comparative terms, I turned (natch) to the blogosphere, particularly IceRocket.com. I used their Trends Tool to measure buzz for each of the three shows in the month leading up to the event, through yesterday:

Digital Hollywood had the largest share of e-voice for the month, which isn't surprising given how long the show has run, and also that "Digital Hollywood" refers to the entire series, not just one show.

"OMMA Hollywood," by contrast, is a single show, and one that didn't exist more than 6 months ago. So we did all right.

If you look closely, you'll see a little orange slash on the graph around March 16, for iMedia Breakthrough. The blogosphere didn't really light up about that show. No real surprise, given the exclusive-nature of the show and its deliberately smaller scale than the other two.

This is pure quantity, by the way. There's nothing in here to indicate the quality of the references, and in truth quite a few of the OMMA listings are from a company exhibiting and speaking at the show that happens to be a SEO, and has several blogs suspiciously redundant in their entries.

I'll probably run this analysis again in a few weeks, to see what the post-show buzz looks like for all 3. Most of the lead-up was 'I'm speaking here - come see me.' The post-event (and real-time) buzz is where true feedback will reside.

Extended by Popular Demand - Free Consultation Day

Actually, it's more of a current-client commitment. But Free Consultation Day is now tomorrow, March 31. I still have a few spots if anyone else wants to pick my brain on:

• Event Strategy
• Event Marketing
• Speaker Proposals
• Launching a New Event
• Agenda Format and Composition
• Pricing
• Programming Strategy
• ...or anything else I've written about here

E-mail me to coordinate.

March 30 is Free Consultation Day

My calendar on Thursday March 30 is wide open. I'm wrapping up a massive show on March 28th and have some ongoing projects afterwards, but my bandwidth is about to increase by a lot. So I'm designating Thursday March 30th as Free Consultation Day.

You may have a few questions about Free Consultation Day:

You: What is it?
Me: Anybody who wants to schedule half an hour with me can do so, and ask me anything you want - about an event or road show you might be planning, suggestions on which shows to sponsor or exhibit at, feedback on constructing a show P&L, speaker recommendations, programming strategy, tips on pitching a speaker, whatever.

Y: Why are you doing this?
M: I could use a new client or two over the summer and beyond. I figure having a candid conversation with anyone interested in interactive media, marketing and advertising events is a better way of demonstrating value to prospective clients than sending out pitch emails.

Y: How does it work?
M: Send me an email. We schedule a time to talk. We talk. I act like someone on your team, not a consultant trying to scare up business by half-answering questions, or working hard to identify challenges (that naturally I'm equipped to solve) rather than address whatever ones you bring to me. Maybe you'll think I know my stuff and hire me. Maybe if I give you everything I've got in 30 minutes, and not keep curtain #1 closed until you sign a retainer agreement, you'll start to think of me as a prospective partner, not just a hired gun. Is that possibility worth missing the last half of Oprah to me? You bet.

Y: Who the heck are you to do this?
M: I'm no oracle or guru or vigorous self-promoter. I just happen to have some knowledge, experience and perspective that some of you may find profitable. And I'd much rather work with someone who reads this blog and is already in my head a little bit, than pitch some company I've never heard of, who has never heard of me, and end up competing on price instead of value.

Y: Anything else?
M: Yes. Now would be a very good time to forward this to a friend or colleague who might not read this blog or know who I am, but might make an excellent client.

Y: How do I get started again?
M: Drop me a line. Operators are standing by.

UPDATE: Re-scheduled for Friday March 31.

The Death of the VIP Conference Pass

Controllers at advertising agencies across the country are grieving. Or they should be, anyway. Why? Because beginning this year they're going to be inundated with requests for an increase to travel, education and conference budgets. Interactive media is no longer on the fringe, and interactive media conferences no longer have to subsidize their attendance by giving away VIP passes to anyone who works at an agency or brand marketer and can claim access to some part of a media or marketing budget.

Controllers notwithstanding, it's good news for everyone. Interactive media conferences will become less dependent upon sponsor revenue, which frees them up to program more directly at their attendee constituents. These new market forces will only (further) increase the quality of the show content, and in no time they'll easily be worth the $1K or so they'll charge for a 2-day event.

And $1K is a bargain. Most conference pricing is cost-based pricing. This means that show organizers build a P&L from the bottom up, figuring out what their expenses will be, and then determining what to charge to cover them. No, it doesn't cost $1K to invite a bunch of unpaid speakers to present from the stage. But it does cost about that much for the venue, the food and beverage, the marketing, the on-site collateral, security, shipping, decorator, A/V, registration processing, insurance, overhead and staffing.

Most events try to cover their expenses through registration, and make a profit through sponsorship. Except in this industry, where we've traditionally had to cover our expenses AND make a profit through sponsorship. Instead of a better-attended more successful show being more profitable, it actually becomes a greater liability. More sponsors are required to cover the added expense of more people, and more sponsors are potentially disappointed if the turnout isn't as expected (which is usually the case, as free passes result in a lot of attrition. How much? Try 50% - half the 'VIP' audience commonly doesn't show up). And more sponsors to satisfy means more sponsors with speaking roles, which leads to greater attrition and, yes, more disappointed sponsors. Isn't that ironic? Sure, but if you're a show producer, it also just sucks.

Before agencies start griping about $1k for an event, they should be thankful that shows are only using cost-based pricing and not value-based pricing. No executive in his or her right mind would go to a show if they thought they'd only raise their own human capital by $1K, or save $1K for their client, or figure out how to drive an additional $1K of sales in their next campaign. You could pay six-figures at some shows and still come out ahead. No, $1K is a bargain. Pay it, happily.

So the shows improve in quality, which is great for attendees. But sponsors become less central to the show's P&L, which is ungreat for sponsors. Should they just learn to be satisfied with less? That, or they'll have to learn to re-invent themselves to market in a new environment, just like their advertiser clients are doing. That too is ironic, but it's equitable and the result of progess in the industry. And that doesn't suck at all.

Field Report: Ad:Tech Impact, Seattle

Without question, Ad:Tech is first and foremost a trade show. Secondly, it's a conference. The Ad:Tech Impact show in Seattle yesterday (the first of a 10-city sweep) was neither. It's more seminar than anything else, and its programming has more in common with IIR or IQPC events than what we commonly think of as Ad:Tech. I suspected as much when they were first announced, not without some skepticism about how they would go over, and integrate with the rest of what Ad:Tech does.

It's too early to rule on the integration, but the Seattle event was, by most measures, a success. And that's no small feat for the first occurrence in a road show of a brand new event. A moderately-sized audience of about 120 arrived roughly on time and stayed through most of the day; many of the show's 33 paid sponsors were either presenting on stage or showing their wares in the 'Solutions Expo' of tabletops in the back of the general session (underscoring the likelihood that the show was a financial success); and the speakers were well-prepared and largely professional (except for the guy from Responsys - he was patronizing).

The first thing you can say about the content at Impact is that it's tactical. Jim Sterne provided the opening keynote, and gave a history of web analytics and some direction for how to champion interactive issues within the organization through analytics and ROI. His speech was peppered with his characteristic folksy wit and warmth, and his audience alternated between scribbling notes and chuckling. While his speech wasn't as provocative as some interactive industry keynotes, it did open the day perfectly. His most memorable concept was about funnels (and not just because he categorized (and drew) them as 'martini glass,' 'margarita glass', 'wine glass' and 'shot glass'), and in truth the day's content was a sort of a funnel. Jim touched broadly a dozen different issues in analytics and marketing ROI, each of which was tuned later in the day in one of the other presentations.

Notice that I said 'presentations,' not 'sessions.' The entire event was comprised entirely of presentations. PowerPoint after PowerPoint - ranging from 15 to 60 minutes each. This was one of my two grumbles with the program. While the PowerPoint and the next PowerPoint and the following 6 PowerPoints certainly underscored the tactical nature of the event, it also robbed the program of some of its potential freshness. I'm a strong proponent of the presentation as a programming format, and I've done research with a client to support it. But as Oscar Wilde said, 'Moderation in all things, including moderation.' An unrehearsed panel discussion or two would go a long way towards adding some electricity into the room.

The second challenge I would make to the show's content strategy is about the speaker mix. One of the conferences I programmed last year was the Shop.org Annual Summit. The tracks at this event are also programmed to be tactical, and Shop.org achieves this by stocking each session with retailers presenting to their peers. Not one of the speakers at Impact was a marketer, or even from an agency. All were vendors. That's not to say that vendors don't know their stuff - in many cases they know it better than their clients. But vendors-only presentations don't allow much room for dialogue, or peer-to-peer networking. And while most of them did a good job reigning in the sales pitches, attendees nevertheless saw about a dozen different companies essentially talking about what their companies could do for the attendees, if hired.

And no small part of the content was sponsored. Of the 6 3/4 hours of content at the event, over 2 1/2 hours - almost 40% of the show - were solo presentations delivered by sponsors expressly because they were sponsors. While this is a good way to satisfy sponsors stage-time requirements, I think Ad:Tech will find it a challenging way to build a long-term franchise for these events.

But almost every attendee I spoke with about the event felt it was worthwhile. Based on my (admittedly small) sample, I got the impression that most of the attendees were either from companies too small to afford a travel budget for larger shows in San Francisco, Chicago or New York, or else they were more junior employees at larger corporations, who didn't personally have conference and training budgets yet. Several I spoke with had never been to an industry event before (despite being in Seattle - a fairly connected city). And that's precisely why Impact works - it reaches a largely unitiated audience, starved for content. Attendees reported how grateful they were that Ad:Tech came to their city in the first place, and were pre-disposed to get something out of the show. That's a far cry from trying to hold a show in New York, where the audience is jaded before the opening keynote even begins.

Part of Ad:Tech's strategy, however, is to use these events to feed into their bigger shows. If they're successful, they'll be left with a new challenge on their hands. They will have raised their audience's expectations of what Ad:Tech means, and will have to elevate the Impact content (and operations - the show was much rougher around the edges than the rest of Ad:Tech) to rival the bigger shows. Or else continue to rely on a fresh crop of attendees to introduce into the Ad:Tech fold every time Impact comes to town.

Does Conference WiFi = Lunch?

I'm probably not alone in expecting to find a WiFi connection wherever I open my laptop. I don't mean to suggest I'm entitled to a connection; my expectation springs merely from repeated observation.

But it's a fine line between expectation and entitlement, and those of us in the conference business - which is a service industry - have to pay attention to our customers' expectations, and often treat them as if they were entitlements.

So how then do we answer the question of the wired conference? I've seen a different approach at nearly every event.

The folks at WOMMA, for example, believe that their audience should pay attention to speakers instead of their email, and deliberately keep WiFi out of the general session. The result at the Orlando show is that the vast majority of their audience remained attentive in ballrooms, but pods of attendees clustered around hotspots in the hallway, wedged 4-across onto benches, and even sitting on the floor.

At OMMA WEST and OMMA EAST last year, ESPN sponsored a gorgeous and expansive WiFi lounge in the exhibit hall. Attendees always had a place to go and connect, but because exhibit hall attendance was free, the lounge was usually jammed with, well, loungers who had no place else to go at the event - probably not the audience ESPN was targeting.

At the IAB events at the Millennium Hotel that I produced, we kept some space open in the exhibit hall for a WiFi lounge, but choosing to make the space truly functional would have come at the expense of booths. As a result, the lounge was too small to be of much use for anyone. Except of course the event marketers, who could claim in communications that we had a 'free WiFi lounge so that attendees can stay connected to the office and clients, without ever leaving the show'.

Different shows have different strategies, but the audience expectation is growing increasingly constant. WiFi has officially become the cost of doing business in the conference industry.

Here then are my thoughts on Best Practices for Conference WiFi:

• WiFi is like lunch. You're not obligated to provide it for free, but if you don't you had better make sure it's readily available somewhere close.
• But WiFi can also be like your exhibit hall. It doesn't have to be always open. Show producers should experiment with 'WiFi Live' times, if there's a good reason not to keep it available always.
• Be transparent and proactive in communications. Tell your audience where, when and how WiFi will be available - both before the event and in lots of signage at the event. You know they're going to ask. Why wait for it?
• Face the attention competition head on. If you know your attendees want WiFi but you're afraid they'll be distracted from your event - program a more engaging event. (WOMMA, by the way, didn't need to turn off the WiFi - their audience wouldn't have looked away from the stage much.)
• Look for the upside to ubiquitous connectivity: invite a dozen bloggers, vloggers, podcasters and others to attend and cover the event in real-time. During breaks, show the most recent entries live from a computer connected to your main stage projector, for the audience to consume while they're taking their seats again.

The good news, for now, is that while attendees expect WiFi, they don't necessarily expect it to be available for free - yet. So don't break your budget buying 2000 people a $10 day pass they're not asking for. You engender goodwill through a strong signal alone.

The (Inevitable) Rise of the Reputation Broker

Steve Rubel commented the other day on the end of e-mail marketing when he cited AOL and Yahoo!'s new initiative to essentially begin charging for first-class e-mail delivery. Maybe now somebody will read the article I wrote for MediaPost called Rolling Out RSS: Think Like a Newsletter, not a Newspaper.

I couldn't agree with Steve more on this. In fact, as a Jupiter Analyst back in 2001, I predicted this very occurrence (e-mail gatekeepers like AOL charging for first-class delivery) in a research note I wrote with colleague Chris Todd (if anybody can find that note, I'd love to see it again. My subscription expired...)

But what's more interesting to me than the death of e-mail marketing are the ramifications on Web 2.0. Let's play the scenario forward and see what happens:

• American Airlines, for example, seeing delivery rates for its Net SAAver plummet, begins publishing via RSS. They do this in conjunction with a blog, so they can use web analytics to have some idea of who and how many people are reading (and because RSS doesn't yet have 100% penetration). E-mail marketers are loathe to give up metrics, so the RSS transition will be incremental, and will demand accountability.
• They then want their blog to have a greater reputation so that whatever they publish to it gets higher search rankings and enjoys a larger audience. They know this reputation is caused in part from the links into the blog.
• So they then begin offering the people on their (doomed) e-mail list 3000 frequent flier miles if they subscribe to the RSS feed (which they can't always track) and link to the official AA Net SAAvers blog from their own blog (which they can track).
• In some cases, they will have customers who are fans, willingly and authentically promoting the Net SAAVers blog because they think it's truly great.
• In others, people will throw up a link just for the miles.
• In some of these, people will throw up a blog just to throw up a link, just for the miles.
• Within months, the blog will have 25,000 inbound links - 5,000 more than BoingBoing.
• And within months from that, 2500 other marketers are experimenting with similar link-for-premium programs, with varying degrees of foresight and conscience.
• Some of these will offer consumers a premium and a link back to the consumers' blog. Think about that.

Then someone gets a meta-idea, as is always the case with the Internet:

• Someone launches a clearing house, where bloggers can survey all of the offers available for discounts, free stuff, premiums from hundreds of different marketers, in exchange for an entry on their blog with a link, and probably some marketing copy.
• Think of this as a CoolSavings.com or a NetCreations for blog links.
• Ironically, this clearinghouse begins as a well-intentioned - you guessed it - blog.
• This clearinghouse (or, more likely, its fast-follower competitor) creates a simple script that auto-creates a blog entry for ALL of the selected offers, inserts copy and links generated by the marketer, and assigns a category generated by the consumer. This script runs on all major blogging platforms, in the same way Quicken can exchange data two ways with all major financial institutions. The Reputation Broker is born.
• The blogger checks a hundred check-boxes and within 60 seconds 100 new entries are on the blog.
• 500 bloggers do this per day. Then 1000. Then 5000.
• Blog platforms get wise and, to stay competitive, actually enhance their functionality for accommodating this practice. Since these auto-entries use a consumer-generated category, the blogging platforms allow the blogger to auto-archive certain categories, so they don't appear on the homepage of the blog, and aren't picked up by RSS readers as 'New' entries. Bloggers then don't have to launch separate blogs, and these spam links carry all the reputation of genuine links.
• Blog reputations, then, are suddenly meaningless, and authentic voices have as hard a time standing out as a personal e-mail does today in an inbox jammed with spam.
• Web 2.0 faces the same crisis that e-mail faced, and which actually helped drive the popularity and penetration of Web 2.0.

Maybe I've got some of this wrong, and maybe there are reasons that this can't happen. But the inevitable truth is that the current reputation system is as fragile as the inbox, and someone will find a way to exploit it. Those of us championing Web 2.0 shouldn't look at email and other failing and failed Web 1.0 instruments as merely opportunity; we need to find both the warning and the example in every system in line for revolution.

Update 6/6/06: Well that didn't take long at all. Thanks to Pete Blackshaw for putting PayPerPost.com into perspective.