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.
