WordBiz: 5 Key Questions (You've Been Dying) to Ask About Business Blogs
Debbie Weil, who has been publishing the WordBiz email newsletter for a couple of years now (? or there abouts) is now pondering whether blogs are the next big thing and email business newsletters are doomed. It's a fair question, but my own answer would be that email still has a pretty vital role in the e-marketing landscape. Generally, I think her advice here is good (tho she is new to blogging herself), but I would take exception to a few of her points:
1) I shudder at the thought that Dave Winer is one of the "most respected" bloggers out there. Loudest, certainly, but I think he definitely represents the old school and is anything but a model for the business community.
2) I also think RSS's use as a marketing tool is not essential in the near term. Truth is, my guess is very few people are using RSS readers yet. It's ahead of the curve. Like everyone trying to redesign their websites for cell phone web browsing back in 1999. If your market is hyper-geek blog readers, then yes, RSS is important. If it's normal mortals, I'd focus on integrating a blog into an email product, something that has as yet occurred to relatively few bloggers yet. That said, RSS is so dead easy to implement (basically, clicking a button in most blog publishing tools) that there's no reason not to do it, but it's not something to get hung up on either. It's a feature, not a strategy or even a tactic.
3) As I say, will blogs replace email? Doubtful. The same thinking as "will the web replace TV/newspapers/radio/magazines/[etc.]?" or "will TV replace radio?" They're different and serve different purposes. I personally predict that email will recover in the battle against spam as client-side spam filtering tools like Cloudmark improve and get more mainstream. It's always going to be a thorn in the side of email marketers, but then I think most companies are doing a piss-poor job with email marketing, too, and deserve to get caught in spam filters. Email is not about direct marketing, it's about customer retention. Until companies come to realize that, I hardly feel sorry for them complaining that their "opt-in" messages are getting caught in spam filters or not opened by consumers. The reason consumers have lost interest in email is the email content isn't interesting or relevant to them. The great thing about blogs is that they're web pages, so if the content isn't interesting, no one will ever visit them. Go ahead an publish all the crap you want to your blog. No one will complain.
