Jeff: So, Rok, thanks for joining me in a little conversation here. I understand it is quite late where you are.

Rok Hrastnik: Yes, it's actually getting right near to twelve so...

Jeff: You're a night owl I understand. You work at night.

Rok: Yes it's about two hours to my bedtime.

Jeff: I see. All right, well, I'll take advantage of it. Rok, help people understand, maybe, who you are. Actually I don't know that I know the complete thumbnail background on Rok Hrastnik. How did you get into RSS, and how did you get become known as the RSS guy to turn to when it comes to marketers use of this technology?

Rok: This is actually an interesting question. It's quite a long story; quite a boring story which I won't get into in a lot of detail. We'll just say that back in 2003 I had a partner in the U.S. We wanted to write a book on email marketing and we planned it all out. Then he comes out with this crazy idea that there's something called RSS. That RSS will rule the world, that email plainly sucks, and that we're not writing a book on email marketing. We're writing a book on RSS marketing.

Picture this, this is 2003, no one in the world actually knows what RSS even is. No one knows it actually exists. So I go like, "Oh dear God, no we're not doing RSS. I want to write a book that people will actually read and buy. We want to write like the Bible here, and you're talking about RSS. What the hell is RSS, anyway?"

Of course, he was quite opinionated about it so we started a lengthy online discussion into which we involved a couple of email marketers and other people about the pros and cons of RSS. Of course, he was pro RSS. I was totally con RSS, I mean, what the hell. What kind of market share wants to use a tool that no one in the world is using yet? During that process I really started getting a role with RSS. I spoke with incredible amounts of people who were actually developing RSS at the time so definitely pioneers of that time, way back then were MyST...

Jeff: This is people in the U.S. or...?

Rok: Yes, people in the U.S. Definitely the pioneers there were MyST Technologies, needed a lengthy interview that when it was typed out was about 50 pages going through the ins and outs of RSS, where it's going [indistinguishable]. Spoke with a lot of other people that had that strange notion back then that RSS was actually something worth investing in. I slowly got to the idea, "Well, RSS might actually be something. It has a sort of business case behind it."

What I saw back then was of the value I can bring to the, let's say, to the RSS table, which was just starting to roll, as looking at this channel from totally marketing point of view and more specifically with my direct marketing mindset. At heart I'm just a direct marketer. By looking at RSS through that was when I actually started working on where I started writing the book and so on.

It was quite a process and it actually took from 2003 to the beginning of 2005 to get all the work done, to research the subject as much as possible, to find out all the different business opportunities, and just write and finish the book. The book writing took about, I'll say, about six months and about, let me see, 57 interviews with various people who were using RSS at the time. Especially people who were developing RSS marketing solutions, RSS tools. Basically the people that were building the wonderful thing we've come to know as RSS and online syndication today.

Jeff: Right, and which is really widely adopted as, I think it was Steve Rubel, who likened RSS to plumbing on the Internet. People are using RSS nowadays without even knowing it. In particular, people who are consuming media. I want to talk to you about...I understand that you have this new book coming out. I want to talk to you about that and I want to talk to you about that, but I know people are dying to understand in a broad sense, marketers in particular, are trying to understand what is the opportunity for a marketer to use RSS? I think we have seen, in fact, I can tell you that we have seen some rather unsophisticated approaches.

I'm not saying that marketers are stupid or ignorant or anything like that. I'm just saying that some marketers with large product databases have decided to put out a stream of RSS. Using RSS they've decided to deliver feeds to anyone who wants to take the feed. I think they're thinking in terms of hoping that search engines will take those feeds and enhance their search penetration. There's been some very unsophisticated use of RSS. I'm wondering what you think of that, and really what is the opportunity for marketers to use RSS at this point, in your opinion?

Rok: Well, Jeff, this certainly is one of the opportunities, but it's just one of the many things of how RSS actually can power most of your inter-marketing mix. RSS is, like Steve said and like many other people are seeing, RSS is the pipe. RSS is the pipe that gets content in a certain format from point A to point B. The business opportunities here are enormous. This is also why I wrote the second book, but we'll get more into that later on. The point is, RSS helps you get content from point A to point B.

This opportunity is basically related with all of the potential that comes from the power of actually reliably getting content, in a fixed format, from one point to another. To go back to your original point, yes, most marketers are doing quite a poor job of doing RSS marketing. The problem I'm mostly seeing here is that RSS is still considered, first of all, something that's more technical in nature which means it's, of course, nothing bad about the IT guys, but it's still primarily driven by IT.

The second problem is it all started with publishers. The first question that came to everyone's mind is, "How the hell do we monetize RSS?" Well RSS is the pipe. It's quite difficult to actually monetize the pipe. If you're Russia, you monetize the pipe by selling access to the pipe. We're talking about with the oil situation right now, but that's not exactly what RSS is. You don't monetize the pipe you monetize how it helps your marketing so you're monetizing the impact...

Jeff: OK, so I'm going to Devil's Advocate you. I'm a marketer. I've just been handed a pipe. What you're telling me is, I think Rok, is this pipe is better than the other pipe and the other pipe, in your examples, is email. Now email is, you know, I've got some problems with that. Emails don't get all delivered and I've got some solutions for that. I think that's what you're saying is this pipe is much better than some of the other distribution pipes, mainly being email.

Rok: Well, I wouldn't say it is better. It's certainly different. First of all let's go at it this way. This is certainly one of the key aspects of using RSS. How does email work, if we look from that perspective? With email you have a publisher and you have the marketer and then the end user. The end user gives the marketer his email address so he gives him a piece of personal information. Then the marketer, who now basically has that email address, sends stuff to that email address. Of course there are a lot of things in the way that prevents the marketer from actually reaching the end user such as spam, spam filters, and a bunch of other issues.

The second problem for the consumer is he just gave something to the marketer. He gave you something and you now have the power to abuse that. RSS works in a totally opposite way. We can actually say that RSS is like email, but turned upside down. With RSS, you the marketer, give something to the consumer. You give him the link to your RSS feed. The consumer then takes that link and puts it in his RSS reader to subscribe to your feed.

You give something, the end user takes it, but whenever he wants to, the end user then removes the link to your feed and stops getting your content. This is the first big distinction. RSS puts the power of receiving content or sending content to the end user not the marketer. Whenever the end user wants to unsubscribe from your communications, well he can just do that with two clicks. While with email, of course, we all know that that's usually not such an easy affair.

From the marketing point of view the number one benefit of using RSS is that when people are content with what you're giving them, the content that you're giving them is relevant to their needs, when its quality content, RSS will get your content delivered 100 percent. We all know with email, even if the consumer wants an email message, there are a lot of services and people along the way from the pipe that gets the email from the marketer to the consumer that actually prevent that email from getting through to the final destination. Like local spam filters, the server spam filters, the black list and so on and so on. There are numerous factors that prevent an email from getting delivered.

With RSS that problem is now gone. If you have on one side a marketer that's delivering relevant information and on the other side the consumer that wants to receive that information, that information will flow directly to the consumer without any chance of it being stopped along the way. RSS, in terms of content delivery, gives a marketer the power to reliably, so 100 percent reliability, get the content to the consumer. On the other hand, it gives the consumer the power to keep or reject the content that he doesn't want. That's number one. That is also one of the issues that marketers and publishers were mostly interested in with RSS, but RSS also has so much more to offer.

If I just take you, very briefly, through the business concept of what it is you actually can do with RSS. What can you do with the pipe? The number one thing, I'll say the easiest thing to do is, you use it to conduct market research. You actually know what people, companies anywhere around the world are saying about topics that matter to you because, like you said at the beginning, RSS is the pipe. It's the pipe that gets content from you to the subscriber, but it's also the pipe that gets content from other publishers directly to you.

Now, imagine this. There are millions of websites. Every website that has an RSS feed gives you the opportunity to take that RSS feed and automatically scan it for keywords that matter to you. Let's say I'm interested in my last name. I enter the keyword "Hrastnik" because I want to know what people are saying about me. Using RSS I can plug into almost any news site, blog, even newsletter around the world and then collect only the posts, or let's say the content, that includes my last name.

At any time I know what anyone is saying about me. Let's expand this to any kind of business intelligence needs you might have. You might be interested in what people are saying about your brand so you want to watch what the journalists are saying. You want to watch what the analysts are saying. You want to watch what the consumers are saying.

Jeff: In the old days you had to pay big money to pay a service to actually do this for you. Nowadays, even though it's...

Rok: Yes, exactly.

Jeff: In fact, I just played around, for the first time, to be totally honest with you, with Yahoo Pipes.

Rok: Which is amazing.

Jeff: Appropriately named Yahoo Pipes because what it allows you to do is exactly what you're...actually people can create these what they call pipes which are essentially... I don't know, how would you describe a pipe? A pipe, I guess, is a...it can be exactly what you just described...a series of queries... Or you say to Yahoo Pipes, "I want to monitor for my name in these 15 or 20 or 30 feeds." That's exactly what it does. Actually there's a pipe preset up by somebody else that I happened to find.

I just went ahead and I put my name into it, and said "Ron" and there it was. I grabbed the XML feed, the RSS feed and I put it in my reader and there it is. It took me all of about 30 seconds to do exactly what you just described. Someone had actually already set that up and I learned how to actually set that up myself because I looked at how they set it up. You can literally do those kind of things pretty easily on your own nowadays.

Rok: RSS, from the perspective of market research and business intelligence is the easy clicking tool that doesn't cost you any money, and does deliver all the relevant information to you from all the different sources: news media, journalists, analysts, bloggers, communities, forums, even newsletters which are then [indistinguishable]. Really anything you want, RSS will bring that to you. RSS based services like Yahoo Pipes and services like my Syndicate, will filter out only the stuff that you care about. You always know what's happening, what your competitors are doing, what your customers are saying, what people are saying about you and so on and so on. First of all, like we're just explaining, RSS is a key market research and business intelligence tool.

Jeff: OK, so you can get market intelligence and business intelligence from it. You can gather up information by using things like the tools that you just named, Yahoo Pipes being one of them, basically to intercept the pipes, information flowing through the pipes and filter it out and make useful use of it. You can also use it to deliver things such as...I suppose marketers are using email to deliver promotional items, all kinds of things. I suppose that's what you're going to tell me next is that a marketer could also push promotions through RSS. Right?

Rok: Oh, yes, but I'm still not there so let me take you through the flow first thus, thank you for the cue, by the way, you have marketers that love doing email promotions, like you just said. The beautiful part here is that there are actually services that allow you to subscribe to those email promotions. Let's say you're a retailer. You're Sears and you want to know what Wal-Mart is doing, so how Wal-Mart is promoting stuff. You want to know how Enzon is promoting stuff, how Target is promoting stuff and so on. They don't have an RSS feed. What are you to do now? Simply, you use one of our email RSS services. Subscribe to their email promotions and then get all of that content, again, delivered into your RSS feed.

Jeff: So you're telling me I'm going to go sign up for Sears, and maybe Target, and maybe Macy's. I'm going to subscribe to their email services which means I'm going to start getting email from them. How does that have anything to do with RSS?

Rok: Well, you'll just take that email subscription and you'll use a service that will convert that email subscription into RSS. Once you've converted it into RSS, it will just become one of the thousands or hundreds of content sources that you're filtering through to get the stuff that's really relevant to you.

Jeff: There's something that's going to basically catch an email that these retailers are sending out and convert it for me.

Rok: Yes, exactly. As a competitive retailer, you can now use that information, again, to watch, for example, what they're doing with laptops. Let's say that laptops are a competitive category for you. Let's say that you want to know what every big online retailer or even physical retailer is doing with laptops in the country or in the state or whatever. Using RSS, you can now combine different content sources like other RSS feeds, other websites and email newsletters, filter it all out to only get the well of information, what they're doing with laptops, and deliver that to your RSS reader directly.

Jeff: There actually are a couple of companies, I think, I don't know if they're using RSS, but they are definitely...Email Analysts I think is the name of the one I'm thinking of right now...that actually does provide that as a service. I think what you're saying is here is RSS providing a business opportunity, right? To create, in this case, a service that does this, perhaps, for competitive intelligence for marketers.

Rok: Not just that. The power here is that in the past if you wanted clipping services, say if you want to know what people are saying or in like the case you're just explaining, if you want to know what the other retailers are doing and so on, you need to pay someone money, right? Often you need quite a lot of money to pay them. You won't find any average Joe or any small time entrepreneur or mom and pop business using these kinds of business intelligence services just because simply they can't afford them. In this part, RSS is leveling the playing field. RSS gives this power, even for free, to anyone in the world. Even if you are one an operation you can now easily conduct business intelligence using RSS. It's definitely something that many entrepreneurs will find helpful. This, of course, is just one of the things. If you move on, in this part, RSS tells you what the market wants, thinks, and does.

Second, and this is the part where you're talking about earlier, RSS helps you generate more online traffic. Number one, yes, by publishing RSS feeds with your product information, with your content, that will actually help you get more traffic from the search engines. Especially from those that are news based. Also what we're seeing in the past two years is also, in a small part, a sort of search revolution. We have the traditional search engines, like Google, like Yahoo and stuff like that. They give you what's the most relevant piece of information regardless of the time.

Now we have news engines which are also search engines. They're all actually provided by the search engines which tally what's relevant, but what is the most recently relevant piece of information. If you go to a service like www.news.google.com and type in RSS you'll get the most relevant and the most recent news about RSS. Implementing RSS as a marketer you can actually plug into news engines like this, the blog engines and so on, and get your content to the people that are looking for the latest thing right now. It helps you utilize additional traffic sources. On the other hand...

Jeff: What you're saying is that Google looks to aggregate and utilize RSS feeds, and to power Google news as an example.

Rok: Part of their services, yes, and also services like Technorati and others. That's just one part of the generating traffic. The second one is online syndication. By creating RSS feeds and making them available you can now actually approach other websites. For example, I could approach you. You have a marketing audience and I say to you, "OK, look Jeff, I'm going to send good stuff about RSS where I mostly tout the stuff that helps marketers utilize RSS and you're running a website for marketers.

How about if I give you my RSS feed? You can then take the summaries of my content put them on your website so you can actually supply people with relevant information about RSS. Of course, when they click on the link they'll get to my site, but they will get to me through you. You're actually increasing the value of your website for your visitors. You're getting more value for the visitors and I'm getting more traffic. It's actually a win win situation."

Some websites have actually taken this concept and turned it into a form of business art. Just take a look at the lovely dot industry www.radar.com. This website has become the primary source of latest news for the human resources and employee benefits industry. Basically what they're doing is they're plugged into the different and thousands and thousands of content sources about employee benefits and human resources and so on. They're doing that through the use of RSS.

They're taking their RSS feeds then on their website they're republishing the summaries of that content, of course [indistinguishable] organized everything else. Basically they're taking content from thousands of other websites and republishing the summaries of that content on their own website. Of course, linking back to the originating source so if the visitor wants to get all the information they need to click through. Essentially you now have websites that are becoming the primary news and content sources for a specific industry just by aggregating content from other websites. Of course, those websites in addition get more traffic because these websites are directing traffic to them. RSS helps to get more traffic also by syndicating your content to other websites. Again, in the generating more traffic department, third part is by...I'm sorry I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.

Jeff: Well, that's OK. It's like 11pm by you.

Rok: Yeah, it is.

Jeff: You're just getting started.

Rok: Now we were talking about this online syndication part from the marketer point of view. You're a website that wants to get your content to other websites, and get it republished there so they generate more traffic for you. Now, take a look at this. From the publisher point of view which, of course also [indistinguishable] the marketer. While you're syndicating your content to other websites, of course, you also want to enrich the content on your own website. Again, you plug into other relevant websites and RSS feeds. For example, in my case, that would be, I would plug into all the websites or writing about RSS and provide that news also on mine.

Jeff: So really what you're discussing here is you're talking about a scenario. I'm struggling to understand something. There are other people who are also listening and struggling to understand. I think what you're describing is a scenario in which you are, as a marketer, you're not just offering a store filled with products. You're really offering, almost like, is it L.L. Bean, I think, which is known for the magalog? You're offering a magazine and a catalog? You're offering something that is, I think it's L.L. Bean, that is a...you're offering information as well as to help that person make an educated purchase as well as the products.

Rok: Exactly. This, actually is much, much more easier to explain in writing in the screen shots. Then it is by doing voice.

Jeff: Right, right. That's what I'm saying. I'm trying to clarify. As you're describing this you're saying, "Well just go get other relevant information that other people are publishing and put it on your site." I can just imagine that people are thinking as they're listening to you are saying, "Why the hell would I do that? I don't do that today." I think a lot of this is quite scary to some people. To the companies that do these magalogs and surround a lot of their products and services with a lot of information almost to the point of editorial, I think that it's not so scary for them. I think a lot of companies, at least here in the U.S...we had what in 1999 or so there's a company called www.garden.com. I don't know if you remember them? This was very much...

Rok: No, I don't actually.

Jeff: This is very much... Well it's too bad that they died because this is exactly what their approach was. Was very content heavy, very information heavy and they would sprinkle products in throughout. I think that's what you're saying is that you can go get some of that. You don't have to hire writers to create all that information, you can go get some of that through RSS feeds, and sprinkle that throughout their site. I think that's what you're saying.

Rok: Yeah, exactly like that and the best part here is when you're providing access to this information on other websites so when you're the portal to the content on the other websites. If, for example, you're Webstar this actually brings you more credibility. For example, let's say you're an online retailer and, of course, you'll be saying great stuff about the products that you're carrying. That's basically part of your selling job, but the credibility there is really on shaky ground.

As everyone knows, "OK, well sure, you're trying to sell this product to me. Of course, you're saying everything is perfect here well on so and so. But if you plug in into other content sources and actually enable people to read more about the product on that website, that's adding credibility because that's not your content. That's what someone else's is saying, that's not what you're saying.

I can give you a great example. Like for example, something that's, I don't know, Amazon.com could do. They're not doing it but it's something that they could easily do it. Let's say that they're selling a laptop. Let's say you're selling a tablet PC, the HP TC 4400. They do their product page like they do it normally. They do their own product description and so on. They have comments from their customers and everything that you'd expect from a Web store. But let's say that now, Amazon wants, to first of all, enrich that content so their customers make better informed decision. So one way of doing that would be to add videos of how to use that product which, of course, they don't really want to do themselves. Even for a company that size, they don't have the resources to do product demonstrations for [indecipherable].

Jeff: They have a lot of products, yes.

Rok: So what you do is you plug into [indecipherable], of course, you plug into MyTube. So you plug into MyTube and then, on your product page for this laptop, provide links to the videos that people are making about this laptop on MyTube. So you give immediate access to product demonstrations for the product that you're selling without actually having to make this kind of product demonstration yourself. That's one, number two is, OK, let's say again, you want to give people the best information about the product and that means also you might want to have them research the product better.

How would people research products nowadays, they are using blogs and they're looking at what people are saying on blogs about the product. So you plug into service like Technorati.com truly delivers content from thousands and thousands of blogs and you--basically, just on your website--display the latest conversations about this product. Of course, if someone clicks through, they get to the regional blog that made this post, but you actually display comments and discussions from bloggers on your product page. You do the same with news items; you can do the same with latest reviews from various websites and so on. So, basically, you enrich your product page by adding content from third party sources to help the customer make their decision.

Jeff: Once again, there are companies out there that are actually providing that--well, certainly not for free--so I will say a relatively expensive solution. I think part of what scares marketers a bit is that, as an example, there's certainly a quality guarantee. With regard to reviews, in particular product reviews, there's a quality guarantee that they're going to get, when they do business with somebody when they're writing someone a check every month, with regard to the quality of those reviews. Let's be honest, the more positive reviews from marketer, the better they're going to want more positive reviews than negative.

Aren't you taking your hands off the wheel a little bit? You can't really drive the car as well when you're really going out there. It sounds like what you're describing can be done for just next to nothing. You just take the time to grab those RSS feeds or perhaps use a Yahoo!! Pipe to tweak it exactly how you want it, then you put it on your site right underneath your product image. Do you think that's scary for marketers? Is that one of the reasons why they're not adopting it faster?

Rok: Yes, it's scary, it is, you're right. Yes, also the other point, right on point, any one could do this now. It's scary, but marketers are no longer in the driving [indecipherable]. So today anyone could go, and everyone does do that, they just go to Google, type in the product name and that then gets a lot of information about the product and a lot of that information will be negative. So people will find the negative information. If you are, of course, providing access also to the negative information, you're enhancing and increasing your credibility with the consumers.

Jeff: Yes, and it's almost like what you're describing--I don't know if you're familiar with Progressive car insurance--but here in the US--by the way, for those listening, Rok is in Slovenia in Eastern Europe, although he's pretty hip to what's going on here in the US, I have to say. There's a company called Progressive that tauts--you should go to their site, Rok, it's Progressive.com. Right on the front page, you'll see that what they do is they provide auto insurance quotes.

But the interesting thing is they provide insurance quotes not only for themselves but also for their competitors because they believe so strongly that--exactly what you just said--number one, the consumers are going to find those quotes anyway on their own. Number two, Progressive is positioning as a destination for auto insurance quotes. They know that consumers are going to shop around. They want consumers to shop around on their turf. So they want the information source and as long as they're in the information source, they are in fact in the driver seat.

Rok: I'm on their website right now and yes, you're absolutely right. This is exactly the model.

Jeff: None of their competitors, to my knowledge, are using it because I think, they're too scary. But that's the section where you describe.

Rok: Yes. Exactly.

Jeff: RSS is very kind to anybody who wants to do that kind of a thing in terms of setting it up and allowing people to research right there on your e-commerce site.

Rok: Exactly. And then, there's also the additional benefit--now we're getting back to that generate more online traffic part. When you have a product page--let's say about a product--when you enrich that product page with content from other sources and that content actually refreshes everyday, Google and the other search engines will recognize you as a very, very powerful source of content or information for the keywords for that product. So that will help you get better search engine rankings because now, even Google recognizes you as one of best locations online to get this kind of information. So this is very powerful.

On the other hand, this is my case number three for RSS, [indecipherable] you getting you more traffic, of course, it will also helps you keep your traffic and get it to come back for more. If they know that if they come to your website they will get all of these latest news, like for example, they're interested in laptops or computing or whatever, that they know that if they come to your website they will get access to all of these latest information. So you will become the access point and that will drive people back to your site to get more and get more and get more.

Jeff: So that's number three. Can you just quickly go through what one and two and three are all in one breath.

Rok: Number one, conducting market research; number two, generating more traffic; number three, keeping that traffic and getting each to come back for more. Now number four is what you got [indecipherable] at the beginning and that's actually getting your content delivered to the subscriber. Now, there is one very, very important point I would to make here. How much time are we doing in the marketing now since 1996, right? And throughout these years, what about more for about 11 years, marketers have perfected how they'd get the email address.

So marketers today know that if they just put a subscription form on their website and then just simply say, "Well, this is our news. To subscribe, please enter your email here", they won't get any pick up. If they just say, "This is our news, please subscribe" no one will subscribe. So what they do is they add all of the benefits to tell people, the visitors why they should subscribe to their newsletter.

They give them all of the reasons why they must subscribe, and also they often bribed them with white papers, discounts, and so on. For example, we [indecipherable] are masters at doing this - at bribing people to give us their email addresses. We get 60 to 70 thousand email addresses in a month, just simply by bribing people to give us their email address. This is what we have to do. This is what marketers need to do to get the email addresses - this is their list of part of the market.

Now, look at how marketers are, in a way, selling - I wouldn't say selling for money, but selling the idea of subscribing the RSS feeds. You go to a website, and there it is, the orange RSS button. Just sitting there somewhere. You don't know what it is - it's orange, it's there, that's it. [Man two chuckles.] I mean, why should I subscribe again?

Jeff: Right.

Rok: Oh, yeah, sometimes they say, "Subscribe to our news via RSS." Really, that's...

Jeff: ...not very compelling.

Rok: [sarcastically] Yeah, I really care about your news. I care about what you have to say to me. I'm dying to hear news about Cisco or whatever.

Jeff: So what you're describing is kind of the state of the market. What do you say to a marketer who's got that orange button sitting there? Do they need to sell it?

Rok: Yeah, they need to sell it. They need to do it exactly like they're doing it with email. They need to take the email marketing approach for getting subscriptions and implement it for RSS. They need to sell the subscription.

Jeff: The obvious problem here is that not everybody has the latest version of Internet Explorer, which has a built-in RSS reader function. Even if they did have that, it's not... well, it's somewhat intuitive in terms of you're subscribing to something, and in terms of using the actual reader that's built into the new version of Internet Explorer.

What I'm getting at is the adoption of RSS readers - I mean, people don't understand that they're using RSS when they use the Bloglines service, as an example, or a better example would be My Yahoo! Which is much more popular. When you have customized your My Yahoo! Page, or your Google home page, to give you the news of the day, you are in fact plugging in different pipes, and I don't think people have yet made that connection - that, "Oh, here's a pipe!" at my favorite retailer's. They don't have anything to snap that pipe into that is convenient for them. What do you say to that, Rok Hrastnik?

Rok: You have to tell them what it's about. Just look at Internet Explorer 7. You have that orange button in the taskbar, glowing there, and telling you please subscribe. Why should I subscribe? Just say, on your website, like you're doing with the newsletter, "Click here to get top-to-top diet tips, to get information. How to lose weight in five days? Click here and you'll get that information directly into your web browser whenever it's updated without having to visit our website to get it and without spam. And if you subscribe now by clicking here, you'll also get a free white paper on how to lose five kilos within the next three days."

So you need to tell people what they're getting and how it actually works. So you get yourself that - you tell them, "Click here. If you're using Internet Explorer, click here" and if they are using Internet Explorer... Actually, you can write a script that will recognize if they're using Internet Explorer seven and will just make it easy for them to subscribe through Internet Explorer 7.

Then you also give, of course, the option to subscribe through My Yahoo! You don't even say, "This is RSS." You just say, "If you are a My Yahoo! User, click here and our latest content will get directly to your My Yahoo! Page." It's as easy as that.

Jeff: Now you're telling me how to sell it.

Rok: Exactly.

JEFF: you have to sell it in a way that and I think we are seeing this on blogs. We are seeing people display icons for MyYahoo, for adding something to your Google [indecipherable] or your Google home page. We're seeing that in the blogging community, but I guarantee that we're not see much of that, at least I'm not.

I do a lot of shopping online, if not all of it. I might go to the grocery store every once in a while to get some food, but I don't see marketers. I don't see MyYahoo buttons on their e-commerce sites yet.

Rok: Yes, but it's not just that. I don't want people listening to this thinking it's enough to put the MyYahoo button up there. So, OK, I'll give this to you in three steps.

Number one. Sell the RSS concept without using the word RSS.

JEFF: ...without using the word RSS, exactly.

Rok: yes, make it technically feasible for someone to subscribe without getting shit scared of what pushing this button will actually do. And so, sell the RSS concept without talking about RSS.

Second. Slice up why they should subscribe. What the benefits of the content. And this is what bloggers are doing it all along. So bloggers, again, just put that orange button, put the MyYahoo button and everything else up there and just wait for someone to subscribe. No, tell them that subscribe here to get the latest top tips on how to make RSS marketing work for you.

Number three. Sell it really hard by telling them, if you subscribe today, right now, or in the next five minutes even add cow dung to it, I don't care. You'll also get a free white paper on how to make RSS marketing work for your organization in five days.

JEFF: As an example.

Rok: Yes, as an example.

JEFF: Because that's what you said, I just want people to be clear that, because that's what you, Rok, are selling is the full time RSS. So tell me...So, OK. You've answered a lot of questions that have been bugging me lately and I'm sure questions that have been bugging other people.

Rok: Can you give me five more minutes?

JEFF: Yeah. Well, I want you to plug the book and tell us why we should buy the book.

Rok: I'll plug the book. I'll plug the book in five minutes. Because I just want to get two more things out of the way before I do that.

So now you got, you get your visitors to subscribe, which of course is the hard part. So it is just like doing lead generation for email. So you have the subscription. Now, of course, the next big part, and this again where we are seeing the 1996 mentality all over and over again, you need to make that subscription work for you. So you need to take advantage of that lead and sell to those people.

Of course, but how do you do that? How do you actually use RSS to deliver content that will make the sale? Well, you don't do it by sending the same stuff to everyone in the world. So, in my book, I'm calling this generic RSS. So, generic RSS feed is the same for everyone.

So, let's say I would go to Sears, subscribe to an RSS feed and that feed would be the same for me and it will be the same for you and for everyone else. So everyone that subscribes to generic RSS feed, always gets the exact same information. But I, for example, might be laptop buyer. You might be a household buyer, or might be a fitness buyer, or you might be a woman that's purchasing products for women. I might be a man that's only buying fitness stuff. Now even marketers as you know have become masters at targeting promotional and other messages to consumers with database market asylum. So with email, it's perfectly clear how every email marketer...

JEFF: I was just going to say what you're, Rok, describing to me as a marketer is a lot of work. But what you are saying is... I think what you are getting at is that you are predicting the rise of, I don't know if you do this in the book or not, but where you are going here is that you are predicting that there will be helpers for marketers to do this kind of stuff.

Rok: There are. This is called individualized RSS. There are already companies doing this, so this is easily accessible.

JEFF: Where are they? Are they in Europe? Are they in the US?

Rok: No, they're in the US. For example, in the US you have Silverpaw which is also an email company so you get benefit of integration. You have Simple Feed which is also one of the users in the RSS base. In Europe you have www.nuked.com and a bunch of other companies as well. You have companies that go out of their way to target the RSS email messages to the right consumer, to the right subscriber. What I'm getting at here is the mindset, the mindset of the RSS marketer. The mindset right now is the same mindset we were seeing in email back in 1996. Everyone gets the same stuff. What RSS marketers need to do today is to start using the email targeting mindset or I'll say the database marketing mindset. Start targeting, start personalizing, and start customizing. This is what works in email; this is what works in RSS.

The third point...so we have this subscriber. You got it through use of old email tactics. You're targeting content to him so you're giving him the information that's relevant to him. Now, of course, you need to get him from the feed to the purchase. Again, email marketers and direct marketers are geniuses at this with their calls to action. Unfortunately most RSS feeds do not have calls to action. Point number three, start using relevant calls to action and tell people what to actually do when they're reading their RSS feed. Just like you would with email or with direct mail or any other direct messaging channel.

If you do these three then you'll be on a great way to making RSS marketing, on the outbound side, really work for you. We're talking about market research, generate online traffic, keeping your traffic, getting it to come back for more, getting your content delivered and so on. This is basically what the new book is about. The new book, the new RSS marketing e-book, that I'm just finishing right now takes all the core business uses for RSS, explains them step by step, gives you all the right information to help you really make the best use of RSS for marketing and also helps you create a marketing plan specifically for your organization.

The difference...the old RSS feed book that was published back in 2005 was based on, it was just a general mix of what you can do with RSS. The new book focuses on specific marketers and what they can do. We have chapters for "RSS for Public Relations Experts", we have "RSS for Direct Marketers" with easy to understand and use strategies and tactics for each of the marketing functions. Telling exactly how, for example, if you're an online retailer, how you can use RSS to get the most out of it. Essentially it's all step by step, really focused on different marketing functions and what they specifically can do with specific strategies for those marketing functions.

Jeff: It sounds like you've made it not so scary?

Rok: That was the plan. The original book, now that was scary. People were actually buying it, people actually liked it, but I'm worried that was more because it was the only book on the topic at the time. When I try to read it, God, I was scared.

Jeff: You, yourself, were scared!

Rok: Yeah, I was wondering did anyone ever actually read this from start to finish?

Jeff: Well, I think there's a lot of information there. I think what you're saying is that this time you've broken it down to the point where someone who if, like you said, they're a public relations practitioner, there's a whole section on it just for them. They might find the other chapters anecdotally interesting. In fact, they probably will because public relations cross into other aspects of a business, right? They can zero in on the area of concentration that they're in as well as, it sounds like, you've make it a little more digestible. That's kind of why I wanted to talk to you today was because I don't think that anybody...I don't know how many times we use the letters RSS, but I think probably too many times. I think you agree that's part of the problem. People hear the term RSS and...

Rok: Get scared.

Jeff: It's kind of like talking about all that HTML. We don't talk about HTML anymore, but yet it powers the Internet, right?

Rok: Yeah, or SMTP for email.

Jeff: Exactly. I think it's important that people understand that although...I don't know if it's in the title of the book or not...but, although RSS is really in it's infancy...I guess that really does underscore the fact that this is in its infancy and that this really is something big. I think it's obvious that this is something that's pretty big because of the flexibility that this gives you, and the fact that there are so many advantages to being able to aim pipes that are sending information all over the Internet. I guess what I'm saying is, everything is able to be put into that pipe, everything, including email, including a website. How can this not be an exciting technology? It just is and once you get things flowing through pipes, what you're saying, Rok, is I can use a device, many different devices, actually, to intercept a lot of that stuff repurpose it. I think that's what Yahoo Pipes is all about.

You're taking pipes and just picking the ones that you want and you're picking information out o...lots and lots of information flowing through four or five of these pipes, but you're only taking the information that you want. Yahoo then gives you the ability to sort through it in a way. One of the things I found interesting was duplication. Certainly there are different blogs publishing the same information. You don't want to have a pile of information that's in duplicate. You just want to know, perhaps, that one news item so it filters it out for you without you even having to think about it. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about RSS, Rok. Where can people find more information about you and the book?

Rok: Well, first of all, thank you for interviewing me, this is a real pleasure. OK, if they want the latest RSS news, how to and stuff like that they should turn to www.rssdiary.marketingstudies.net. Be forewarned the blog is on hiatus until I finish the book. You'll get more information soon.

Jeff: Depending on when people are listening to this. We'll pull this out for a while. Good. If someone wants to probe you directly, I don't know if you do consulting and that kind of stuff, but do you take email requests or anything like that? Is there a site or an email address?

Rok: Sure. They can just go to the website, everything is there and if they're interested in the actual RSS e-book they should go to www.rss.marketingstudies.net. Now depending on when you're listening to this interview you might still get to the old website and the old e-book. If you want RSS right now simply get that e-book and you'll get the new version for free. Every customer from the previous version will get the new one for exactly $0 so it can just go ahead and get started.

Jeff: I know that you come to the Direct Marketing Association Conferences, many of them at least, and that's where I actually had a chance to meet with you in person recently. Do you get to conferences often and if so where might people actually track you down? I know you're doing some speaking and those kinds of things. Where should people look for you?

Rok: I'm definitely coming to the next DM Annual in October in Chicago. I'm speaking there on RSS. I'm heading a panel on advanced RSS tactics for e-commerce so please, if you're in Chicago drop me a call and we can go for a cup of coffee or we can actually go listen to our session which would really be great.

Jeff: Yeah, I will definitely do that, but anyone listening should know that Rok is a pretty busy guy, but he's pretty approachable. If you can corner him at a conference you'd be well served. Get as much information out of him as you can. Although you're being pretty generous with the book. It sounds like everything that you're giving away there is well worth whatever the book costs. Thank you again, sir and I hope to talk to you again soon. Maybe we can do this again.

Rok: Well, Jeff, thank you very much and I would love to do this again. Have a great time and again, thank you for the interview, I loved it.