I spent the past couple of days in San Francisco for the Direct Marketing Association Annual Summit.  Our Co-Founder Brian is the President of the Seattle chapter of the DMA, so we have gone to this show for the past couple of years.  It's a huge event, but there is significant disparity between the level of sophistication that we see amongst marketers at shows like Shop.org and this one.

Last night, I was invited to a RSS Roundtable event sponsored by Pheedo and SilverPOP.  The idea was to allow RSS thought-leaders to convene and discuss the future of the medium.  It started out as a laid back networking event, but it eventually evolved into an interesting discussion.  I have only been in online marketing for seven years, so my perspective is admittedly limited, but I am amazed by how quickly marketers are inclined to abandon tried-and-true fundamentals every time a new medium is introduced.  A large part of the discussion was about whether or not personalization is imperative to the success of RSS.  Some people in the room felt like the advantage of RSS over email is anonymity, so subscribers should not be asked about their preferences.  This argument was supported by the rhetoric that "RSS is still in its infancy, so personalized RSS is something that will be born in a future phase of adoption."  These people were much more interested in the monetization of feeds that will occur through CPM and CPC advertising. 

At that moment, WhatCounts and SilverPOP became aligned in our proclamation that personalized RSS is already here.  We have both been offering it for quite a while.  There is no shortage of studies that clearly prove that relevant messaging is superior to broadcast messaging in every possible KPI: impressions, click-throughs, conversions, RFM, user experience, etc.  Just because a new medium has been created, marketers don't need to abandon this knowledge by reverting back to non-targeted messaging.  Whether we are using direct mail, billboards, email, RSS, viral marketing or smoke signals, the tried-and-true strategy of delivering the right message to the right person a the right time should not change.  E-Communications leaders like WhatCounts, SilverPOP and others clearly offer solutions for segmenting and personalizing RSS feeds to allow each subscriber to receive a version of the message that is relevant to his/her interests.  Jupiter Research and MarketingSherpa have published studies that prove that subscribers would prefer to volunteer more information to receive more targeted messages.  So, why wouldn't marketers want to invest in this technology for their subscribers?

Sure, anonymity might gain more subscribers initially, but I'd be willing to bet all of that advertising revenue that those people will unsubscribe as soon as they realize that your messaging isn't relevant to their interests.