Been a while since we looked at RSS feeds and with all of the catalogs appearing in my mailbox daily thanks to my resident All Star Shopper I thought I would rant a little bit. First up, courtesy of AdRants, Target is offering personalized weekly ads via email which is great. Too bad, they didn't mimic what Sears is doing via SimpleFeed and offer the promotions via RSS feeds. Even Lillian Vernon has a RSS feed too. As someone that has held various e-marketing positions in big corporations, I wonder why the management team at Target couldn't make the leap of faith and incorporate RSS fields off their site for a nominal fee via SimpleFeed? It can't be because their e-marketing team was clueless can it?
Then this study came out from BizRate that examines online marketing in the retail space for the upcoming holiday season. Before you jump for joy over the next number, I was disappointed with the people that did the study or combined the results. It said that 41.6% of retailers will incorporate blogs or RSS feeds into their holiday marketing strategy and 79.5 will use viral marketing at social networking sites. Just to round it out, 97.4 will use search marketing. Ok, so retailers get search - wow, glad they figured that one out and almost 80% see social networking as an opportunity which I'm not really sure I know what that means. Are they going to upload videos into YouTube, put up a page in MySpace, or use display ads? However, what is disappointing, is that they combined the results between RSS feeds and Blogs which shows a naivete in what that means. Blogs are social communicating sites while RSS feeds are a mechanism for pushing out news and information. Sure you can advertise on both, but they require different strategies.
I'm glad to see that retail companies are embracing the internet for selling their products. Too bad, they haven't really figured out how to use RSS feeds to cheaply and easily eliminate catalogs for marketing their products. If only, they'd take a meeting with SimpleFeed and make the life of heavy shoppers (like my wife) easier.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
US Postal Service won’t let you refuse mail.
If the US Postal Service would abide by its own rule, each homeowner could easily stop junk mail from getting into their mailbox by putting a written notice on their mailbox expressing their preference.
The US Postal Services practices are supposed to be according to the Domestic Mail Manual (DMM). The DMM contains provision 508.1.1.2 that says, “Refusal at Delivery: The addressee may refuse to accept a mailpiece when it is offered for delivery.” I interpret this rule to mean that if a homeowner wants to refuse an unwanted mailpiece (i.e. junk mail), the homeowner can do so when the mailpiece is offered for delivery. More to the point – refuse it before it is put into the mailbox!
In practical application, since the postal carrier comes to homes at different times each day, the homeowner cannot be waiting at the mailbox to dialogue with the mail carrier about each mailpiece. The only realistic way to interpret 508.1.1.2 therefore is that the homeowner should post a notice on the mailbox telling the postal carrier about the homeowner’s preference. The notice to the postal service must be specific and unambiguous. For instance, a homeowner should certainly be able to write, “No mail that is not addressed to the Jones” because that does not require the postal carrier to make a subjective judgment. On the other hand, it would not be acceptable to write “no junk mail” because the definition of “junk mail” is subjective and the mail carrier cannot decide.
Unfortunately, the US Postal Service has written to me that they will NOT honor a notice refusing mail, not matter how specifically it is worded, because the postal carrier does not have time to sort through the mail at my mailbox to pick out the pieces that are not addressed to me. Therefore, the US Postal Service is passing their sorting and disposing task onto me by putting all the mail they want into my mailbox, even though this seemingly violates 508.1.1.2.
Since the U.S. Postal Service will not abide by 508.1.1.2, homeowners need to stop unwanted mail at the source (i.e. by blocking the sender from sending it). We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel
Posted by: Ramsey Fahel | March 16, 2007 at 10:00 PM