I've been fortunate enough to meet some very interesting RSS executives and CEO's over the past few months, one such CEO is Fergus Burns of Nooked. His company and business model are quite interesting so I thought I'd share a little more information about Fergus and Nooked here by way of a Marketing Shift Q & A. I recommend reading all you can about RSS & feed based marketing, imho it's a growing trend that will have the same effect the search engines had on traditional marketing back in the day. The new push is pull, it's all the rage.

Q: What is your background?
A: I've been working on Nooked for the past 3 years - previously I worked for numerous start-up companies in an advisory capacity. From 1994 to 2000, I worked for Microsoft - I started off on the engineering side of the house, and moved over into management after 3 years.

For a large part of my Microsoft career, I was involved in "content" driven products - Encarta, Streets & Trips, MapPoint, MSN - the one theme is my exposure and usage of markup technologies - from SGML to HTML to XML.

Q: What does Nooked stand for & How do you pronounce it?
A: Nooked is pronounced - Nuked. It's a derivative of the Gaelic for News - Nuacht - pronounced - Nuked.

Q: How many employees are working on Nooked at this time?
A: We're a small team of 10 people.

Q: How long have you been in the feed space?
A: I could claim that I've been dabbling with feeds since the CDF days. In all honesty we really started to get into RSS in 2001 - we started to see these cool aggregator applications appearing that meant that consumption was going to be ubiquitous over time.

Q: What is the business model behind Nooked?
A: The business model has been simple to date - we have a value proposition for corporations where they wish to publish their communications through RSS. They pay us a subscription fee to use our service - which is an on-demand, hosted service. We call that product our Nooked FeedWizard.

We have other service offerings that are coming out of lab - the basic premise is that we can monetize the publishing and consumption of enterprise communications, through different monetization models.

Q: Who is your target customer?
Our target customer at the moment is the VP of Marketing and/or Corporate communications Communications and/or Customer/Partner Ssupport - anyone at a CXO level whose responsibility it is communicate with customers onlinethe community. We also work with partners, such as communication agencies, who share the our same vision as ourselves, and who can work with the CXO levels to implement these forms of communications.


Q: How many feeds does your target customer currently have?
A: We offer each client on Nooked FeedWizard five Feeds "out of the box" as default. We can extend that number by any amount. The Nooked client base is growing every day - we have people using our service from all corners of the world. The number of feeds on the system is into the thousands at this stage, and we expect this to grow.

Q: Do you foresee a time when every user is given a unique subscriber url rather than a unique publisher url?
A: Yes, we do.

For the moment the focus and business demand, has been to provide a unique publisher URL - this is the standard implementation that we see on sites from Microsoft through to the likes of CNet.

In the future, publishers will want to get finer reporting and consumers will want a personalized experience from RSS, and the obvious way is to implement unique subscriber URLs. The only negative on this implementation, is that you create a significant bandwidth cost to both the publisher and the aggregator, which goes against some of the original principles of RSS.

By the way, Nooked supports both implementation scenarios.

Q: What mechanism is used to track stats on an RSS feed? Do you track unique clicks or do you also track views and crawler activity on each feed?
A: The primary mechanism at the moment is to track the click through activity. Using this metric, you can then drill down into time- based reporting, the source of the click through, the content or item preference, etc. Click through activity reporting has been made somewhat easier through the widespread use of the Google Adwords solution.

Views and crawler activity are also part of the reporting mix, but they are not as accurate as the click through measurement.

Q: Do you foresee a time when the number of subscribers to a company's feed will surpass the number of email mailing list subscribers?
A: Yes, we do. We see RSS a complimentary channel to Emailemail, rather than as a replacement.

From a publisher perspective, email marketing has been simple - get people to sign up, push message out and measure the conversion/commercial impact. Publishers have also been working to a monthly/quarterly schedule which acts as an "excuse" to get their message out.

This has changed dramatically due to Spamspam, CAN Spam Actact, Email email virus, etc. Consumers are moving to a scenario where they will only use email for communications with individuals and groups within a closed environment. Email newsletter view and clickthrough rates are declining.

RSS gets around a lot of the problems of newsletter publication schedules, Spam, opt-in, Virus, etc - it's a clean channel, which is 100% controlled by the consumer. If the consumer subscribes, you have created a communication flow, which can reward the publisher, as long as they don't break that "trust".

Q: Do you believe feed marketing and email marketing can coexist? Please explain?
A: Yes - they can co-exist. I think it will take a few years for people to move over completely. In the interim you need to have a hybrid solution - email gets sent out to people, but included is a link to the RSS feed (probably a unique url feed for that person). Over time the publisher will see the shift.

To help accelerate the market, we beta launched our Nooked Directory. We see it as a 'Yahoo' for corporate RSS, enabling people to easily find a number of feeds for a particular industry or business category. That is a problem people face today - how do I find RSS feeds? Can I have meta-feeds?

Q: How many paying customers does Nooked currently have?
A: Without giving away all our secrets, we've got a nice recurring revenue model at the moment - we're seeing conversions every day from our free trial to the subscription service.
As we continue to enhance the Nooked offerings, and as the market adoption rate for RSS increases, we anticipate our customer base to grow even quicker over the next 6 months.

Q: If you could use a single word to describe RSS feeds, atom feeds, feed marketing in general and anything that has to do with xml syndication, what would it be?
A: That is a trick question - Conversations - would be my best attempt.


Interesting tidbits section

Q: Rugby or Football [European version]?
A: Football - but I also like Rugby

Q: Email Marketing or RSS Marketing?
A: RSS marketing

Q: Where do you live?
A: Ireland

Q: What cell phone do you use?
A: Sony Ericcsson

Q: What kind of car do you drive?
A: VW

Q: Google or Yahoo!?
A: MSN :)

So today Shannon turns another year year more beautiful and wise. I wanted to get up at 5:30 to have a couple surprises ready for her but that turned into 6:30 or 6:45 (can't remember now). Anyway, I dashed downstairs when I woke up and furiously put her two birthday cards together... I hated the fact I had to rush (meant I didn't plan ahead very well) but I put her birthday card from me together. That means I underlined a bunch of words in the default birthday for wife poem and put a snappy new 10 dollar bill in the card and licked the envelope... ewwww, worse than morning breath. Then I forged Shannon's birthday card from Piper (shhhhh, don't tell Shannon). Piper could only afford to give Shannon 1 dollar but it's the thought that counts anyway. Then I sealed Piper's card and started on breakfast.

Shannon's birthday breakfast consisted of 1 blueberry muffin from BJ's (Piper got one too even though it wasn't her birthday) and a glass of orange juice. Then I made Piper's morning milk and figured out a way to carry all of this upstairs and didn't drop anything until I got to the top of the stairs. That's where I was greeted by Piper crying on the floor in front of her sister's room (I have no idea how Finley slept through that fiasco). I managed to get Piper off the floor and showed her the blueberry muffin and after 5 minutes or so she calmed down and Shannon got Piper's bday card and the 54oz Hershey's Mint Chocolate Bar. Then my card for Shannon was next with my 54oz Hershey's milk chocolate bar.

So it was a pretty good morning, sans Piper's crying. Piper and I did a few little vinette's for Shannon that included an impersonation of the flying Frogdini's and saying houpla a lot. We also sang happy birthday to Shannon at least 5 times and to Piper at least 3 so everyone know's today is mama's birthday.

I couldn't have picked a better soul mate if I was given my pick of anyone in the world. Just ask Shannon, she'll tell you I tried to date every female in the world but it's lies I tell you, all lies :) Shannon gets me like noone else, she laughs at my corny jokes. She's wise beyond her years. She's an incredible mother, she knows when to be firm with Piper and she knows when to let some things slip... I still don't know how she does it. She's a living, breathing dream to me and I'm realizing more and more every day how blessed I am. Just look at the girls she's blessed me with.

Honey, I love you and hope you have a wonderful birthday!

Help me wish Shannon a happy birthday by commenting on her blog or getting something off of her registry... either of those really mean a lot to her.

I've gotten a lot of verbal feedback from various technology marketing execs about Jeremy Allaire's new company Brightcove. Most think it's similar to the role blogs are continuing to play with the major news channels [mostly television news like say The CBS Evening News formerly with Dan Rather]. They feel the ability to give on demand tv to anyone with a browser is huge but the ability to allow the little guy to be seen and heard via internet tv is even larger.

I personally believe this will bring about more advertising opportunities for small and large companies alike. Back in 95 you could launch your online store by simply being found in the Yahoo! directory and likewise now a blogger can launch an incredibly powerful and fruitful blog if he's commented on by the right blogger or if he's found in the search engines for relevant terms about the topics he covers. Now I think it's the indie videographer's turn. Perhaps Brightcove will offer the same type of opportunity to independent directors, actors and editors. The ability to get noticed because your work is easily accessible by the masses is where we're headed as a net society and that will flow over into the offline world as well.

I've always believed a man / woman should be judged based on what they bring to the table and what they're capable of. An artist carries a portfolio, as does a web developer, a real estate agent has a list of clients, a restaurant has secret guest diners and the list goes on... but the commonality is the fact that all of these people had to get noticed before they build any sort of reputation. An artist most likely had to work for free, the real estate agent had to have the guts to convince someone to let him represent them in the biggest sale / purchase of their life, the web developer probably had to do pro-bono work, the restauranteer had to know how to build a restaurant and cook before he could possibly expect people to pay him for the food he serves.

So if we can overcome the visibility factor and make getting noticed the easy part, then each person's | company's work will speak for itself. Then we're well on our way to a brighter tomorrow for all concerned [creator and end user]. Yes, I fully understand technology is simply a tool and is neither positive or negative but it's rather how we use it that makes it good or bad. I alo understand that every form of technology [new or old] is susceptible to some form of spam or wrongdoing but those of us who understand it are it's anonymous watchguards if you will. And I believe the entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow who will have the biggest impact on society as a whole will be the "enablers". They'll level the playing field as much as possible to the little guy can compete with the corporate giant and each will be judged based on what they bring to the table by way of their product offering instead of how big their marketing budget is. Hats off to Jeremy and company for taking us to a brighter tomorrow.