The Coming Web Revolution

Big changes are afoot online. It’s still early, but I see two trends that will impact online marketing: 1) the sharing of content and 2) the sharing of applications.

These two trends haven’t fully arrived, and so they don’t have well-established names yet. But their early glimmers are visible today in the growth of really simple syndication (RSS) and the growing popularity of Web service application programming interfaces (APIs).

These trends — let’s call them “open content” and “open apps” — are coming fast. During the next few years they’ll revolutionize the Web, and in doing so, revolutionize online marketing. This article will show you why open content and open apps will matter to your business in the future, and explain how savvy catalogers can start using them today.

What Is Open Content?

I’ll use the phrase open content to describe sharing your online content (e.g., product information, specs, reviews, musings, customer feedback) in computer friendly format, usually XML.

The best example of open content today is RSS. With RSS, you can share information with customers, vendors and the media — in short, the entire world. Because RSS is a computer friendly format, it makes it easy for others to search your data, fetch it, republish it and use it in interesting ways.

Many people think of RSS as related to blogging. And indeed, blogging platforms use RSS to syndicate content across the Web.

Digression: If you haven’t checked out the blog phenomenon yet, do so today. The blogosphere is growing at a phenomenal rate. Technorati, a blog search engine, reports the number of blogs has doubled in the last five months, reaching 16.4 million blogs in September 2005. For starters, check out www.bloglines.com, www.newsgator.com and www.blogger.com. But RSS extends far beyond blogging. Here’s a grab-bag of some creative non-blog uses of RSS:

- coupon distributors, to push coupons for shoppers (www.dealoftheday.com);

- news wires, for press releases (www.businesswire.com); and

- companies, for general purposes (www.ibm.com/press).

I’d wager that more than half of all organizations with significant Web content offer some RSS feeds today, and I suspect almost every Web-related organization will do so within a year. As organizations publish mountains of great information via RSS, people search and read this information using RSS feed readers. This is all well and good, but because RSS is a computer friendly format, machines can read RSS, too. That’s where things get interesting.

With relatively little programming, you can build a software agent to, say, monitor your key competitors or watch for great real estate deals in your neighborhood. This trend toward open content will happen with or without you. It can influence your brand even if you don’t participate directly.

Consider the case of Kryptonite Lock. On Sept. 12, 2004, a blogger described how the formidable black bicycle lock easily could be picked using a simple pen. Within two days, other bloggers had picked up on this weakness, posting video demonstrations of the lock’s vulnerability. Kryptonite issued press releases, but the blog storm quickly spread. The story reached The New York Times on Sept. 17. By Sept. 19, Technorati estimated that almost 2 million online blog readers had seen some sort of post about the vulnerability.

To quell the storm, on Sept. 22 Kryptonite announced it would replace all affected locks. The incident cost the company $10 million in direct costs and far more in loss of reputation — and this blog storm blew up in just 10 days.

There are many other cases of bloggers harming brands, as well as cases of them helping brands. If it hasn’t already, the blogosphere will exert influence on your brand, too, both positive and negative. In the next two years, there will be thousands more external voices with the power to shape your brand than there were two years ago.

Using RSS Today

How can you use RSS to help your business today? Get familiar with RSS and blogs. Start reading before you start writing. On the content consumption side, monitor RSS feeds for intelligence on your brand and your competition. Use RSS feeds to syndicate fresh news relevant to your industry onto your Web site.

On the content creation side, provide customers the option to read your marketing e-mails via RSS. (Big advantages: no spam concerns, highly trackable and free.) Use RSS feeds to announce the arrival of new products, special offers and price reductions. And set up a blog to let your experts speak to and with your customers.

What Are Open Apps?

The second important online trend today involves open apps.

The Web’s most heavily used sites are front-ends to powerful computer applications. Consider search engines, e-commerce, online banking, online games and online travel reservations. The exposed public Web sites simply are human friendly input layers for the applications beneath.

As with open content, things get interesting quickly when computers start speaking to other computers. APIs let this happen. In short, an API is just a technical specification, a written document that describes how one computer can ask another computer to do something. For example, using eBay’s API, you could have your computer instruct eBay to post a new auction without having to click your way through all the Web screens.

Sure, programmers can write scripts to interact with Web sites without APIs. These scripts impersonate a person using a browser. The approach is called “screen scraping.” But it isn’t a valuable tool for two reasons. Scraping often is disallowed by a site’s terms of use, and breaking rules never feels good. Second, scraping is difficult because it’s brittle. Since it relies on the exact details of the HTML source, scraping code breaks each time the site owner modifies his or her screens.

APIs solve this problem. If a site wants to grant visitors access to its applications programmatically, it provides an API to do so. Many of the most interesting sites online today offer comprehensive APIs. See for example Google natural search (www.google.com/apis); Google paid search (www.google.com/apis/adwords); and Yahoo! paid search (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/af/yws_api.php).

Some of these APIs are public, some aren’t. Some are free, some aren’t. Why are these APIs so interesting? Just as RSS allows your computer to read content, APIs let your computers control Web services. Instead of a human struggling to manage bids manually on your paid-search campaigns, a well-programmed computer can do it faster, cheaper and better. Instead of using a person to manually track all your shipments, a well-programmed computer can do it.

Today, your organization probably doesn’t have sufficient business need (or available IT resources) to commit to the costly effort of building integration systems to tie into your vendors’ APIs. And your organization certainly doesn’t have sufficient business justification to consider creating your own API to let partners or customers interact with your internal IT systems. But some of your agencies might have built this integration layer. Your search marketing agency should be using the Google and Yahoo! APIs (and, soon MSN) to directly manage advertising on your behalf, with people and well-programmed software driving the APIs.

And some of your software vendors might provide this integration layer. Expect that as you upgrade your operations software (e.g., applications for Web, contact center, warehouse, accounting) during the next few years, the software you buy may start offering Web APIs.

These APIs would allow you to permit trusted partners to access your back-end systems. It’ll take a few years for such APIs to arrive, and a few more for businesses to invent creative uses of them, but both will occur. APIs will bring you and your vendors closer together. Just as open content will change marketing communications, open apps will change merchandising and media buying.

In September, Google began testing ad brokerage for print publications, as well as moving into voice over Internet protocol telephony. I predict the large search engines will morph into general business brokerages, changing the cost structure of entire industries: television media buying, real estate brokerage, travel and telecom.

Open content and open apps will influence your business during the next decade. Approach these new technologies strategically. Like the inventions of the 800-number, the credit card and the Web browser, these technical innovations will reshape the catalog industry.

An expanded list of links from this article can be found at: www.rimmkaufman.com/links/open-content-apps.

Glossary of Terms

Application Programming Interface (API): A specification that allows programmers to execute commands and retrieve data from some other application. Often that other application resides on remote servers, and the API runs across the Web; such APIs are called “Web services.”

Blog: Short for “Web log,” it’s an online personal journal with reflections, comments and hyperlinks, usually presented in reverse chronological order, annotated with visitor comments.

Document Type Definition (DTD): This describes a flavor of XML, specifying what tags and structure are valid in an XML document. There are hundreds of popular DTDs, among them really simple syndication (RSS) and DocBook.

Really Simple Syndication: RSS is a text file format that lets you describe your content (e.g., product information, ideas, press releases) in a computer friendly format. Using RSS lets other sites access, categorize, search and republish your information easily.

XML: A text-based markup language for sharing data, XML comes in different flavors (e.g., DTDs) for different applications, ranging from publishing to e-commerce to finance.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., heads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, a Web marketing services and consulting firm. He can be reached online via his Web site: www.rimmkaufman.com.