As media comms companies scramble to accentuate their value proposition in an increasingly competitive online and mobile media environment, one of the touchstones of their efforts is the "one click" mantra. In other words, make it as easy as possible for a customer to find the content they want. But there is an increasingly persuasive school of thought that holds one click is actually not few enough.
How could this be so? There are a steadily growing set of devices upon which any click is a hassle. The most numerous and obvious example is the cellphone, where the keypad is often a finicky and unpleasant way to enter any click at all.
Then there are devices such as the Chumby (www.chumby.com) for which the content displayed is configured online via a Web site which allows for both a selection of content to be made, and also the order in which that content will be displayed to be set. The cellphone is self-evidently a device for people on the go who don't want to have to stop and punch keys. The chumby is a device for people whose hands are otherwise occupied - for example, because they are bottle feeding a baby.
Therefore, there is a growing number of people who don't just want one click. Instead, they want no click. Or in other words, they want "set and forget". That is what a Chumby delivers. The RSS feeds are chosen for display and then the dear little Chumby goes ahead and serves up what has been chosen, in the right order, forever and a day. Or at least until the viewer gets tired of the selection and seeks a change from time to time.
The significance of this is that it is an ironic reversal of the popular wisdom. Those who see RSS as a fad with little relevance to the mass audience beyond early adopters tend to argue that personalisation is too complicated and esoteric for the majority of folk who just want a nice, simple content solution. But in fact, the simplest content solution around is actually the new wave of "set and forget" personalised feeds.
A good example, for those interested in technology news, is Techmeme (www.techmeme.com). Here I can conduct a search of all the technology news, fishing out, for example, any mention of "Jason Romney" or "Telstra BigPond" and then obtain those search results as an RSS feed. If I have an RSS reader on my phone or chumby, it will continuously present me with the corresponding finds, always freshly updated thanks to the operation of RSS. It is set and forget. Not one click, but no click at all.
Over time, BigPond will offer more and more of its content via RSS. Monetising RSS is sometimes a challenge because third party publishers who are the source of the RSS information, have rules about where an advertisement can be placed by parties "down stream" - such as BigPond - when the RSS feed is rendered. One of the key media questions of our time is what is sufficient for a media comms company to control the placement of an advertisement near an RSS feed? Does the media comms company need to own the handset only?
Certainly control of the physical device upon which RSS feeds will be displayed, does give the media comms entity substantial control over how advertising will pop up in the user experience. But there are some grounds to suggest the media comms company should also seek to control the software side of the RSS rendering experience also. This is what Apple achieves when it sells both hardware and software such as iTunes. It is what US telco AT&T is exploring when it makes available its own online browser in the form of its new Pogo product.
One of the difficulties with sustaining the two pronged approach - hardware and software based RSS rendering - is that scale is required to make it profitable in the short term. If the addressable audience is only local eg in Australia, rather than global - as is the target of the Googles, Yahoos and Microsofts in this world - then the advertising yield will always be challenged to reach acceptable performance targets. And there will be an inevitable conundrum, also, regarding marketing support. The marketeers will quite understandably want to put money into marketing properties that are successful, but success will only come to the new offering if it is marketed.
This is why media comms is partly about logic (the numbers, the empirical research from marketing segments etc), but also partly about confidence in beliefs about media trends: what is possible to achieve and why. It is arguable that only if this latter aspect of business development is given enough weight, that new offerings will ever be able to wrest adequate resourcing, long enough, to find a way to blossom.
The alternative is to conduct some kind of shortish trial, decide all too quickly that the property lacks a sufficient value proposition to be embraced by audiences, and terminate it prematurely. Whilst termination of non-performers may show business rigour and decisiveness (and be especially appropriate when it comes to media properties such as a poor performing new TV series where audiences are unlikely to change their initial predilection and somehow make the show popular later on) the same perhaps cannot be said as readily about applications. Applications take time for the early adopters to promulgate the value proposition and catalyse uptake. Applications leverage nascent media publishing and consumption trends - such as RSS results from search engines displayed on devices where any click at all is a burden - that are only just taking off.
It will be interesting to watch the business dynamics around these issues play out. They are, amongst many other things, at the epicentre of the media comms challenge.