I sat in on Robert Scoble's presentation during the Internet Strategy Forum about a month ago here in Portland. It was interesting to hear his battle with Facebook, and the amount of time it took for him to ultimately setup a profile, even though all of his buddies were recommending it. Its a result of what I call "Social Saturation," (having accounts with facebook, linkedin, flickr, blogger, myspace, pandora, twitter, etc., and being hesitant to setup yet another).

With that said, I came up with a new term (kind of) today:

Indie Fatigue (n.): Energy drain caused by trying to stay one step ahead of Corporate America and the general population, so you (feel that you) are not a sell out.

e.g.
I liked Moby until he was on all those commercials
Craigslist was cool, until my mom started using it (not sure if anyone has really said this)
I had a facebook account, until there were threats that Microsoft might take over.
Cuba was a great place to visit, until Castro died and they opened it back up to tourism (NOTE: this has not yet happened)

I agree that this concept needs some refining, and see three elements to it:

1. Trying to beat corporate america and big media (an independent...?)
   
2. Trying to do things that the general public is not. (a rebel)
   
3. Trying to discover the "next best thing." (a trend setter)

me: What kind of music do you like?
some dude: I like Indie music.
me: Why would you like this song over another, simply because the other is related w/ label?

I almost called it Trend Fatigue.... Maybe I should call it Hipster Fatigue

My point- At some level, many consumers will tire of chasing the hip, and settle. Posted by: Andy at 11:50 AM  |  Permalink

I'm a little torn on this one, but beyond losing a bit of brand integrity, why the heck not.

For one, it is cheap, but beyond that:

1. Try to re-engage (divert) that subscriber
2. Charge for the pageviews

No doubt, the creative could sure be improved on this one.

Question: If someone does try to unsubscribe, you then distract them during the process, and email them on schedule, have you really improved your relationship with that consumer? Posted by: Andy at 11:34 AM  |  Permalink

I typically do not blog about eROI projects, but a recent launch might just look like a normal site to some, but the cool things going on in the back-end should be understood by many.

To begin, it is a daily email blast for topics related to mind, body, and health. BeThree simply wanted a site that they could use as a landing page for each of the daily editions. eROI took it one step further.

First, we built out the site using wordpress. BeThree had an incredible amount of content, so we pre-posted 6 mos. worth of blog posts, each scheduled to go live on subsequent days.

Every morning, our email platform goes to the blog and pulls the respective content of that days post via RSS, populates the email, and sends a test to the admin who then has the option to pull the plug before the email is dropped one or two hours later.

The daily newsletter archives are then actually driven by the archive element on wordpress, which permalinks over to the respective blog posting.

eROI has been its own emailRSS tool to drive weekly updates (subscribe on this blog) aggregated from each of our own 4 blogs, and it has been working wonderfully.

Sometimes there is just more than meets the eye. Posted by: Andy at 11:56 AM  |  Permalink