Whenever I'm out and meeting new people, I usually ask - How's your business doing with it's online marketing?

In almost every case, the response is negative; it seems that small businesses (for the most part) have been left out of the movement to upgrade their sites to embrace web services and Web 2.0.

This isn't that surprising; web services and upgrades to your website to support XML and other technically challenging publishing models is not easy nor is it inexpensive. Larger firms have not experienced technology stagnation as much as smaller companies because they depend more on on partners and vendors who have pushed for deeper value chain integration. This has caused entire industries to keep pace with XML and open source standards.

Small businesses are typically under no such pressure so they stagnate. Another cause for technology stagnation in small businesses is the belief that since they built their own site with HTML, they shouldn't have any trouble re-building with more HTML. This is a fallacy for many reasons - a big reason is that search engines don't index just HTML - they also love XML, a different publishing format that provides the ability to add meaning to content, not just the content itself. Since search recommendations depend on deriving meaning from content resources, we can expect the demand for XML in addition to (and sometimes instead of) HTML.

Small business consultants are partly to blame as well; few have XML knowledge or the capacity to help their clients embrace these technologies, so they stick with vanilla HTML because well, it works, the small business person thinks it works, and everyone is happy. This is an incomplete version of reality. The bottom line -

"If your business content isn't being published in XML, you are risking becoming invisible to customers online."

My interest in this problem has been ongoing for almost a decade (XML 1.0 became a global standard exactly 10 years ago his week). How do small companies stay abreast with technologies that are relatively complex and sustain rapid changes to meet competitive threats and open doors to new sales opportunities?

Get a comprehensive assessment of your online marketing strategy from a consultant that has a strong track record with open standards computing and web services. You can usually know if this is the case by asking them for specific blog posts about XML and web services. If they've never written about these subjects, they probably can't help transition into the present - a web where integration, XML, and agility play a huge role.

At the outset, there are [perhaps] tens of thousands of small business owners that use Outlook with a POP email account; they don’t have access to an Exchange server. That said, the challenges for mobility and practical email management in this climate is challenging.

Synchronization

The key requirement for mobile email is synchronization; this is to say that when performing email tasks while away from the desktop, any actions taken, must also be reflected in Outlook when you return to the office. It really doesn’t help to create a reply or delete a message while away from the office only to return to an environment that hasn’t been updated to reflect the activities conducted away from the office. The lack of explicit and accurate synchronization erodes productivity, lessens the ability to use email as a knowledge management solution, and creates confusion for users.

Some argue that leaving messages on the server is the solution, but since Outlook supports only two deletion options; (i) delete from server after (n) days, or (ii) delete from server when deleted from the Deleted Folder, there’s no straightforward way to capture received emails in a locally accessible knowledgebase. Retaining messages locally in the deleted folder retains them on the server. Most business people want to keep received messages indefinitely, thus suspending them on the server indefinitely.

But it gets worse; assume you have a desktop and an iPhone and you blindly assume that setting up each client to leave messages on the server will meet your requirements. Messages sent from the iPhone will be saved to the sent folder on the iPhone; they will not be in the sent folder on the desktop. Most business people rely on their sent messages as a key component of basic knowledge management. Fragmenting messages across multiple devices eliminates all possibilities to manage historical communications in a manner that would allow one to find anything.

The Last Mile of Spam

Further complicating matters is the tired issue of spam control. While most ISP’s provide general spam filtering at the email server level, the vast majority of Outlook users spend a good deal of time tuning the last mile of spam rules to catch the 20% of useless messages that creep through the ISP filters. Reading our email pre-Outlook (as is the case with a POP account that leaves messages on the server) bypasses the last set of spam rules, thus forcing the user to manage spam in two locations; the desktop email client and the mobile device email client.

Business Rules

Many Outlook users create rules that manage email tasks such as filing, forwarding, and deleting messages. These rules exist in Outlook and some are fairly complex and critical to the productivity of the small business person. However, reading the messages on the server with your iPhone device requires you to see the messages before the desktop client is able to process them. This creates more effort, more thinking, more tasks and in an environment that is far less conducive to more tasks.

The Solution

The solution is simple – there should be only one authoritative location where email is received, managed, and archived. Oddly enough, this is precisely what Microsoft Exchange achieves. But for small businesses (whose owners and employees are typically more mobile than most), and who typically lack access to Exchange servers, they need an email-server proxy – i.e., a proxy that allows their mobile devices to arbitrate email transactions with Outlook running on their desktops.

Until last week, Soonr provided precisely this approach; a desktop server that transformed Outlook into a remotely accessible application. As messages were received, Soonr would update the remote view of the inbox by proxy. As new messages and replies were created, they were replicated as email transactions that occurred on the desktop. When I would return to the office, Outlook was exactly s it appeared on my iPhone.

A similar (and equally useful) solution was provided by AT&T some time ago, but they (like Soonr) decided to get out of the email business and probably for the same reasons – mobile email clients are available from many providers. Their stories (of course) read well on paper, but these providers are delivering client applications, not solutions.

It’s possible there’s a configuration that will meet my requirements, and I’ve simply over-thought the challenges. I’m open-minded to try new ideas, however, I’ve not found an abundance of alternative approaches. Please contact me if you know of any.

While there aren't many use cases for piping RSS content into Evernote, it is possible and it's not very difficult. Ideally, an Evernote API for RSS content would be helpful, but lacking that, here's one way to achieve a seamless and automated integration.

Since tweets sent to @myEN are delivered into your Evernote account, it's pretty easy to setup up a private role account in Twitter to act as the gateway for capturing RSS content.

A separate [protected] Twitter account and a feed added to TwitterFeed (or HootSuite) where each item includes @myEN, will cause the feed to be captured in the Evernote account attached to the protected Twitter account. You want the Twitter account to be protected to avoid publishing the feed contents to the public timeline.

A key element of this approach requires that @myEV be included in RSS item title. This is not difficult to add through Yahoo! Pipes. Using pipes it is also possible to filter certain items for publsihing to your Evernote account.