My Yahoo, My MSN and My AOL have been in place for some time and sites like Furl and del.icio.us - once the domain of the very tech savvy - are gaining in popularity. Earthlink, one of the largest ISPs in the US, last year unveiled its RSS reader and social bookmarking site, making it possible for another five million people to start using RSS feeds and sharing content.
A couple of years ago or so, Robert Scoble, then the tech evangelist at Microsoft, wrote that any marketing person who did not add RSS feeds to their website ought to be fired. Harsh words indeed, and perhaps a little premature. But as the number of people using RSS feeds and social media continues to climb, marketing and PR folk should be looking at feeds as a viable alternate messaging medium.
One of the most basic tenets of marketing and PR is that you use the medium most likely to reach an audience. In 2005, many may have dismissed RSS as unimportant, based on statistics from Pew Internet:
In 2006, the RSS feed playing field looked very different. A study by Yahoo late in 2005 revealed that 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalised start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.
According to JupiterResearch last year, consumers adopted Really Simple Syndication (RSS) at an astounding rate. A report stated that some 30% of businesses surveyed added RSS feeds due to customer demand. Twenty five percent published feeds to increase their subscriber base and 10% cited "competitive pressure."
Savvy e-tailers are taking this trend to heart and adding RSS capability for shoppers to keep track of pending product introductions of interest. The alerts typically send a product description and photo directly to RSS enabled portal pages like My Yahoo, said eStategyOne, blogging about an article in the New York Times.
Yet when visiting sites reported to have feeds, they could only find the feed on the Burpee Seeds site. And marketing studies.net reports that Burpee's sales stats soared as a result of this feed. It seems that even in this new world of content syndication and RSS Feeds you still need a strategy.
Understanding RSS, syndication and social media, planning and implementing a sound RSS strategy and creating RSS feeds that meet the needs of your customer base is becoming an essential skill in marketing and PR today.
