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Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik What do savvy marketers have to say about RSS? What are
their top tips? We set to find that out end of 2004 to collect the best
possible insights on RSS marketing from top marketers and
RSS developers and leaders, for Unleash the Marketing &
Publishing Power of RSS. Let?s get started ? 1. How can RSS be fully integrated in our marketing and
communications mix
Answered by Robin Good, MasterNewMedia.org "From what I can see RSS is an effective marketing channel
in that it allows easy and extended distribution of your
core news and information channels to the widest possible
audience with very low costs, maximum compatibility with a
great number of media devices and with the added ability
for the customer to take on this information and reuse it
to hir (his + her) benefit. That allows customers to further become marketers and
promoters of your own products and services. If we openly
allow the content of public RSS feeds to be freely
subscribed, syndicated, re-aggregated and republished we
will only find that new and greater value can be extracted
every time someone goes about doing this. So it is important not to keep RSS newsfeeds under locks. RSS is one of the purest viral marketing channels. Its
virality being spelled clearly in its acronym: Really
Simple Syndication. Yes, you need to make these three words make sense to you
in order to leverage the maximum out of this content format. Allow syndication. Don't limit it. Let others take your RSS feed and do things with it.
Encourage them to do so. Have them use it to republish your
news (among others) on their home page. Help them achieve
that. Write and explain with short stories or simple
tutorials how easy it is to search, filter and aggregate
content from different RSS feeds and to create dedicated
niche newsfeeds on most any topic you can think of. Explain
openly that if you do create such dedicated newschannels
they can be as easily republished as news Web site, which
can carry contextual ads (Google AdSense) from day one.
Very sustainable if not altogether profitable. Look for example at the work being done by Waypath with
their Blender experiment and see other useful and
complementary uses of RSS that can be economically
profitable." And another great tip from Robin: "Create as many RSS
newsfeeds for your content as are the topic/themes that you
cover. Do not pack all of your content under one generic
RSS channel." 2. What's really going to drive readers/customers to adopt
RSS? Buyers of what products and services are most likely
to adopt RSS?
Answered by Bill French, MyST Technology Partners "I don't think anyone wants to adopt RSS; rather they want
timely information in a controlled and organized way such
that it helps them do their jobs better, or manage their
personal information diet. This is precisely the reason we
adopted (for the most part) SMTP - but none of us
considered "adopting SMTP". Email applications and the
benefits of a store-and-forward architecture with
reasonable assurance of delivery drove us into the realm of
SMTP. And the driving force that seems to be causing early
adopters to use RSS feeds has more to do with the volume of
information and news that we find ourselves awash in each
day. There's no question; everyone will eventually adopt RSS (or
similar formats) but we'll know that has happened when no
one refers to it as RSS. ;-)" 3. How would you compare RSS and e-mail as content delivery
tools?
Answered by Tom Hespos, Underscore Marketing "RSS is all about consumer control. How many times have you
thought about subscribing to an e-mail newsletter but
thought, "Nah, they'll probably sell my e-mail address to
spammers" and didn't subscribe? With RSS, consumers can
unsubscribe from feeds at any time, so the risk of getting
unwanted content or spam is virtually nil. I think consumers have been waiting for something like this
for quite some time. The added control will make them more
likely to want to aggregate content from publishers they
read regularly. As a marketing guy, I think it's
appropriate to mention that moving to RSS is not without
its risks. Content publishers know that it's somewhat
cumbersome to unsubscribe from an e-mail newsletter, so
they've taken certain chances with their e-mail newsletters
that they won't be able to take with RSS ? they carry
standalone sponsor messages, load up their HTML newsletters
with animated ads, maybe take a risk with some of the
stories they write. Since the "unsubscribe" button is right there for feed
subscribers, publishers might not get a second chance if
they screw up. With RSS, there's no broadcasting a "Please
come back" message to people who unsubscribe. If you lose
someone, you lose them until they decide to come back. So
I'm sure publishers will need to handle RSS with kid gloves
until they get a sense of what their subscribers will like
and what will make them run for the door."
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