Tuesday, August 08, 2006
RSS Marketing Taking Baby Steps
RSS as marketing tool is at about the same stage of development as my son Dylan. At 20 weeks, he is aware, but not quite ready to crawl. Even today the benefits make the effort worthwhile, but wait six months.
Rudimentary tools and specialty services for creating RSS feeds are available, but it is still too labor intensive for most marketers to master themselves. Similarly, advertisements are still the exception and not the rule as marketers and publishers learn strategies and do the cost-benefit analysis.
And as Robin Stanton points out on
Adotas, getting exposure for your feeds is a pain. You have to register with a plethora of the niche of RSS and blog search engines (see this handy
guide), which is unacceptable for a technology that wants to become mass market.
Marketers can track their products and competitors via RSS news feeds, but today that requires using a good RSS reader or cobbling together feeds using the digital equivalent of bailing wire and popsicle sticks. NewsGator allows you to group your feeds into folders, and search on those folders, which makes it a snap to track a topic. Since I started using it every day, I can scan feeds in one quarter of the time it took previously.
Firefox has a built-in RSS reader, and hopefully Microsoft's new IE and Vista will take RSS aggregation into the mainstream. Mastering RSS today will put you far ahead of your competition
Posted By John Gartner at 12:40 PM
Permanent Link: RSS Marketing Taking Baby Steps
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(3) Comments on RSS Marketing Taking Baby Steps
The big change will come - as you've mentioned - when IE7 (free, automatic update for XP users) and Vista are released. IE7 features an RSS button right in the middle of the toolbar and lights up if a site has a feed. You can then sign up for an RSS feed as easily as bookmarking a site.
Then RSS will truly become mainstream as businesses rush to get their content automatically delivered to potential customers long after they have left the site. I anticipate it will replace email as the marketing distribution vehicle of choice due to its permission based subscription and bypassing of spam filtering.
Comments by Matt Ambrose : Tuesday, August 15, 2006 at 11:47 AM
You advise waiting another six months and say that there are some rudimentary tools that can help marketers get RSS enabled. Forrester Research said a year ago that companies should at a minimum put their press relases into feeds. Jupiter said a month or so ago that marketers should be planning their RSS strategy right bow. Everyone who sees PRESSfeed comments on how simple and easy it is - it was built for marketers to make it easy to use RSS to syndicate their content.
Comments by Sally Falkow : Saturday, August 26, 2006 at 03:21 PM
changing diaper how?can you teach me?coz i dont know how,i'm scared,my baby rashes..........
Comments by lovelyshiny cathlyn : Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 10:28 PM
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