Traces of Inspiration

SXSWi: Using RSS for Marketing

• March 11th, 2007
• Filed Under: Marketing, RSS, SXSW

Not too many thoughts going into this panel. Not a “can’t miss” panel, but interested to hear some other perspectives.

Panelists:

• Tom Markiewicz, EvolvePoint (Moderator)
• Emily Chang, Ideacodes, ehub.com
• Bill Flitter, Pheedo Inc
• John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing
• Greg Reinacker, NewsGator Technologies Inc

How talk about RSS?

• Everyone wants to deliver information to their customer/audience faster.
  • Direct stream, whether they know it or not
  • Benefit for users, efficiency for company
• What result do you want? Don’t even call it by name. Find out what they want and tailor solution.
• Need to show ROI - how do you leverage it?

How fast is RSS moving into the mainstream? Is the adoption rate there?

• Growth rate is still accelerating.
• IE7 is first exposure for hundreds of millions.
• Does adoption rate matter? There is a sector that want info this way.
  • We all get info in lots of different ways, might as well enable it.
• Going towards mainstream, but not there yet.
• Huge spike when Google Reader and some Microsoft products were launched

What about the term? Is RSS something the average user needs to know? Will it be like POP/IMAP? Nobody cares about that. RSS vs. Atom, wil it be called news feeds, feeds, etc.?

• We’ll need the term far less when it becomes better integrated with our tools
• It’s not “RSS”, it’s “subscribing to content”
• Email changed our lives, search changed our lives. Subscribing to content is next.
  • The content comes to us.
• Nobody knows what SMTP is, but they use it. RSS will be like that.
  • It’s a part under the hood that makes the car run.
• Not just for subscribers anymore: It’s for moving the data from site to site
  • How do we measure use of this information?
  • RSS can be an API for anyone’s web site

How are companies using RSS for marketing?

• Don’t even have to have a feed on your site to use RSS for marketing
  • There’s a cloud of content out there
  • Be the people that host the conversation
• RSS for news feeds, RSS as PR
  • Product updates
  • Fast and direct information
  • Job listings
  • Marketing surveys
• Irresponsible to not have this content available
• Anything you do with marketing, you need to measure it.
• Track your competition
• You can know instantly if someone is or isn’t writing about you
• RSS for better search results
• Still important to tell people how to subscribe to feeds

Some tips:

• Start article with company name, make sure that when it is syndicated you at least have that bit of branding.
• Don’t get too crazy formatting content in your feeds. It’s going to be viewed on a ton of different devices.
• Don’t post content just to have new content. Too many sites have one nugget and a bunch of crap every week
• Write down notes on things throughout the day (advice given, info found on sites). You’ll have a backlog of things to write about.
• Instead of RSS, say (for example, a recipe site) “get a daily recipe straight to your inbox or reader”