RSS is the hot messaging idea gaining the attention of PR and marketing folks alike everywhere. And while they struggle with questions such as “what is RSS?” and “How do we implement this on our websites and blogs?,” many are missing the point. It’s not so much about the technology as it is about the content. Bill French at Myst Technology has been building Enterprise RSS sites for years. In a recent interview with Inkblot he said, “oddly enough, understanding your customer’s content requirements is tougher than the technical challenges associated with syndication. It’s relatively easy to create feeds. It’s very difficult to create a feed that a segment of your audience cannot live without - and that’s the objective.” There are many services out there that can add an RSS feed or conversion to your website. But what you put in the feed determines your success. Far too many companies have not thought this through enough and they don’t have an enterprise-wide content strategy. There also seems to be a disconnect between online and offline content. Perhaps it’s because they are still trying to cope with what all this hot technology is and how it works, rather than what should be in it. Instead of figuring on how to monetize feeds with ads, we should be concentrating on how to create that feed they can’t live without. Who would want to read an aggregated feed of hundreds of press releases from a newswire site? What you need to do is figure out who your audiences are and what interests them. You may only have 100 people reading your feed, but if they are the right 100 people, you’re home free. The recent study from the Ponemon Institute revealed that consumers do want to get messages from companies, but they want it to be relevant, based on previous purchase behavior and they want to be in control of the delivery method. That’s a perfect RSS strategy right there. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Segmenting audiences and creating content specifically for one group is one of the most basic PR and marketing techniques. Apply it to your RSS content strategy and you’ll get spectacular results.
Sally Falkow is founder and co developer of PRESSfeed, an RSS service for marketing and PR use. She is co-author of The Power of Online Syndication in Public Relations. For more information on RSS visit http://www.press-feed.com.
