According to a recent Nielsen/Net Ratings report nearly three-quarters of active Web users are connected at home via broadband - a 15 percent increase in the last year. The report makes the point that broadband users are more than three times as likely to use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a delivery method for their preferred Internet content than dial up users. So are RSS feeds a valid marketing strategy yet? Take a look at these results reported on MarketingStudies.net: W. Atlee Burpee & Co. (the garden seed people) saw their RSS strategy help them increase November sales by four times from just one trial feed featuring a 'seed of the day'. USAToday.com reports that their RSS traffic is 'rising month after month by orders of magnitude', even though they are barely promoting their RSS feeds. Travelocity identified the Yahoo and MSN email users among their current email subscribers and sent them an offer to subscribe via RSS feed with the easy-to-use MyYahoo! and MyMSN buttons. 2/3 of the people that opened the e-mail actually subscribed. This highlights the fact that the inclusion of RSS feeds into personalized pages and browsers has taken the use of feeds far beyond the techie community. According to a recent Yahoo survey of MyYahoo users, more than 80 percent did not even know what RSS was, but they were using feeds to read news and information. 30% of marketers surveyed by Jupiter Research in the "Feed Marketing: Use of RSS as Alternate Messaging Medium" study said that they have implemented RSS feeds because of customer demand. "Marketers must begin to plan their RSS strategies now," says the report's lead author, Jupiter analyst David Daniels. "The simple moral here is that even if you don't want to go 'full RSS' just yet, you need to setup your RSS feeds," advises RSS marketing guru Rok Hrastnik of marketingstudies.net. "Results will follow. People are in fact in need of the content consumption solution offered by RSS ... you just need to present it appropriately."
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.
