: Sherrie Perkovich
I read an interesting article from eMarketer about the adoption, use and overall understanding of RSS. For those of you who are among the 88% that RSS may as well stand for Really Smart Strategy...you are not alone. According to this article, 9% of US employees know what RSS is and only 2% actually subscribe to it.
So what does this mean for your brilliant marketing plan? You've done your homework and want in...many times we as marketers get wrapped up in new technology advertising without knowing exactly what the reach is because of the buzz its creating in the marketplace. Do some research to see how important offering RSS feeds to your customer/clients is. If they are a tech savvy group, absolutely include RSS.
I believe RSS to be a smart way to get your messaging to your client/prospects by them pulling it vs. us pushing it. Helps get past all of the lovely security items such as email blockers, spam filters, firewalls, etc.
The future is going there...just a matter of how fast and if RSS gets a little help from the big operating systems...
Link to the eMarketer article...
http://www.emarketer.com/Articles/Print.aspx?1004127
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I know I'm a bit late to comment on this, but here are my thoughts as somebody who has been working with (and building tools for) RSS for over 5 years:
End-users don't care about RSS, and they shouldn't have to. Why? Because RSS isn't the important part of the equation.
For example, nobody would say "Hey, get updates via HTML!" We (as people who work with the web) have web sites, web presences, web applications, etc. THOSE are the user-centric applications. HTML is simply the enabling technology.
Likewise, RSS is an enabling technology, but end-users don't care because RSS by itself is rather esoteric. What they DO care about is the ability to get interesting news to automatically update on their My Yahoo! page (or My MSN, or Netvibes, or whatever).
I would say that RSS is nearly as valuable to a marketer/advertiser as HTML is... if it's used correctly. I absolutely will NOT give an advertiser my email address because I don't want the spam (I know, I know, it's not technically "spam" by definition because it's opt-in, but it's still more email than I care to deal with).
So in the end, who cares about how many people know what RSS is? They don't have to. RSS makes it possible for your messages to spread faster because RSS can go nearly anywhere. It's portable in a way that HTML isn't. Allow interested parties to pull your RSS feeds into consumer-oriented applications (such as the My Yahoo!'s of the world, or even feed reader applications for those who are more tech-savvy).
P.S. Here is a whitepaper published by Yahoo! in 2005 about their findings about RSS. 2% is a small number, but when you realize that the important number isn't 2%, but rather the 27% that are using RSS without knowing it, RSS becomes a much more valuable concept.
http://s3.ryanparman.com.s3.amazonaws.com/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf
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