Comments for SXSW: Using RSS for Marketing

SXSW: Using RSS for Marketing

2007-03-12T02:00:41Z

Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.

This morning, I attended a panel titled "Using RSS for Marketing". The panel had a great set of participants including: Tom Markiewicz CEO, EvolvePoint (moderator); Emily Chang Co-founder, Ideacodes; Bill Flitter Chief Mktg Officer, Pheedo Inc; John Jantsch Owner, Duct Tape Marketing; Greg Reinacker CTO/Founder, NewsGator Technologies Inc.

Tom's style of facilitation (at least for this panel) guided the conversation to cover a broad range of topics extremely quickly. However, at a high level, the panel discussed:

Where are we in terms of user adoption / understanding of RSS
Reasons marketers should syndicate content
What are marketers and publishers doing wrong?

]]> User adoption / understanding of RSS

The panel all agreed that user adoption of RSS is continuing to grow. They also all agreed that inclusion of an RSS reader in Internet Explorer 7 has helped increase adoption. Bill pointed to some research showing a 500% growth in the automotive vertical in 2006, as one example of this growth spreading outside of the technology and early-adopter crowd.

However, they also agreed that most people don't actually know they are consuming RSS content. Greg Reinacker did an excellent job summarizing the consensus of the group when he stated: "It is not about RSS at all, it is about subscribing to content". Yahoo and Ipsos did some interesting research (pdf) in Oct 2005 that showed there are a large percentage of unaware RSS users. Apparently, this group is continuing to grow in size.

Interestingly, Bill commented that even in pitches to advertisers, Pheedo has stopped talking about RSS and now just talks about 'content distribution' or 'syndication'.

Reasons Marketers Should Syndicate Content

The panel went through a number of reasons why marketers would consider syndicating their content via RSS. The reasons tended to fall into the following 'meta reasons':

It's an easy and faster way to deliver information to their customers and other audience members;
Marketers are becoming more like publishers (here's a good description of pubvertising - nb: free acct required); the panel said RSS is a great way for marketers to participate;
It is a very easy way to optimize your content for search results, because if your feed is optimized then the content is crawled and archived efficiently for search results.

What are marketers and publishers doing wrong?

Bill talked about publishers "being too stingy with their content". He indicated that most want to restrict the feed to partial text, even though in the research they have done the difference in response rate (clicking back to the website) is not statistically significant between full and partial text. In addition, he talked about the importance of adding your company's name to posts and potentially even as part of the title (like the AP feeds).

John talked about making sure your content is easy to subscribe to. Going back to the state of adoption, he encouraged all bloggers, publishers and marketers to make it very easy to subscribe. He even encouraged marketers targeting lower-tech audiences to include a video or page description, explaining exactly how to subscribe to your content.

The panel also touched on the limited amount of tracking that publishers and marketers do on their feeds and the importance of including basic analytics. Note: I discovered very similar things in a yet to be published second phase report that I prepared for the Newspaper Association of America, on 'RSS Next and Best Practices'. Here is a link to a brief description of the full project, on my personal blog. The second phase involved surveying 70+ newspapers about their use of RSS.

Comment from Mick Liubinskas on 2007-03-11

2007-03-12T02:51:55Z

Nice post Richard. Wish I was there.

Was there any discussion about standardisation with RSS? Obviously going to non-tech requires the simplicity. Or do you think that is already answered?

RSS is a big topic of discussion around Tangler. Obviously we want to do it, but there's doing it and there's doing it well. Options with an RSS would be interesting and I'd like to see someone do that well.

e.g. Give me everything, or just give we stuff with the word collaboration in it. Or maybe, give me articles with 50+reads and/or 10+ comments.

Any case studies on this?

Comment from Mick Liubinskas on 2007-03-11

2007-03-12T02:52:51Z

Sorry, Nice post Sean!

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2007-03-11

2007-03-12T03:15:01Z

Mick, I wish I was there too! :-) Re your question, I think we're starting to see standardization from the likes of Feedburner, Pheedo and Nooked (who I advise to). The question of using RSS 2.0, ATOM, RSS 1.0 etc is pretty much handled now by Feedburner and the others - i.e. the end user need not care which format they're subscribing to, as it's all standardized by those feed mgmt companies.

The question of RSS filtering however is still a work in progress. Yahoo Pipes is at the geeky end of the spectrum, but shows where we're headed. Feedburner hasn't done a lot with filtering yet, but we've profiled several companies recently on R/WW that are doing it. The latest post we've done on this is:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedblendr_remix_feeds.php

Comment from Tom Markiewicz on 2007-03-11

2007-03-12T04:10:01Z

Thanks for attending and blogging our panel! Regarding the coverage of many topics rather quickly - this was decision we made to try to cover some intersting topics from a higer level marketing perspective. We wanted to make sure we stayed away from the technical talk and focused on some of the bigger issues marketers need to be aware of.

Comment from Ian Purton on 2007-03-12

2007-03-12T09:02:28Z

RSS Campaigns are going to grow that's for certain. People are more and more reluctant to hand over e-mail addresses to marketeers and feeds are a non risk commitment.

We've build a tool for handling RSS marketing http://www.ploud.com

Comment from NeilCauldwell on 2007-03-12

2007-03-12T10:22:24Z

You're right Ian - RSS will reach a much greater audience than it does now, just don't expect the mainstream to refer to it as RSS. Non-techies are scared off by the acronym, it really has been an obstacle for the technology. If RSS had just been call 'Subscriber', or 'Subscribe-to', we'd have seen a greater adoption by now.

Comment from Sean Ammirati on 2007-03-12

2007-03-12T12:58:04Z

Neil, I agree that potentially RSS could have reached adoption faster if it had a less technical name. However, the panel pointed out (and I agree) that RSS ultimately will be as relevant as "SMTP" or "POP3". Yet, email & content syndication are easy for everyone to understand.

Comment from Paul Jacobson on 2007-03-13

2007-03-14T05:55:39Z

Interesting statistic in the Pheedo report about the relative parity between summary feeds and full feeds.

Comment from David Dalros on 2007-04-05

2007-04-05T19:46:26Z

That would have been a fantastic panel to sit in on. As a company we are researching the possiblities of integrating the whole Web 2.0 concept into our marketing structure.

Although not entirely new, but gaining recognition and acceptance at an alarming rate, I see the future of any digital marketing climbing out of the, what is it...5% percent market share it currently holds against conventional marketing.

I also agree with the statment that a simple re-naming would have expidited this to have happened much sooner.

Great post.