May 09, 2006
Forrester Report on Interactive Marketing
No suprises here. A recent study from Forrester shows that marketers are relying on older, proven forms on online marketing such as email and search vs newer forms of social media such as blogs and RSS.
Posted by kpoor at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2006
Real Simple Startup (RSS)
With straight forward tutorials like this one from Emerson Process Experts - no one has an excuse for not wading into the RSS waters.
First saw this here.
Posted by kpoor at 10:37 AM | Comments (1)
February 16, 2006
New Media 101
Debbie Weil at BlogWrite for CEOs has a good, updated list of blogging, podcasting and RSS 101 sites for marketers. If you need to get up to speed, this is a good place to start.
Posted by kpoor at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2006
Uses for RSS
Basement.org has a cool list of ways RSS is being used to deliver information besides delivering headlines. With recent launch of the IE7 beta with RSS integration, RSS appears ready to explode as a delivery channel.
The question is - will PR professionals be prepared to answer client inquiries on how to integrate RSS into the communications mix?
Posted by kpoor at 02:14 PM | Comments (1)
September 15, 2005
Google sidebar more functional than widgets
I've been using the new Google sidebar for several weeks and would highly recommend it. What seperates it from widget based applications such as Yahoo's Konfabulator is that it is always visible. I really like the design of many of the Konfabulator widgets but I find that throughout the day, my desktop is usually not visible so I am not viewing the information very often. The Google application wins the battle of functionality, which, in my mind, is always the most important characteristic of Web sites and applications.
Posted by kpoor at 08:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 23, 2005
RSS used extensively by the influencers
Shel Holtz points to a new study by Nooked that focuses on key influencers—journalists, analysts, and bloggers—showing that RSS usage in this group is a whopping 87%, with 92% aware of RSS. As Shel points out, the number may be skewed since many of those interviewed were bloggers, but the study finds that "Journalists and Analysts have moved beyond the ‘RSS for beginners’ stage and now demand information be delivered to them through a clean channel, in a specified location with specialist content.”
While some may focus on numbers that say RSS is far from wide spread adoption (Forrester found that only 2% of Americans use RSS), for PR professionals that need to reach the influencers and opinion leaders for their clients, these types of metrics are excellent ammunition when talking to clients about incorporating RSS into strategies for communicating with key audiences.
Posted by kpoor at 07:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 11, 2005
Bruce Marshall RSS article
Bruce Marshall at A PR Guru's Musings posts an article he had published in Profile magazine discussing RSS as a PR tool. The following paragraph addresses what I consider to be the most applicable and revolutionary use or RSS as a communications tool:
Another perhaps even more powerful benefit for PR professionals is that you can use RSS to syndicate your own headlines and content. Publishing your news or press releases through an RSS feed provides another channel through which journalists and other stakeholders can access your news.
As PR professionals try to counsel clients on these new technologies, this is one of the best ways to introduce RSS to a company. Not only can journalists and stakeholders access your headlines this way the want to access your headlines this way due to the efficient nature of news readers and RSS feeds.
Posted by kpoor at 08:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 08, 2005
Things to do with RSS
Tim Yang posts 15 different ways to use RSS. Uses range from business to personal. Even cooler than his original post is the wiki version which has allowed others to expand the list, which is now much larger.
This is a great resource to learn of the numerous possibilities that RSS provides.
Posted by kpoor at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 06, 2005
NY Times: Marketers see opportunity in RSS
An article in the NY Times discusses the appeal of RSS to marketers. Interesting outakes:
R.S.S. is somewhat like TiVo for the Internet. By letting people have content pulled from Web sites and fed to their own computers automatically, they can then store it for later viewing. The growing number of R.S.S. users has some online publishers - they are now the biggest group of suppliers of R.S.S. feeds - starting to worry that R.S.S. could take eyeballs away from their existing advertisements on the Web.
Visitors to nytimes.com via R.S.S. feeds has soared from about 500,000 a month at the end of 2003, to 7.3 million last April.
R.S.S. may be getting bigger soon. Microsoft has announced that R.S.S. - the abbreviation stands for Really Simple Syndication - will be integrated into its next Windows operating system. Microsoft's announcement makes it more likely that R.S.S., used for years only by the tech-savvy, will become more of a mainstream computer tool.
The washingtonpost.com, part of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, for example, is considering ways to insert ads into its R.S.S. feeds, which currently include only headlines and links to articles on the paper's own site. "Anytime a medium attracts a large audience, people begin to think through and figure out ways to deliver ads to that audience," said Tim Ruder, vice president of marketing for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. "R.S.S. won't be any different in that regard than any other medium."
This article supports the fact that companies need to understand RSS and how it is being used by their customers.
Posted by kpoor at 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 16, 2005
10 Steps to Using RSS
Otherwise Engaged has posted a very straightforward, 10-step process to start using RSS. For someone confused by the technology, this a great walk through on how to get started using Bloglines.
First found this post here.
Posted by kpoor at 08:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 24, 2005
Why Should Your Company Support RSS?
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the primary reason companies need to be supporting RSS is because it is the way customers want to receive information.
Matt McAlister wrote an interesting post that discusses the future of Websites in an RSS world. I particularly enjoyed the coorelation between the rise of RSS and the early days of the Web using InfoWorld as an example.
Matt also shares some of the views from the recent Syndicate conference in New York last week:
Adoption
RSS adoption has hit critical mass. I don't know what the metric was when that happened, but it's done. If you don't support RSS usage, you're not in the game...Can you imagine operating a company today that had no Web site? Will the same thing happen with RSS?
Standards
We've all joined onto a platform, a common standard for pushing/pulling/sharing individual items. Those items might be news headlines, transaction data, persistent search queries, links to downloads, etc. And because we have a standard, we can universally identify what those things are and how to treat them...just like what HTTP and HTML once did for the World Wide Web.
Integration
RSS is basically invisible to the originator and consumer of a feed. The blog tools all publish RSS automatically, and most CMS's have been configured to publish RSS feeds. It's much like when we began publishing HTML templates over databases instead of building volumes of individual HTML pages. The technology is becoming invisibile behind the utility of it.
Proliferation
If you don't interact the way your customers want you to, they simply stop communicating with you. There is so much information to choose from out there that you have to produce quality stuff, or at least stuff that is unique. Google was born from the need to find web pages that mattered. Who is going to help us identify the media companies that communicate well in this new world?
I originally found this link at Micropersuasion.
Posted by kpoor at 02:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 18, 2005
The RSS Experience
Yesterday my wife, Lillian, provided a perfect case study on why companies need to understand how to use RSS. I recently introduced her to bloglines as she was reading numerous blogs but was navigating to them individually through bookmarks. Bloglines, plus a quick demo on how any RSS enabled site can quickly be added to the aggregator, and it was game on. In two days she is hooked on RSS.
After using and customizing bloglines for one day, she asked me why so many sites are not RSS enabled. She was really quite frustrated by it and even voiced some anger at sites and organizations that were not allowing her to get information the way she wanted. And there in lies the reason companies need to get on board with RSS – it is the way customers want to receive information.
Neville Hobson, author of NevOn, refers to an interesting interview with Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo recently posted on Clickz. Costolo discusses this fundamental change in the way people are using the Web. RSS aggregators are essentially becoming Web browsers and as more information is available through RSS feeds, the less apt a person may be to leave his or her aggregator. All pointing to the idea that companies need to make sure their content is RSS enabled if they want to stay relevant to their customers.
Posted by kpoor at 08:32 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 13, 2005
Real Simple RSS Explanation
For those who continually hear the term RSS but are not exactly sure what it means or how it works, Lee Odden has a straight forward, non-technical description on his online marketing blog.
Posted by kpoor at 07:41 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
