Looking back, it’s easy to remember forms of webtalk in days gone by and think, that’s quaint. Geocities comes to mind. MySpace. Even – as much as I hate to admit this – UseNet newsgroups. And one day, Facebook and Twitter will likewise go the way of Gopher, supplanted by some new and more efficient way of getting info out there.
When we talk with clients about their social media presence, occasionally we’re still asked about RSS feeds. RSS isn’t nearly the hot marketing medium today. Should we care about ensuring that our website has an RSS feed available?
And to that I say, absolutely yes.
To explain why, let me illustrate with an example of how we at Load Bearing Creative still use RSS every day to keep track of the industries we serve.
For the most part, we handle niches – the topic areas that no marketing firm can entirely focus on and still keep their doors open. Military wireless. Automation robotics. Nanotech. Esoteric healthcare electronics. At one point, we even wrote sales copy for flavored vodka.
None of those are topics that anyone, anywhere, in our line of work has the time or market opportunity to become an expert on. Taken on an individual basis, there simply isn’t enough traffic in any of them to keep a marketing business busy full time. And yet, you have to be conversant enough in each of them to be able to handle the “do you have a writing/design background in [insert obscure tech topic here]?” questions.
Meanwhile, every one of those topic areas lives in an industry ecosystem with its own laws of physics, centers of attraction and crucial annual trade shows. So in addition to content, there is culture.
So when you add on top of that the comings and goings of potential contacts, important announcements that may indicate trigger events, and noteworthy media mentions – i.e., the politics – well, that’s a lot of data. A LOT of data. And you just can’t make any use of it without some sort of automation that simplifies the information farming process and draws attention to what data is really important.
This is where RSS feed readers come in. The one I use most often these days in RSSOwl. There are others out there that are just as good, and your tastes will vary, but for purposes of this article I’ll refer to the package I use every day. I like it.
In this tool, I have several folder subsets created: Alerts, Companies, People, Topics, Blogs, etc. Each one may have folders nested beneath them – for example, the Companies folder subset contains folders for all of our clients, as well as any other company we keep an eye on.
A modern RSS feed reader will also allow you to integrate Twitter feeds. So each of these subfolders contains a link to that company’s Twitter feeds, which I can then flip through like email. I open up RSSOwl in the morning, update all, look for companies in highlighted bold, and skim the Tweets. The program simply makes a great Twitter reader.
Then we have Google Alerts. You may have heard that Google shut down their Reader RSS service a few years ago, and briefly the RSS features of Alerts was discontinued as well. They brought it back months later, and so we can still create Alerts and process them as RSS feeds. Alerts feeds go into the subfolders as well, which then keeps us updated whenever something shows up in the news or gets mentioned online elsewhere.
And that takes us back to RSS proper. If a company’s website has an RSS feed, we subscribe to it. This will make sure that we receive press releases, whitepaper or case study notifications, and anything else that the company deems important. Most of all, the company’s RSS feed – assuming that one exists – offers up context. In the sea of digital noise and up-to-the-millisecond news reports, having that context today is more important than ever. It tells us what we should be paying attention to.
If there is no RSS feed, we have to guess. Your customers have to guess, too. That’s not good.
Combined and seamlessly integrated into a good RSS feed reader, however, it can all add up to pretty good intelligence. Not perfect, but fairly accurate and usually actionable. The picture comes into focus.
So don’t dismiss your RSS feeds next time your company revisits its website design. Twitter hasn’t replaced it – in fact, the sheer volume of rapid fire Twitter content makes the more pedestrian RSS more necessary. Because these days, automation is the only real route to digital sanity. And often, sanity requires the freedom to walk instead of frantically dashing about.
RSS feeds give you that. I’m reading your RSS, and many others are, too. It’s too good of a tool to throw away when you can leverage it instead.
