RSS and Marketing—The Perfect Match Beyond Blogs and Social Networks Elaine O’Gorman December 2, 2005

RSS and Marketing RSS is more than a distribution technology for blogs and syndicated content. It is a channel. Every new channel holds promise to reach new audiences and to have an opportunity to stand out—a valuable characteristic in an overcrowded marketplace. So…how should Marketers begin to think about RSS?

How Big is RSS?  Yahoo estimates:  4% of the U.S. online population reports using RSS  27% of the U.S. online population uses RSS without knowing it  "Unaware RSS Users" are similar demographically to the average Internet user  This suggests that RSS is not just for the tech-savvy few  Jupiter estimates:  RSS usage has grown 83% yr/yr  Outstripping the growth of even the internet browser in terms of adoption  Only six percent of marketers said they were unaware of RSS as a marketing tool in a November 2004  Your competition is making plans to use this channel

The RSS Ecosystem RSS Distribution RSS Distribution Internet Content Creation Web-based Readers Web-based Readers Desktop Readers Desktop Readers Web-based Tools MSN Spaces Blogger (Google) Typepad Yahoo 360 AOL Journals Installed Tools Moveable Type Wordpress Expression Engine Specialized Tools RSSDirect (SPOP) SimpleFeed SyndicateIQ Measurement Feedburner Conversion Feedblitz Bloglet RSS Search Technorati Feedster Specialized Bloglines Pluck Newsgator online Portals My Yahoo! My MSN Google Personal My AOL Browsers Internet Explorer 7 Firefox Apple’s Safari Specialized Feed demon MobileRSS NewzCrawler NetNewsWire Outlook plug in Newsgator RSS Popper

What are the Opportunities?  How can marketers take advantage of RSS?  Corporate blog  Syndicate web content  Advertising in other people’s blogs and newsfeeds  Other types of communications?  Newsletters?  Promotional content?  Transactional content?

What are the Obstacles?  Adoption  But not for long  Immaturity  Standards for reading and rendering still evolving  Bandwidth intensive, and conservation methods not widely adopted  Broadcast orientation  Measurement  Targeting and segmentation  Serving individualized content

Criteria for Success  JupiterResearch criteria for success of an alternative messaging distribution solution  Security  Personalized and relevant  Measurable  Guaranteed delivery  End user control, including permission support  Ubiquity  Open Technology  RSS meets all of these requirements but two:  Personalized and relevant  Measurable

Individualized RSS  Newer generation of RSS content creation and distribution solves these issues by changing the paradigm  Separate feeds are created per subscriber  Jupiter has dubbed this “Individualized RSS” or IRSS  The consequences of this shift  Measurable  Targetable  Personalizeable  Gather profiles  Connect with other data (transactional, profile, account history)

Consequences of IRSS  Corporate blogs  Reliable measurement, what is of interest, who are evangelists  Newsfeeds  What gets read, what gets passed on, better monetization  Advertising  Targeted buys, reliable impressions  Newsletters  Untapped audience, wide variety of platforms  Promotions  No PII needed, spam-proof  Transactional  No deliverability issues, non-refutability, phish-proof