Consumers are not willing to receive boring, irrelevant content from marketers in their email inbox. Even when they have signed up for the email, if it does not grab their attention or address their needs, it goes in the junk mail box.
As filters improve, users focus less on traditional spam and more on which opt-in material interests them most.
One way to circumvent this problem is to create an RSS feed and offer users the option of subscribing in a feed. Many consumers prefer this method because it is anonymous - no giving up your email address when you subscribe. And you can unsubscribe at a click if the content is not what you wanted. Great for the consumer - and a good method for marketers too, even though you lose some of your metric ability. You know you get a guaranteed 100% delivery rate and people say they trust marketers who give them control of the messages much more.
Of course it is still all about the content. A boring, irrelevant RSS feed won’t be read either.
The time has arrived: We simply can’t ignore social media tools any longer when we’re creating communications campaigns.
They’re too ubiquitous . . . and too powerful.
But you’ve got to match the right tool to your communications objectives: You have to find the smartest, most effective–––and cost-effective–––ways to take advantage of them. And we’ve seen some pretty spectacular mistakes. Ill-planned social media forays can waste huge amounts of money in a hurry.
We’re presenting a one-day Social Media Bootcamp with Bulldog Reporter that will show you everything you need to harness the power of new social media tools–––like RSS feeds, content syndication in social media , YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, SEO, Technorati and more–––to dramatically increase your visibility among today’s “new influencers.” The workshops are in the first 10 days of August. We go to Chicago, DC, NYC and LA.
Here are just a few of the inside techniques we’ll cover in this intensive one-day workshop:
How to monitor your reputation online, starting today
How to set up a measurable, accountable social media program
How to identify and track top blogs in your industry–––and decide the best time to join in the conversation
Acquire the techniques for placing the right messages on leading social media outlets, like FaceBook, del.icio.us, Digg, and YouTube
Harness the power of corporate blogs and podcasts (including critical insight on who in your company should blog and who should not
How to easily implement RSS Feeds and social bookmarking so that your news, podcasts and videos are syndicated online
Start using the latest Search Engine Optimization techniques to supercharge the visibility of your website and press materials
Find out the smartest (often ignored!) features of an online newsroom
In the analysis seciton of the recent BtoB marketers survey about measuring and monitoring online reputation and brand building, Paul Dunay of Buzz Marketing for Technology made this comment:
“B2B marketers should consider how to syndicate their content,and widgets could be a very good way of doing that. A recent Forrester article noted that 80% of Web traffic comes through the homepage and 20% comes in to very specific pages. Forrester now is recommending that you plan for 20% of traffic to come from your homepage and 80% to come from very specific pages in your site. That means start syndicating your content!”
RSS is what you need.- One of the quickest and easiest ways to syndicate and socialize your content (make it easy to share) is to use a tool like PRESSfeed. You can be up and running in less than a week.
One of the advantages of the social web is that people share content that they find online. But they wast fresh content. No-one is interested in tagging or sharing a story that’s weeks old.
FLOR recently launched a new Inspiration Gallery for Martha Stewart Floor Designs. To get the word out to design bloggers a sneak peek blogger info page went up on their news feed on Friday.
The IT department was up to their eyeballs preparing for this launch and having a way for the PR folk to quickly and easily add and share content was a bonus. Â
May 1st has been a celebration for many caudes. Worker’s Day is one of them. Back in medieval times May 1st was a celebration of Spring and fertility.Â
Now it has been named RSS Awareness Day.Â
Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if that number were 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, says Daily Blog Tips.
 The idea is to spread the wrod about RSS and ow important is is. They suggest that we lik to RSS resources.
In an interview with Lee Odden, Charlene Li of Forrester Research said that if she had to choose to be a social technology she’d be RSS/XML.
“Nobody would know who I am or what my initials mean, but I make everything work together. I’d be the foundation of mashups, social applications, and widgets. Without me, the social Web would grind to a halt.”
Charlene Li is Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research covering social computing and technologies. She is undoubtedly one of the most often quoted analysts on all things dealing with social computing and commerce on the web.†She has a new book coming out in May called “Groundswell†– co- authored with Josh Berhoff.
According to the Avenue A | Razorfish Digital Consumer Behavior Study, 56 percent of online consumers now use RSS feeds. And it’s people across all sectors - from those who grow seeds to silver surfers to tech-savvy youngsters. We’ve all got the RSS bug.
Now that search engines display what they call blended search - where news, images, videos and blogs are all served up on one page - it’s even more important to have content in these ‘buckets.’ RSS feeds can help you to get your content indexed faster and improve your ranking. You want your news releases and articles to show up on page one for your brand name, product name, or keywords.
If you do not yet have a content syndication strategy in place, get started.
In July 07 A thread in the Digital Point Forums reported that Google was indexing fresh content faster. Some sites saw their content show up in the search results within a few hours.
 Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing agrees. He posted at Search Engine Room on the benefit of fresh content. Lee writes about the benefit of blogs.  But you’ll get those same benefits by adding a feed to news content on your website.
The post Fresh Content: Myth or Magic went hot in Sphinn just a week ago. The article takes an in-depth look at the pros and cons of publishing content for SEO purposes.Â
Google and other search engines serve the searcher. They have said repeatedly that they look for quality content. Quality content.Â
When you create and publish content it should be of value to your visitors. Don’t write for the search engine - write for your visitors. The ease of publishing online today means that pretty much anyone can put up a blog or an RSS feed. But not everyone can write excellent quality content.
It’s no longer about just having a feed. It’s about having a feed they really want to read and will subscribe to or republish because the content is just so damn good.
If it is in a feed Google will reward you for good quality fresh content.Â
If you syndicate it in a feed others will see it. And use it. And subscribe to it. And bookmark it in places like del.ici.ous and digg.
It’s a symbiotic process. You need great content and you need to make it available to others online. Hire a good writer to help you generate content that your visitors will crave.  Syndicate it in an RSS feed and make it easy for others to use it and share it.
Rebecca Lieb, vice President and Chief Editor of the ClickZ Network graciously agreed to chat with me about the future of search and public relations for a paper I am researching.
During the interview she commented that she pays more attention to her RSS Feed than to her email. In fact, she even has the email account for story pitches forwarded to her RSS reader. And she says many of the journalists she knows do the same.
She was recently involved with an evaluation study of small niche news sites in specific industries and was surprised to see that every site she looked at was using RSS feeds. Not just big mainstream media sites, not just tech sites - sites that cater for thoroughbred racehorses or engineering news.
If you want to get your news content read and seen by your target audience -Â and journalists in your field - make sure you’re adding regular news content to your site and syndicating in an RSS feed.Â
The first two trends mentioned are a switch to alternative media and more budget channeled into interactive solutions such as RSS, podcasts and video casts.
RSS is proving to be a good fit for the travel industry, reports Hospitality.net: hotels and resorts using RSS feeds to syndicate their content are seeing results in better search visibility as well as an increase in targeted traffic and sales.
People are looking for visual content about a resort, hotel or destination
They want to read reviews from ’someone just like me’ who has already experienced this destination
They want more information about the area
Online travel spending has outstripped offline bookings
Destinations have a wealth of content they can offer online
Emerging channels such as podcasts and RSS feeds will claim increasingly larger shares of marketers’ budgets over the next five years, says Entrepreneur.com.
Entrepreneur.com’s predictions about the