How to Implement RSS

Before you start configuring your site for RSS, the first question you must ask as a marketer is: Do you have anything worth delivering to people every day, or perhaps every week?

I know it’s strange, but people don’t subscribe to newspapers to read “news releases” declaiming that “Bob Fergus, CEO of Fulbright Enterprises is incredibly proud to announce the PSX4000 with the exclusive glurp feature is now available in vibrant pink.” I’m not going to reproduce my previous diatribe on the subject of joining the conversation about your products, you can read that here.

That’s a backdoor way of saying that you need to change some of the fundamental ways you market for RSS to matter, because you probably don’t want an efficient way of delivering boring messages. There’s no way, and much more importantly no reason, to connect RSS to a static corporate Web site. Nothing good will happen.

While RSS can be used programmatically to deliver a synopsis about anything, the most common uses for it are newsletters, blogs and podcasts. For newsletters RSS is a way to bypass the email black hole; for blogs, RSS delivers headlines about the newest posts and comments; for podcasts it’s a description of the associated audio. If you use these tools, forums, or social networks to discuss your products, your company is poised to use RSS in very valuable ways.

If you have great content being generated frequently — such as a lot of knowledgeable employees writing interesting things they have unique insight into, or better yet, all of them and a lot of your customers conversing about your products and services, then RSS can be extremely valuable to you. The effectiveness of email and other mechanisms for delivering content is declining daily — too much noise.

It’s not just spam issues. I have hundreds of newsletters sitting unread in my inbox. Not because I wouldn’t find them valuable, but because I have to spend time opening each and sorting through them to find useful information. There’s a reason why popular print magazines put teasers to their top stories on the front cover. So you can tell at a glance if you should pick it up.

By comparison, I have five RSS feeds in my browser bookmark toolbar, and seventeen feeds in my RSS reader (I use Google’s reader and also have a custom Google search page that consolidates my RSS feeds). I look at them frequently, because I can instantly see if there’s something I care about. I don’t subscribe to an RSS feed unless I want to hear from the provider, and if they become boring or useless they are gone in a click.

That’s a compelling reason to rethink at least some aspects of how you market. Unless you have Hemingway writing for you (last I heard he was dead) the only way to maintain that level of interest is to have honest conversations. Think Oprah. Think Larry King. People don’t listen to them to hear them talk–they want hear them interact with their guests. Your prospects are not looking for bland corporate speak, they want honest interaction, opinion and answers.

Like most Web 2.0 components, setting up RSS is not particularly hard. I’ve done it myself for my own blogs and personal online experiments, and I’m hardly a techie.

To create an RSS feed you need software that keeps an eye on the content of a Web site or other content source and generates the RSS code when new content is detected. In a blog or forum environment this is handled by installing a plugin module, or in some cases, directly by the system software as a built-in feature. The RSS feeds are generally sent to an intermediary system like Feedburner that manages the subscriber base and transmits the feeds to the appropriate reader. Feedburner is free and it’s very simple to set up, though you need access to the HTML files that comprise your Web content. Feedburner requires that you “claim” your site by adding a little code snippet to it that Feedburner can then read. If you can add the code, then you must own the site–or so the logic goes. Then you give your feed a name and you’re set.

Once you have the site registered on Feedburner you can encourage people to subscribe to your feed like this: Subscribe to Ponohouse (an RSS feed I set up for my personal blog). The RSS subscription link can be sent by any medium that supports hyperlinks, so it could be in the signature block on your email, in documents you make available on your Web site, in online advertisements, in pictures you post to Flickr or videos you upload to YouTube. You also need your tech folks to make certain your blog or other content stream knows to “ping” Feedburner when new content is added. There are a number of other sites that should be pinged as well. But that’s technical detail, and it’s a very deep mineshaft we’re looking at here.

So why doesn’t everyone know all about this stuff? Why isn’t it as common as email? It’s getting there — Feedburner alone manages about 340,000 RSS feeds — but it takes time for technologies to permeate, and RSS was really only valuable to online newsletter publishers until blogging, forums and social networks became popular.

As a marketer, you still need the content infrastructure and the corporate will to have two-way conversations with your customers, prospects and critics in order to make RSS valuable. If you have that in place, RSS can be a big wide open direct channel to the people you care about most.