We all know RSS has a lot more to offer beyond blogs.. so the recently released 2006 eHoliday Mood Survey has this nugget:

41.6 percent of retailers will incorporate blogs or RSS feeds into their holiday marketing strategy – and 79.5 percent will use viral marketing at social networking sites.

The NY Times had a great piece last year on this subject – Personal Shopper

The RSS audience is valuable to retailers – 100% opt-in, specific intent, etc. Last year people were concerned with “RSS Adoption” – some recent product news is going to drive RSS consumption numbers up a lot.

1. IE7 from Microsoft 2. MySpace Widget Platform – potentially a new generation of “RSS Consumers” 3. Yahoo Mail 4. Google Reader releaseReally Simple Shopping will be the intersection of RSS marketing and Widget Marketing

Lots of talk on the recent Techmeme announcement on using RSS for online advertising

Couple of comments - Finally the Feed is the Ad - applause for Gabe at Techmeme for implementing this, and securing advertisers - not a new invention. CNet, Pheedo and nooked have done this before - hopefully the springboard for more activity around “the feed is the advert” meme

tags: nooked, techmeme, rss, rss advertising

I was asked this question the other day – how does RSS and SEO work.

A good starting point – read this post from Stephen Spencer.

He offers great advice on

1. own your own feed url 2. ping services and 3. auto-discovery.

To push the envelope out a bit, people should pay attention to what Google are up to.

The Google Base project is the key to marketers. This quote from a recent analyst conference call with Google management on Google Base

“Through that integration, the overall Google experience will become much more structured, much more refined, and much more precise. It’s a real improvement in end-user quality.”

John Battelle has 2 great examples – Real Estate and Travel of what this looks like in Google Search.

See this example source for the “Travel” category

Jeremy Zawadony of Yahoo has some interesting comments on Google Base + SEO

“Is my money better spent on Search Engine Optimization techniques and advertising, or should I be paying someone to build tools that make it easy to get my data loaded directly into Google Base (and kept up-to-date)?”

The one negative on Google Base is the lock in – you put data into Google Base, but you can only retrieve with Google APIs – GData – which has all the hallmarks of a “lock-in” or mousetrap.

ZDNet has a great article on how Google are extending RSS (ATOM) through GData.

For some additional background on the Google strategy, you should listen to the Adam Bosworth podcast (Adam is VP, Engineering at Google, and was one of the top Engineers at Microsoft)

The real alternate to the “silo” mentality of Google Base is Microformats – this is “edge feeding” at its best.

Jeff Jarvis has a great discussion on this Google Base vs Microformats.

In Summary

- Marketers need to offer feeds on per product/brand/category basis - These feeds need to support additional attributes from google base, microformats, etc. - You need the ability to track where you’re getting results

If you want to avoid all the technology mayhem, and just want results – feel free to contact nooked

Tags: microformats, rss, gdata, google base, nooked

Dave Winer has kicked off on “measuring rss“

“Do they count all the readers at Microsoft as 1 subscriber? Is that just the number of times the feed was requested per day? How then would they factor in people who read it more than once. My aggregator reads it 24 times a day, am I counted as 24 “readers?” Bloglines just reads it once for N people who subscribe, how do they factor that in? Just curious to know what the method is. Since no one has to sign up for anything they can’t directly count the number of subscribers.”

Additional commentary clarifies that the current practice for Publisher feed analytics is based on “circulation” – this is what Feedburner and Pheedo offer.

We spoke about this a while back – personalized feeds

Feed Analytics for Marketers is based on “subscribers” – that is what they want, and that is what they get.

tags:rss, dave winer, feed analytics, nooked

Is this piece on Clickz, more FUD from an email vendor on RSS ?

Some comments

- Feed Subscription. Vendors such as nooked, Feedburner, Simplefeed, Pheedo, etc make feed subscription very easy – and in most cases a “1 click process”

- RSS only for blogs. Not true – RSS is plumbing – its the “glue” that makes content of any type easy to distribute and consume.

- Segmentation. Easy. Personalized feeds make this possible – Consumers get the information they want – in a granular form. See JurysDoyle for example.

RS and Email marketing can work hand in hand – its very complimentary.

This is 2006 not 2003 – marketers are using RSS today – reaching out to consumers who are delighted to engage with organizations through this channel.

Tags: nooked, clickz, rss, rss, rss email

MessagingTimes has a piece on a recent Jupiter report on feed marketing.

“The predominant reasons that email marketers are incorporating RSS into the fray are: “

1. Satisfying customers' demand: 30 percent
2. Increasing subscriber base: 25 percent
3. Competitive pressure: 23 percent
4. Executive mandate: 19 percent
5. Low cost to implement: 17 percent
6. Reliable delivery: 15 percent
7. Ability to deliver secure content: 13 percent
8. Advertising opportunities: 12 percent
9. Early adopter status: 10 percent

They go onto mention the nooked rss and email integration with email marketing vendor Infacta

Tags: nooked, infacta, messagingtimes, rss, email marketing

Susan Mernit, following on from the latest discussions @ Widgets, Mashups and Microformats, wraps it up in a great post – “Widgety Goodness“

Widget Marketing, with Microformat smarts has lots of potential – espcially when you look at what Microsoft cooked up @ 285.entry”>Live Clipboard

Microformats are exciting from a technology perspective, and given the speed of adoption (Happy Anniversary), they will present more opportunities and benefits for consumers, pubishers and advertisers.

A new space is beginning to develop – widget marketing.

Led initially be desktop widget services such as konfabulator, we are now seeing tons of services supporting widgets/gadgets – especially in social media applications (typepad, wordpress, myspace, aimpages, netvibes, etc).

I’ve noted some recent startup activity specifically @ widgets – Snipperoo, PostApp, Tagworld, and a mobile widget venture from Nokia Labs, called Widsets.

All these startups are going to make “widget” placements in social media services easy – rather than the current “html/javascript” hacking – watch out for tons of innovation.

Widgets are primarily driven by RSS feeds, which creates tons of opportunities for marketers to develop lead generation programs @ RSS and Widgets, and more opportunities for publishers to monetize their content.

Tags: Picture in Picture Marketing, widget marketing, snipperoo, nooked, widsets, rss

According to UK Publication, NewMediaAge ABC Electronic will now audit RSS feeds in the UK.

ABC ELECTRONIC is an industry owned, tri-partite, non profit making organisation that works with and on behalf of advertisers, media buyers and media owners to provide third party independent auditing services.

Andy Flint, head of client services at ABCE is quoted

“There’s really going to be a growth in the use of RSS feeds because the standard tools that people use to browse the Internet will have them built in,” he said, in reference to the new version of Internet Explorer, which will feature an RSS reader, bringing it in line with other Web browsers like Firefox and Safari.”

Tags: rss, nooked, nma, abce

Rok has pulled together a great survey to gather information on how folks are using RSS for marketing purposes – see his blog post here

Sign up here

tags: rss

I recently came accross an interesting article penned by Matt Anthony of the VML group.

I really like “The Vision” section

The vision

“As consumers, we will continue weaving online experiences into an inextricable thread in our lives. We will explore the new technology that makes our lives easier and better. Our curiosity will grow into expectation. As advertising experts with vision, we will align our technological acumen and adaptability with our clients’ competitive marketing spirit, and give curious consumers reasons to expect more.

So my toaster oven hasn’t dropped to the hard-to-beat sale price I want. And I have left the serious bargain hunting to a mysterious conglomeration of acronyms. Yet I know that while I may have hitched my wagon to the content syndication star, I still hold the reins.”

Tags: vml, nooked, rss,

The folks over at the Gilbane Group are demanding companies to start using RSS.

“Frank does a great job of filtering the news and getting it out to our readers. We get several press releases a day, and on busy days it can be a dozen or more. When one of our conferences or a trade show like AIIM is coming up, the flood of news can be pretty overwhelming. To make it more challenging, most of the news ends up in our email in-boxes—along with dozens of other legitimate email and, some days, hundreds of spam. I have pretty good spam filtering, but sometimes it overflags, and a vendor email will end up in my junk mail folder. Every week or so, I go through the spam and flag these email addresses for my white list.

So I have a proposal for vendors. Come up with an RSS feed for your news, and I will subscribe to it. A few of you already do this, and I have subscribed, but most of you don’t. So add an RSS feed for your press releases and let us know—by email of course.

While you are thinking about it, you could consider a more general RSS feed for other elements of your Web site—events, new documents, and so forth. I am sure your customers would appreciate it too.”

nooked makes it easy – within 2 minutes you will have RSS feeds for your site – get started – signup here for FREE [YES FREE !!]

Tags: nooked, rss, gilbane, micropersuasion

Bill Nussey of Silverpop kicked off an interesting debate on Personalized RSS or Individualized RSS.

Dick Costollo and Fred Wilson commented on this approach and the potential problems. Brad Feld also posted on the subject a while back – and flagged similar thoughts. [Note – Fred and Brad are investors in Feedburner]

As flagged by Charlene Li back in July, marketers want a better way to track RSS usage – and we can validate those concerns in real life questions/deployments.

[Note: nooked enables marketers to offer a “broadcast feed” and/or “personalized feeds”]

In terms of tracking we view it simply

- Personalized RSS feed user = subscriber(actual) - Broadcast RSS feed user = circulation (of part thereof)

Marketers see through the fuzz @ circulation calculations, and prefer the actual subscriber tracking.

Anyway to help remedy, the biggest challenges facing the industry is getting the aggregators/readers to support

- personalized RSS – in discussions with the likes of Greg and Rok we need to save everyones bandwidth :-)

- formalized user agent strings, with feed usage information

- support textinput – if implemented, some interesting segmentation work could be done – see thoughtful post from Roger Cadenhead

Some early starts were made on this back in December, hopefully it will kick start again in the near future.

Tags: nooked, feedburner, silverpop, personalized rss