RSS and Marketing

When you know 3/4 of the folks speaking at a session … you know you have to be there and you know that it should be fun.  I’m here in the RSS and Marketing session.  Niall is doing his intro, but I wish he had polled the audience to get the user level.  That said is it pretty comfortable at the podium.

Speakers:

Niall Kennedy, Principal, Hat Trick Media
Bill Flitter, Founder and VP of Marketing, Pheedo
Don Loeb, FeedBurner
Stephan M. Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Don did his intro and Bill is doing his now.  Interesting that these two competitors are sitting next to each other!

Bill is talking about his new product, which I happen to have tried for one of my other blogs.  It’s called the FeedPowered Platform.

Stephan dude!  Slow down!  Okay we have full-text feeds, multiple feeds, category feeds, optimize blogs, tags, internal tags, optimized title tags (WP plugin).  Whew.  Stephan says just to e-mail him to get the presentation (hey man what about a flash thing or something!).  Oh and his daughter makes $20 a day through Adsense via her blog!

Don is making the key point here … just blogging isn’t enough, you need to be out there, tracking mentions, finding links, and comments.  Then you need to leave comments contributing to the community.  I’ve seen this first hand with not only Feedburner (I love em, use them for all my blogs) but many other companies.

Stephan is talking about making sure you have tag pages, tag clouds, related tags because while blogs are search engine friendly they aren’t search engine optimized.  Looks like I’ll have to get these on some (all?) of my blogs.

Don: E-mail and RSS are complementary.  Yes, RSS you should be able to get feed content in e-mail if that’s what you want.  Of course, e-mail is just not a great way to deal with content you really want to read.  Look … try Google Reader if you’re not using RSS.  It’s easy, it’s free, and you can manage the info flow better.

Of course with RSS (and blogs) you need to post often with relevant, recent content.  Good idea for moving your e-mail mailing list to RSS: email each group (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, etc) and let them know they can add you content to the My Yahoo, etc page.

I also know that FeedBlitz allows you to import an e-mail list into their RSS to e-mail solution.  The key is trying to wean people away from e-mail as an info source.

Ooh the partial vs full text debate … I’m wondering if I should speak up?  Bill says his data on partial text feeds don’t have high click through rates.  Don … when people are looking for content they are looking for all of the content.  Even with full text, people will click through to comment (I do it do be able to blog it).  Generally MSM and other media companies do partial, bloggers, full (well I don’t know about that).  Stephan does make an excellent point that with full text Google and other engines can index the links out and related tags and keywords in the whole post vs just a bit.

Okay measurement … that’s still a tough one.  I haven’t tried Pheedo’s solution, but I do use FeedBurner.  RSS metrics is still in its infancy.  Essentially I use FeedBurner and look at their metrics.  I don’t take them as gospel, I take them as a barometer.  Then you look at the comments, links in, look at what keywords people are using to find you.

When people consume RSS through something like MyYahoo … they often don’t realize they are consuming RSS. Just make it easy and don’t say it’s RSS!