Many brands and B2B businesses have a news page with an RSS feed.  The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed is a helpful tool developed in 1999 to syndicate blogs in a common format. Today the orange square with white radio waves is well-recognised on the internet.

This spawned aggregation services that enable users to group all their RSS feeds into a single location for reading.  Some RSS readers are online (Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes) others are desktop applications (NewsGator, Toolbutton).

What proportion of consumers and businesses actually know how to set up and use an RSS reader?  Do you use one?

Forrester reported in October 2008 that consumer adoption of RSS was only 11% which is tiny compared to consumer readership of blogs.  In response to this finding, commentator Steve Rubel said “Feeds are way, way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve.”

Has RSS adoption changed since 2008?

My instincts say ‘no’.  Leading techy-nerd-geek types have long left RSS behind in their search for the latest “high” from new RSS tools ranging from iGoogle to Waves and Yahoo’s Pipes.  But apart from dedicated web 2.0 followers, most of the populace and particularly us in B2B are not interested in using these free tools to consume content.

So what is happening in RSS and how can the B2B marketer harness this ‘really simple’ technology to support their marketing communication strategies?

In one sense not much is happening to RSS – the technology has not advanced; it continues to work and is installed on thousands of sites.  However, there is a lot happening with the RSS output.  Social networks are now linked into RSS and are themselves feeds.  There are feeds of feeds, feeds of comments, feeds of ‘likes’ – you name it there’s a feed for it.

Consider the tools that are actually widely used; Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Posterous and FriendFeed.  They all have large user-bases and are all RSS aggregation tools.

But B2B audiences don’t care about RSS, we need to use services which are a step removed from traditional RSS where feeds are provided to subscribers in ways they already consume but they are not aware they are receiving RSS.  Cunning, eh?

I asked Phil Hollows Managing Director of Feedblitz about this transition

“This is much more interesting for B2B marketers because it is the application that provides RSS-by-email – with minimal extra work by the B2B marketer thanks to the automation built from RSS.  FeedBlitz also adds value to the raw RSS feed with click-through tracking and branding while using the ubiquity of email.”

The customer doesn’t have to download another application in order to consume the RSS.  And even technophobes have email at work.

Hollows adds

“Email is THE best media distribution channel because your newsletter can also get out to Facebook, Twitter, Instant Messenger, mobile phones and Skype.  And the consumer chooses how they want to receive it.  They just get your news and is easier for the marketer – you scale out more rapidly to reach audiences from whatever platform they want to use.”

ACTION:

• Check the feed on your news page has ‘subscribe by email’
• Review Feedburner or Feedblitz to provide the service

For the B2B marketer aggregation of feed content is a rich source of data to mine and consolidate in order to get competitive marketing intelligence and custom content for your brand and industry.  You can get free market research by searching feeds.

The Conversation Group researched the Google Android mobile phone release tracking comments, blogs, tweets and gaining insight into consumer views, buying intentions and sentiment.  

Richard Heale of Thinking Insight reviewed iPhone users’ views.

“It was clear that although customer sentiment favoured the pricing and free data features there was a strong undercurrent of complaints about poor battery life and problems using headsets during charging.  Now that is actionable insight for the R&D lab and the customer service team.”

ACTION:

• Try free tools to research your brand: Backtype, Twitter Search, Technorati, Google blog search
• Paid services with free trials: eCairn, Leximancer (via Thinking Insight), Radian6.

What happens to mass email?

The mass email services may be the next service to hit the dustbin.  Combining email with RSS lets the customer choose how they receive your messages.  And so by delivering newsletters and email shots using RSS technology a customer can read it on Facebook, their mobile phone, through Twitter or by email.  Your brand can harness the “multiplier effect” of social media because a recipient can immediately read, comment, share or forward the message to his network of contacts increasing your reach.

The next big move for B2B is integrating electronic marcoms across several platforms.  This means you have to do less and use fewer suppliers but reach a greater audience.  Feedblitz is a paid email service that you can use for your ‘normal’ email marketing as well as newsletters, auto-responders, surveys, forms and RSS-by-email.  I am trying it out now for my blog.

Try setting up your blog’s RSS so it automatically creates a Tweet every time a new post publishes using Twitterfeed or FeedBlitz.  Or install Tweetdeck and publish in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  Posterous is a blogging-by-email service where you send an email (from your phone, maybe?) and it appears on your blog.

ACTION

• Try out an automatic cross-posting service
• Ensure your company and staff are listed on LinkedIn – it’s the social media platform for business
• If you have a Facebook page, add your blog feed to update the wall posts

You shouldn’t think you have missed the bus.  If you use separate tools or services start combining them into a hub of social media marketing automation.  You get good information about the chatter and your messages reach more people through their networks.

Related articles

• Feedblitz Gets Better and Better – Adds Social Sharing (buildabetterblog.com)
• The Changing Face of RSS – What the Death of Bloglines Means for the Future of RSS (plagiarismtoday.com)
• Death of RSS readers? I don’t think so. (thepomoblog.com)

Image by luc legay via Flickr

When you have taken the time and effort to create original content,I have always believed in using it two or three times in different ways to extract maximum value.

And so a press release becomes an article which is reproduced as a flyer and is mailed to clients or included in the corporate brochure as an insert… you get the picture.

It's much easier than that online these days.  Five things to do in order to "amplify" your work i.e. get it used two or three times in different places.

1. Set up Twitter Feed to automatically cross post from your blog to your twitter account.
2. Use Tweetdeck's Facebook integration to automatically cross-post to Facebook from your Twitter stream
3. Set up FriendFeed to include all your social media feeds and get that feeding Facebook
4. Find Ning groups, eCademy or Linked In groups that align with your specialist area and cross-post onto them from your blog
5. If you are an agency get approved to stream your blog (or just your best work) onto Marcom Professiona l

Now I have been thinking about the increasing numbers of people I have on my database stored in a 'catch-all' category which I started calling "Blogger" or "Freelancer"/.  There are nearly 60 people who don't work for an organisation, who I connect with regularly and who are beginning not to fit into the data fields provided.  These lead withorganisation as the principal field.  No organisation = create a fake one (Blogger) = not really representing this person accurately as there isn't an organisation called that and these people don't all work together for that organisation.

And that's just the start.  What about the people with whom I correspond via social media platforms?  It's pretty easy to add in a field called "Twitter ID" or "Facebook profile link".  But what's the point?

1. I can't mail / contact them in a traditional-style mass mailout
2. I can't contact them using links from inside my database
3. The style of contact in social media doesn't enable a mass mailout approach, if you're following me you'll see my message

I am thinking that the days of a single customer database aggregated from across the organisation is dying.  

Welcome to the interim new world of a distributed contact database and the world of aggregators to enable cross-platform viewing.

[note this is interim as the market moves towards the day when consumers hold their own information and companies build trust in order to access it = VRM]

So how might it all work?

Social media has some key attributes that are very different from old-world corporate marketing communications:

• Sharing and discovery
• Real-time information
• Feedback and re-iteration

Now that hardly works with a traditional 'campaign nor with database marketing techniques.

And so we'll need to change the nature of our "campaigns".  Of course they will continue to be called campaigns but that will become a mis-nomer.  Conversations will have to become the norm. There's a spectrum of information from broadcast (fixed point in time and not editable) to one-to-one conversations (infinitely editable, fast-moving and continuing over time).  Campaigns of the future may start in the broadcast mode but will need to move through the middle ground where peer-to-peer conversations and social media sharing is the broadcast medium and then move back to the organisation on an individual conversation business as the moment of transaction gets closer.  

 I think there's still a role for a database and some direct communications in this scenario – but its influence will be different.  It'll be a "conversational stimulant" not just a marketing message.

The anatomy of a "conversational campaign"

1. Each will be more time-co-ordinated: judged to be delivered, developed and amended in real time
2. Starting with some broadcast channels and including easy sharable content for social media
3. On-the-fly improvements and changes with several possible directions will be needed as the peer-to-peer messaging happens
4. Tracking and measuring must flow through all three parts : broadcast / peer to peer / direct conversation with the brand organisation
5. The customer contact team (?call centre) will work as part of the delivery team at the conversational end to close the marketing loop and fulfil the transaction

Unresolved issues and changing behaviours

In no particular order:

• We will still segment our audiences.  But by behaviours not demographics.  How to define?  Sales cycle stages?
• How do you send a message out only to the parts ofyour SM profile and followers that you want?  Multiple online profiles / rss?
• How to get an overall view of a multiplicity of sites with your brand / organisation profile and the differing audiences and conversations?  Aggregation and tracking tools needed.
• What to do with your company database as its utility slowly dies.  Maintain stasis?
• Stop worrying about collecting customer data via social media- they will come and go.  Track numbers but don't try to record them until near the point of transaction.
• Anticipate the rise of customers holding their own data and feeding it out to brands / organisations on a trusted basis.  Privacy intermediaries may control this?

What to do now

 Transitions take a long time to happen.  We're all going to be running parallel systems of old-databases plus new social media contacts held on third party platforms for a while.

1. Get a presence on SM platforms
2. Sign up to an aggregation platform like Friendfeed
3. Track changes in numbers of subscribers
4. Run old campaigns with a SM link-in so that the broadcast elements can migrate into peer to peer social media with ease
5. Run new campaigns on SM with direct conversational opportunities back to the brand / organisation
6. Continue to try to link 4 and 5 ever closer
7. Practice good database marketing but track customers who are on both SM and old database.  This will give clues about % take-up and when you'll be able to switch off the database
8. Stop buying data lists.

Just got a stream of Friendfeed subscription notices – one fromPaul Carr who I know… thanks, mate!

But when I checked a couple out I started to learn something….. Friendfeed has been quietly multiplying without me noticing.  It's an aggregator of social media feeds which is nice and it purports to be the 'mass of everything' place I can follow all my mates at once on a single platform.  I'm not sure thisis quite what I need.

#Here's what I learned

1. They are real people.  I jest not.  This is a real criterion for me to follow you – can I find you in several places online saying interesting things. 
2. Some are real powerful people. Like why are they following me….. delighted, flattered but better improve some of my writing, methinks.
3. Why are there so many of them? Seventy three people I don't know are reading my stream… really?
4. Thank goodness I don't need to subscribe back- online etiquette is so much simpler than being a middle class Brit! [grin]

How to get found online and how to State your Business are the first step of business development programmes. And tracking your online mentions through linkbacks, and simple Google search alerts is a great start.

ReadWriteWeb has a great post summarising the free and paid-for monitoring tools available for online brand / key phrase monitoring.

Interestingly they say they use Friendfeed search and I also find this a cheap / easy tool plus Google alerts.

There's a bit of future-speculation around whether Facebook will allow search and monitoring as well as audio and video files using speech to text services (that'd be useful)

and I found a new one today that purports to be more appropriate for social media.  SocialWhoIs

Well, it says "who you should follow and why" as tis subtext. 

Let's see.

Easy to sign up and some neat security features – it links your profile via friendFeed or Twitter.

and I liked the way it uses proxies for passwords.  You can keep them secret.  It was easy to sign up and link to my account.  I chose FriendFeed because it includes Twitter and so I guess it'll keep everything in one place.

So I ran some queries…

SEarch for "biz dev"  – Answer: We were unable to query the intertubes. Please try again

And you have to go back on the browser to try again – no links to re-edit search text string

.

So, not great results for the term 'marketing' in the "Look for" search box on the home page.

But when I tried 'search by tag' for the same term I got a great result – lists of people's twitter IDs who are interested in marketing.

And so I conclude it doesn't search the whole Twitter user base – just those who are registered at SocialWhoIs.  And so I rather think that ZoomIn fo is still a better resource for researching prospects.