The consumption of content today regularly happens beyond the website publishing such content in the first place.
Log data may be mined easily for useful details, as it resides under the control of the site publisher. Visitor habits become profiles, and the publisher acts accordingly based on usage trends; certain hot content topics fuel the next targeted ad campaign.
Once the viewership, and the log data, head elsewhere, the site publisher suffers a bit from lack of information. An article receiving little attention on the website could be a phenomenon in the feed readers of many people, shared and shared again throughout the world of social media.
Advertising firm Pheedo said they have a new way to look at this engagement with content distributed via RSS. Their FeedPowered Analytics Dashboard debuted with options that should attract passing interest from publishers, especially the bigger brands online.
Pheedo claimed its new technology will measure content engagement, including interaction rates with valuable destinations like Digg, Reddit, and Facebook. Publishers track where people receive the content, and what they do with it.
This extends to the advertising a publisher places in the RSS feed. Pheedo said the Dashboard provides the expected information on impressions and clicks.
“Brand marketers can no longer expect users to come to their micro-site. Distributed media is the new micro-site,” Pheedo CEO Bill Flitter said in a statement.
We wonder what impact this may have on site design and development on an ongoing basis. If a brand name company expects its content to enjoy consumption outside its .com presence more than on their site, that suggests an impact on content creation and advertising placement.
Consider someone with many feeds in their reader. They probably skim their feeds and only read deeply when engagement takes place. It hints at a need for Dashiell Hammett-like prose in content: short, direct, and informative.
Deeper content provides plenty of value for customers with a brand relationship, and those people probably visit a brand’s site to find product details or service instructions anyway. But maybe there’s an emerging trend here for a copywriting style that’s equal parts Neil French and Sam Spade, for feed-distributed, trackable content.
