RSS has been touted as a vehicle that could supplant email marketing; a skeptical look at RSS indicates what companies will need to avoid doing to make it work for them.
RSS is a potential solution for marketing. There are pitfalls that have to be avoided. Derek Harding at ClickZ helpfully brings forth the problems in his article.
Despite recognizing the issues with email that RSS adoption can avoid – delivery problems, spam filtering, or blocking – Harding has his misgivings, and admits to generally telling those who ask him to just say no to RSS.
He sees the current usage of RSS as mostly one that gathers syndicated content from sites, blogs, and podcasts. Marketing doesn’t come into play, and when it does, it has not been kept up to date in the examples he has seen.
Harding makes the valid point that the user experience with RSS readers and aggregators is immature. He further contends that it’s hard even for competent users to subscribe to feeds.
As someone who uses the Opera browser, I’ve been used to subscribing and managing feeds easily for some time. I freely admit to being in the minority here.
In his story, Harding allows that RSS has potential to complement an existing email marketing effort, rather than being an email killer outright. Sensible, but there are a couple factors that may happen and push RSS right into the mainstream.
The potential for greater RSS adoption cannot be discussed without looking at Microsoft and its efforts in the RSS space. IE 7 will be pushed out to millions of PCs as an automatic update later in 2006, and millions of machines will accept that upgrade.
Microsoft has worked hard on making RSS as user-friendly as it can for the typical end-user. Even a small percentage of IE 7 users who take to RSS will propel it into greater acceptance, and that would likely build over time.
As that adoption broadens, marketers will realize very quickly that they have to ensure their RSS efforts need to be managed for timely and relevant updates. An email marketing industry has developed over the years, and there is no reason to think entrepreneurs won’t try to craft RSS marketing management solutions over time.
Today’s RSS minority could be the vanguard of a ubiquitous majority that expects RSS from the sites they visit and do business with regularly.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
