Paul Miller Blogs With Us About How to Use RSS Effectively

David Schatsky | June 30, 2005, 09:07 AM

Paul Miller accepted our invitation to review a JupiterResearch report and blog about his reactions. It's a good contribution to the discussion over how to use RSS effectively.

Broadly, Paul agrees with the positions taken by Eric, the lead author of the report, but cites a few areas of disagreement. For example, he takes issue with the report's statement that “Sites with frequently changing, compelling content should deploy first, managing the feeds as they would any marketing channel.” [his emphasis] and goes on to say

Jupiter should surely know as well as anyone, given their analysts' engagement with blogging, that a good work blog is absolutely nothing like most marketing channels, yet has the potential to form a powerful link between the blogger, their employer, and past, present and potential customers.

Jupiter does not believe that traditional marketing practices should inform the conception of blog content--the editorial side of things--which would result in something that Paul calls "the use of pseudo-blogs by marketers to push their products." The sense in which we believe RSS feeds should be managed as any other marketing channel is from the standpoint of measurement. As the report states,

...site operators must think about content syndication in the same way they think about any other marketing and acquisition vehicles, tagging feeds with tracking URLs that will identify visitors, segmenting these visitors, and tracking growth of feed-driven traffic relative to other marketing acquisition vehicles.

There are a couple of other points of disagreement that I believe are related. Paul disagrees with Eric's (overly) broad recommendation that feeds should be updated daily (Paul: "most of the best blogs to which I subscribe are often only updated 2-3 times a week"), and "violently" disagrees with Eric's recommendation to "Only offer summary descriptions in available feeds, forcing readers back to sites to read entire articles..."

Paul's reaction: "Personally, I hate summary feeds. Indeed, unless it's absolutely vital to get the feed, I am quite rigorous about never subscribing to these abominations."

Publishers are finding their way here. Some who offer feeds are seeing that may reduce time spent on their site, which may seem to threaten a reach-based advertising revenue model. But they are also observing that feeds can increase the frequency of contact with their audience, as RSS readers will pull updated feeds as often as they are available. Knight Ridder's news organization, for one, is adapting their news cycle so they can have new things to say on a story throughout the day to better engage readers.

Paul's analysis is worth reading. And I would not be surprised if the voluble Eric has something to add as well.