Tag Archives: Carl Agers

About 2361 days ago E-Commerce

How to Make RSS Make Money for Your Business

It used to be that corporate intelligence — whether it was about customers or competitors — required hours of painstaking work poring through news clippings, analyzing webpages, and compiling notes on transactions, phone calls, and competitive coups to stay current. But now with RSS — short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary — up-to-the-moment data can arrive automatically in e-mail, RSS aggregators or be incorporated into a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. Rather than forcing you to hunt for the required data, RSS sends the information automatically to you the moment it’s available. RSS channels, or “feeds,” provide instant notifications about updates or changes to a website. The technology first came into widespread use among bloggers, who wanted to notify readers about changes to their weblogs without having to organize and maintain a list of e-mail addresses. RSS aggregators, or “newsreaders,” were developed to access feeds automatically, saving the user the hassle of checking websites repeatedly for updates and changes. Business uses for RSS Business has found ways to expand RSS beyond simple convenience into the realm of strategic necessity. “Competitive intelligence and brand marketing are two of the bigger use cases for RSS,” says Todd Berkowitz, director of marketing for NewsGator, of Denver, Colo., one of the most popular RSS aggregators. “There has been a big push into enterprise RSS systems that give companies the ability to subscribe entire groups of people to feeds that don’t necessarily jump out and say, ‘Hey! This is RSS!” In many cases, the people within a company who most need the information that RSS can provide are among the least technically savvy. So it’s crucial to make RSS technically painless. NewsGator created an enterprise server product that lets companies manage feeds centrally, pushing data out to personnel in the best position to make use of it. Competing syndication solutions are available from Attensa and KnowNow. “Blogs and other social media tools are going to become an important part of doing business, but just how valuable are they without a way to read and aggregate them?” notes Trapper Markelz, a senior project manager at executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart, which is using NewsGator to put critical information in front of its recruiters. “Delivering relevant, timely information in an easy-to-consume way is a challenge in most enterprises, but RSS is a great way to solve this problem. I expect it to become an indispensable technology for most businesses and be as ubiquitous as e-mail.” Incorporating RSS into CRM RSS feeds can be incorporated into customer relationship management software such as NetSuite to provide instant access to the latest news and updates about client companies. There is also PubSub, a Web service that filters through scores of RSS feeds to create new, custom channels based on keyword searches. RSS also lets companies keep track of who subscribes to which corporate RSS feeds and, perhaps more importantly, lets companies watch which news items subscribers choose to explore in greater detail. “Gathering market intelligence is the primary reason for having RSS,” says Carl Agers, vice president of client services and strategy at Decision Counsel, of San Ramon, Calif., a marketing consultancy. “You can build a profile on a subscriber to an RSS feed solely on an e-mail address and the pages they choose to view. Which feeds are they reading? Which words trigger what responses?” RSS also can provide customer leads. A New York private equity firm, for instance, uses the technology to receive instant notification whenever certain forms are filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including those that are required whenever a large number of shares are sold. “It’s a pretty good bet that the seller is flush with cash,” Berkowitz notes. “That would make them a good prospect to go after to invest in a private equity fund.”

About 2422 days ago Setting Up a Website

Decoding RSS

Admittedly, spam is a serious problem for corporate and consumer users alike, but junk e-mail filters are crippling corporate communications. Studies show that up to 38 percent of all corporate e-mails, including messages customers have requested, are not reaching the intended recipient. There is an alternative: RSS — Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary — is a mysterious-sounding acronym, but it’s probably something you are already using. If you have a MyYahoo or customized Google page, you have already used RSS to add headlines to your page. The feed from the sites that provide those headlines is called RSS. Usually is thought of as a means for culling useful information from the cacophony of noise on the Internet, such as on MyYahoo, RSS also broadcasts business information to those who want it, without having to clear any spam blockers or e-mail filters. “Because RSS is a 100 percent opt-in medium, end-users WANT to receive this content,” says Charles Smith, CEO of RSS marketing company Pheedo, of Emeryville, Calif. “The readership and interest in content delivered by businesses through this medium is very high.” RSS feeds announce website changes RSS channels, or “feeds,” provide notifications about updates or changes to a particular website. The technology first came into widespread use among bloggers, who wanted to notify readers about changes to their web logs without having to organize and maintain a list of e-mail addresses. RSS aggregators, or “readers,” were developed to access feeds automatically, saving the user the hassle of having to check websites constantly for updates or changes. An RSS feed is an XML — or Extended Markup Language — file that refers back to the actual data file where the information is stored. There are two typical parts in an RSS file. The file header contains metadata, things like a headline or brief description of the data file that is linked to the RSS feed. The actual news item itself can be transmitted in its entirety to the user’s RSS reader, or it can be summarized and linked to a longer version back at the host website. Readers, which essentially are just Web browsers for RSS content, come in a variety of configurations. Some are designed to pull feeds directly inside an e-mail client, such as Microsoft Outlook. Others pull the feeds directly into the user’s Web browser or they can be accessed through a Web browser, but don’t download any information to the user’s computer. There are also stand-alone reader applications that send instant notifications to the user when a new piece of information comes in. Among the more popular readers are SharpReader, FeedDemon, Bloglines, NewsGator and MyYahoo. Any website can offer RSS syndication Any website can offer an RSS channel. Simply create an XML file and link it to an RSS icon — they look like little chicklets and that have been popping up on sites all over the web.  Visitors to your website then can copy and paste the address of your channel and add it to their RSS reader. Keep in mind, of course, that subscribers seek out sites that are worth their time. “The tools are cheap, to free. That’s not the gating factor,” says Carl Agers, vice president of client services and strategy at Decision Counsel, a San Ramon, Calif. strategic marketing company. “The main question you need to ask up front is, what’s going to drive the RSS feed?” There are myriad advantages to offering an RSS feed. Besides doing an end-run around spam blockers and e-mail filters, RSS readers put your latest news directly in front of the customers who specifically have requested it. Customers benefit by not having to hand over personal information about themselves just to get access to company news, and the website’s sponsor can be sure that subscribers truly are interested in the feed. Perhaps most importantly, an RSS channel lets other sites easily “host” your company’s news, and you can use the feeds from other sites to keep your site updated. Industry-related websites that pick up your company’s feed can help spread the word about your products or services.