Customers Still Clueless on RSS

How cool is RSS if customers don't get it?

Where are we on this RSS conversation?  How many of your customers ask you about RSS or say they are attached to you because of the RSS factor?  I've been listening for this for more than 5 years and the voices of our customers are not bringing up the topic of RSS.

ClickZ writer Heidi Cohen tells us RSS is about to go mainstream. In her article 10 Ways for eMarketers to Use RSS, she urges us to start testing new ways to use this technology to gain a competitive advantage.  Heidi goes on to tell us RSS is the ultimate opt-in marketing vehicle with high returns available if we stay in sync with your consumer's needs.

What goes through you head when you see that an eMarketer study estimates that 88 percent of employees don't know what RSS is?  What seems to be a more important statistic is what percentage of your customers have RSS as their information filter and information grabber from the flood of content and images coming at them every day?

The acceptance and adoption of RSS has been much slower than expected.  It seems to be one of those situations that if you have never experienced RSS, all the talk about it means nothing.  This reminds me of the communications exercise during an executive retreat at one of those very nice resorts where thinking and brilliant thoughts come easier than when working in a pressure situation.  The group leader told us to describe an apple to someone who had never seen or heard of an apple. What does it look like?  What does it taste like? What are all the reasons why you would want an apple?  And so forth.   Obvious to those of us to have enjoyed many apples and a total mystery to the one who has never seen or heard of an apple.

I remember the time and place I first heard about RSS.  It was 5 years ago and Paul Ward and I were working with the corporate partners (Business Council) of the American Society of Association Executives.  For three meetings and six months Paul explained RSS.  He got out his brand new Apple laptop computer and showed it to them. The more excited he got about how wonderful it was and how it creates value, the faces around the conference table turned more blank or more confused.  The other issue was more subtle.  That Apple computer was just a little too geeky for the business leaders around the table and besides, there was a lot of scrambling and calling up tech support in the middle of the presentation when it was clear the high-tech conference room was all set for the PC world and PC connectors.  It just didn't feel mainstream and that causes the masses to wait until the early adopters have absorbed the risk for the rest of us.

While Heidi now hypes RSS as "your opportunity to get ahead of the crowd and learn how to use RSS on your site and in your marketing I'm still concerned about the fact that my customer are not jumping into this "opportunity" with our firm.

With the release of the latest software updates, such as Explorer 7, and other software that shows us the orange RSS icon means you can get an instant alert every time the Web page or blog is updated, the convenience factor alone may help this along.

Customers want us to figure all of this out for them and then bring them what they want, when they want it, the way they last told us they wanted to hear from us.  On that point, Heidi is completely aligned with customers.  She shows us that  RSS feeds enable you to "parse content into small, digestible chunks that consumers want."

The last word on this is still John Jantsch in  Your Readers Don't Care What the Technology Is Called. Speak the customers' language, John coaches us.  Your customers know what Yahoo, Google and AOL is.  RSS feeds fit right in with that world they like know, like and trust.
 

.

Comments

[...]

I am Very thank full the owner of this blog. Becouse of this blog is very imformative for me.. And I ask u some thiing You make more this type blog where we can get more knowledge.
thanks you very high work..
http://www.cesurturk.org

[güzel sözler]

thanks

[sex shop]

I am Very thank full the owner of this blog. Becouse of this blog is very imformative for me.. And I ask u some thiing You make more this type blog where we can get more knowledge.
thanks you very high work..
sex shop
http://www.sawos.org

[youtube]

http://www.youtube7.net thanx