This is a summary of our recent presentation at PRSA Media Relations Workshop, Orange County, CA. I will be posting the summary here in three parts.
Have you seen these little orange buttons during your web travels?
They are your media relations power tools!
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the pivotal technology in today’s media environment and it is being adopted at lightening speed by both the creators and the consumers of news. Do not give in to any temptation to dismiss or underestimate the importance of what we are telling you here today about RSS. It is a vital tool for your media relations efforts.
Really simply, RSS sets up a method for your web content to be instantly syndicated – by individuals, editors, journalists, or by news sites or web sites.
Technically, RSS is a small bit of code in a blog or web page which instantly turns that content into a syndicated “feed.” People subscribe to feeds, and that content is received via software on their computers called a “news aggregator” or “news reader.”
Most blog services automatically generate RSS feeds so that a reader/subscriber to that blog is immediately notified when a writer has posted. RSS ties the writer and reader together in time, giving a sense of immediacy, and to some extent a sense of shared experience between the reader and the writer. But, its power goes way beyond that.
So, RSS sounds simple (and it is), but HOW you use it is what makes it so powerful.
"The day will come when the online location of a company's RSS feed will be just as much of a PR pro's email signature file as his or her email address, home page and phone number."
---Phil Gnomes, pr guru
With the mindshift away from mainstream media to the concept of everybody as creators of content (see Part 1), communications channels are broadening. One reason is….
Email is dead.
Nearly half of the 31 billion email messages sent every day is junk email, drowning the average email user with approximately 2200 spam messages per year.
Only about 50 percent of journalists are even opening e-mail.
With filtering, blockers and trust lists, you cannot count on your email being received much less read.
But RSS is an entirely “opt in” communications channel. You simply provide the location of your RSS feed - with that little orange button - and the minute you update content, every subscriber gets it delivered to their newsreader. RSS acts as a homing device for your news.
Email is still a method to communicate with a “trust network” of people known and welcomed. And, we still recommend providing email options, but RSS simply cannot be topped as a distribution channel.
RSS Makes Everyone Happy
Journalists are rapidly adopting RSS, and increasingly want companies they regularly cover to publish RSS feeds. It gets around invasive and non-relevant pitches, and allows far more timely access to news. Some journalists are asking not be pitched any other way.
RSS makes it far easier to get your news into the hands of those who care – and to get it in front of more people. A nice side benefit is that traditional search engines, like Google, Yahoo and many others, index content from RSS feeds faster, and often more favorably.
Journalists are not only monitoring specific feeds, but they are also using RSS to monitor topics. So, this means that even if a particular journalist is not monitoring your feed directly, if they are monitoring the topic in general, your news may make its way into their news reader anyway, if you’ve constructed your headline and copy well. A great way to get additional visibility by doing nothing!
Desktops Are the New Front Porch
BusinessWeek magazine calls RSS the "online paperboy" because it delivers news from blogs and web sites directly to “the desktop” via RSS news readers.
As I mentioned earlier, a “news reader” is software that pulls in content from RSS feeds. News readers are available for download (many excellent ones are free) and the newer versions of most browsers have, or will have, RSS readers built in. They look and act very similarly to your email software. Readers generally have three columns: one that lists all the feeds you are subscribed to; a second that shows the headlines associated with that feed; and a third column displays the full content of the feed. Some feeds provide a short summary and a link to the full text others provide the full text within the feed.
Here are some RSS news readers:
Sage (For Windows, Firefox)
NewzCrawler (Windows)
NetNewsWire (Mac)
Pan (Linux, Unix)
So, start syndicating your content!
RSS not only notifies readers immediately, but it is a media relations person’s dream because it makes re-broadcasting content automatic.
RSS is being used by “news magnet” or “master news sites” sites like:
Memestreams – a collaborative web site to find and share interesting web content.
NewsKnowledge - gathers and redistributes news to corporate, content publishers, and other aggregators. It also offers a media monitoring service that is based on search terms and then aggregating the feed results for you.
Findory and Topix.net are news aggregation sites, which become more personalized as you use them. And, you will find one of those little orange xml buttons on your news page – you can subscribe here to a single personalized feed, letting Findory or Topix gather RSS feeds for you.
And, of course major online news and mainstream media outlets are also using RSS to capture news across the Internet.
Creating an RSS Feed
It is easy, even if you are a non-techie. First, most blog services have RSS built in and which broadcast automatically each time you post.
But, for a small fee you can use a web-based RSS publishing service like Nooked, PressFeed or Simplefeed to send out news via RSS. No technical know-how is required. These RSS services work similarly to web-based e-mail. First you log in with a user name and password, you write your copy into a form and press "post entry" to distribute the news. It is as easy as sending an email.
We recommend making your newsroom a blog, to take advantage of built-in RSS.
Use Nooked, Pressfeed, and Simplefeed to get started adding RSS feeds to your news distribution. You can use RSS for lot of things other than press releases, such as alerts, crisis communications, announcements, events. Well, just about anything.
By the way, if necessary you can also password-protected RSS feeds.
In the Know – Now
The new generation of search tools such as Technorati, PubSub and Feedster, depend on RSS. If you’re not providing an RSS feed for them to index, the users of these tools aren’t finding your news.
These tools specifically index content made available via RSS, but “mainstream” search tools, like Google are also now using RSS to find and index content.
RSS search engines update their indexes far more frequently than Google or Yahoo. They update every 15 minutes to an hour, while a typical cycle for Google’s database update is as much as once a month.
We’ve noticed that Google indexes blogs faster than regular web pages, largely due to blogs incorporating RSS.
Subscribe to RSS Feeds
Monitor your own news, your client’s online reputation, industry news items, competitors – and don’t forget - journalists by subscribing to RSS feeds.
A few places (there are more than 50) to find RSS feeds are:
PubSub
Feedster
Technorati
Daypop
Subscribe to Searches
So, if you aren’t yet convinced of the power of RSS, try this. Use RSS to subscribe to search terms. News and content that contain those terms are aggregated for you on your desktop via your news reader, saving you time and keeping you instantly in the know as soon as something is posted. Use RSS search engines to create a “subscription term” and simply paste into your news reader the unique URL the search engine provides you for the results and – voila – the flow to your desktop of keyword matches begins.
Use these tools to see what people are saying about you or your clients. For example, I’ve used Technorati and PubSub and have subscribed to my name, as well as terms like “modern media” and “mobile media.” When new content is indexed by these two tools, I get it instantly in my newsreader.
By the way, these are not necessarily a substitute for using traditional search engines like Google. RSS search tools are indexing content being fed by RSS and provide you the newest information as it is posted, while Google contains an enormous pool of non-RSS content. Each has its strengths, but watch Google as it is incorporating RSS into several new services.
Here are a few RSS search engines you can use to subscribe to searches:
PubSub
Technorati
Feedster
RSS can expand your media relations efforts by magnitudes. It can make your life easier, and by monitoring searches, provide you with better reporting.
But Wait! There’s More!
RSS can also have “enclosures.” Enclosures are various types of documents. So, that means documents can be distributed via RSS. It is analogous to an attachment in an email.
In fact, an RSS enclosure that is absolutely exploding in popularity is an audio files – and that makes it a podcast. Which we’ll talk about next (in Part 3).
"I reiterate my plea that PR folks focus hard -on the behalf of their clients - on putting anything that would go out to a mailing list of larger than 2 people onto an RSS feed..."
-- Dan Gillmor, journalist, author and blogger
I may need further advice or RSS usage. Though I have it installed by SEO expert, I am yet to full understand it full use> Can someone throw more light?
Posted by: yinka olaito | May 11, 2009 at 09:55 AM
Thanks, Bill, for reading and commenting.
To answer your question, you are correct in saying that it allows journalists to “segment” their activities and get well-organized content delivered to their desktops, avoiding “messier” email – or unsolicited email.
But from a PR standpoint, RSS also causes content that might otherwise go undiscovered to be “found” by a journalist. Although that's just one of its benefits.
However, it does benefit search engine marketing hugely. The reasons are many, but I’ll just mention two here to keep it brief.
You cannot theorize that each individual post is “low” in importance and therefore can’t impact your rankings. Search engines are looking for RSS feeds to track newly updated pages/content. They index feeds more often than “regular” content. In addition, if there is an increase in the rate of updated content, this also “scores” favorably with Google, for example. This is because in addition to it being attractive as “fresh content” that page may generate lots of inbound links because of the RSS feed, and/or, it may prove a popular link (clicks) once it has been indexed - also factors in creating “importance.” What’s really interesting, by the way, is you can use RSS to boost optimization of even static content by including keyword-targeted feeds on your webpage.
Another search engine implication is there are 50 or 60 search engines that use RSS feeds almost exclusively to index content. If you don’t have an RSS feed, you aren’t in them at all.
RSS and search engine optimization is pretty broad topic, and I caution you not to narrow your optimization efforts to the inbound link theory. RSS is actually changing the way search engines rank pages. We definitely need to be looking to RSS if the search engines are.
Posted by: Linda Zimmer | June 29, 2005 at 07:50 PM
Great article. So, correct me if I'm wrong here...
In PR, it appears the primary value of RSS is to let journalists segment their activity. Rather than look through a huge bin full of email, they now can actively join RSS feeds, and check new, well-organized content at their own leisure. As a result, they are more likely to read what we have written.
This mechanism usually wouldn't benefit search engine marketing in the narrow sense: that is, the process of arranging for valuable external links to point to your own site, so as to increase the importance of your own site. The reason is that the rank of each individual posting is very low.
Is that correct?
Posted by: Bill Mitchell | June 28, 2005 at 07:37 PM
This is a nice intro to RSS.
Posted by: Lisa Williams | June 10, 2005 at 12:41 PM