IMV23 : RSS Defined

The following is a transcript for IMV23 : RSS Defined. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to internet marketing voodoo, episode 23. I’m your host Ted Murphy. And with me today is J.B. Holston, CEO of NewsGator. Welcome to the show today J.B..

J.B. Holston:

Thanks Ted. Good to be here.

Ted Murphy:

J.B., we’re here to talk today about RSS. And, obviously, NewsGator is one of the premier RSS services out there. I was wondering if you could start off by telling our listeners a little bit about NewsGator and the types of services that you offer.

J.B. Holston:

Sure. NewsGator is a private company. We were formed about three years ago. And the company started with a product that allows folks to subscribe to RSS content directly in Microsoft Outlook. So, essentially, treated RSS just as if it were any other kind of email. You could organize it and do with it anything that you would do with email. And since then we’ve expanded the company’s platform so that we support a wide range of products in three primary areas.

We have consumer products, FeedDemon, which is the leading RSS reading software for the PC, and NetNewsWire, which is the leader for the Macintosh. Our two premier products on the consumer side along with our online service, which anyone can sign up for free at http://www.newsgator.com.

We have an enterprise business. We have an enterprise server product that sits behind the firewall and allows corporations to manage this tsunami of RSS content in an efficient and effective way.

And then we have private label business where essentially we license our platform to allow other brands to have a RSS based, subscription based relationship with their end users. USA Today launched a feature called My USA Today about two months ago. It’s powered by us at the backend. And that’s an illustration of the kind of work we do on the private label side.

We’re based in Denver. And any of your listeners who happen to be in Denver should call.

(Laughter)

Ted Murphy:

So we talked a little bit about RSS there. But I think we need to jump back a little bit. Because some of our listeners may not actually understand what it is that RSS does. So could you tell us a little bit about what RSS is? And ultimately, for our listeners, how they can integrate the power of RSS into an online marketing strategy?

J.B. Holston:

Absolutely. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a very technical term. It actually is know to stand for a couple of things as well. But that’s actually the easiest way to think about it. It’s a very simple technical protocol. It’s an extension of an XML markup language that basically creates the ability for anyone to subscribe to content, to content distributed via the web.

And the reason that that’s important is that people are looking to have much more control over where they get their stuff. And when they get their stuff. And they want to basically only receive content, and only receive it in the places that they want it that’s really relevant to them. And as it’s happened, our assess is this very simple technology that’s really taken off as the way to enable that changed relationship from folks running around trying to find what’s new on the web, or other places, to being updated immediately whenever there’s something new.

To give you a specific example, if you go to usatoday.com, they probably have a hundred different RSS feed right now. And if you’ve got an RSS reader – for example, NewsGator or a FeedDemon or a NetNewsWire, you can read that. You can subscribe to those feeds through that reader. And it’ll automatically be updated. You’ll get new content from that source whenever it’s published. So, for example, if I care about my particular column, this USA Today, I don’t have to now go back to the USA Today site to find out what’s new. Though I can. I can read that directly in my reader.

Microsoft has characterized – Gates has characterized RSS as one of the sort of fundamental game changing technologies, because it really represents a move from folks chasing content to the content chasing folks. And that’s a big change.

Text, audio, podcasting really took off. It has enclosures around RSS. And increasingly, video as well. So it’s not just text. Historically, every blog site in the world generates RSS, by definition. So that’s kind of how the phenomena started to take off. As the number of blogs increased, we’re now up to, you know, 36 million, doubling every five months, whatever that is. That was generating all kinds of content for folks to track. And then the mainstream media all started to output RSS content as well. And then, increasingly, enterprises are – the enterprise systems are starting to generate RSS content too.

So an online marketing point of view, a lot of the interest in this has been around different ways for online brands to relate to their constituents. I mean, really what RSS represents is a way for you to take your brand and kinda slice it and dice it according to whatever parts of that brand are of the greatest interest to different groups of users. And then essentially allow them to subscribe to just that part. So, now if you think about it from an economic point of view, it kind of allows you to price your offering according to a demand curve. That’s kind of obvious if you think about content publishers, like USA Today. It use to just be a monolithic site where you’d go and have to find whatever it is you were interested in. Now you can subscribe to any of a hundred different views of USA Today.

But a lot of online marketers, a lot of online brands, that aren’t media companies are starting to use the power of RSS to change their relationship with their constituents. The travel sites, for example, now has RSS feeds where you can set up a search feed. You can basically say, I’m interested in the following destinations, the following kinds of offers, according to these kind of price parameters, whatever maybe of interest to you, and you’ll be notified whenever there’s a new offer that meets those criteria by that travel site. That’s an example of online publishers that aren’t media companies using the power of this technology. They have a different relationship with their constituents.

Ted Murphy:

You had mentioned that you’re actually working on some projects inside of corporations. What are you seeing there in terms of RSS changing the face of corporation communications, and how employees may gather information about the master organization?

J.B. Holston:

Right. So any kind of knowledge worker, and more and more employees are knowledge workers, increasingly needs to track a much broader range of information than they use to. And some of the roles of the corporation for which that’s true are pretty straightforward. If you think about it, for example, the corporate communication’s function within their organization, within a Fortune 100 enterprise, it’s really for those folks now to track a much broader range of sources of information that talk about their company, about their brand, whatever. The obvious example that’s given is, you know, if someone on a Friday night blogs something negative about one of you products, you wanna know that right away. Because the way the world works today, if it took until Monday at noon for your PR firm to get you the fax copy of the clipping service, which if they happen to catch this all, but which included that blog reference, 60 hours is enough to kill a brand, the way the world works right now. So that’s an obvious case where you got a particular function within the organization where the folks need to track a whole lot of external content and RSS is just a very efficient and effective way to do that.

What’s interesting though, increasingly, companies are looking to use RSS as ways to communicate and collaborate internally, around internal content, to a much more extensive degree. Again, some of those examples are fairly obvious. Companies that are doing a lot of internal blogging, for example, or even companies where it’s only the CEO who blogs, you know, wanna ensure that all of their employees have a way to track that information effectively and efficiently. If they have wiki initiatives, or any kind of initiatives, they have different means of collaborating internally around content. But, typically, looking at RSS is the best way to distribute and get people to subscribe to all of that kind of content.

But other kind of applications within the enterprise are using RSS increasingly as well. If CRM applications like salesforce.com, for example, now export RSS and so you can keep track of information that that application is generating as a subscriber to a feed based on a particular parameter. And so what we’re seeing is that it’s moving from just employees within the organization, who need to track a lot of external information, to more and more employees for whom tracking a great deal of internal information is done most effectively around RSS. That’s kind of the big new way with respect to RSS with its come on over the last year.

Ted Murphy:

What about using RSS to gather information, competitive intelligence, what types of applications are you seeing there?

J.B. Holston:

Yeah. That’s been one of the biggest early factors in adoption of technologies like ours within the corporation. The corporate communication function is a good example, but sales and marketing is another one.

I’ll give you a personal example. I have a keyword search feed set up for NewsGator, as well as for our top four, five competitors, whose names I won’t bother to tell ya. I’ve got keyword search feeds set up for each one of those. And, essentially, what those feeds do is they’re going out and tracking any case in which our company, or any of our competitors, are mentioned. It may be out of blogs. It may be out of SEC filings. It may be in mainstream media. It can be anywhere really. And that content, whenever that mention occurs, the content with that mention in it is sent to me. And I set my NewsGator account up so that some of that shows up on my mobile phone. Some of it shows up via our enterprise server here in Microsoft Outlook. Some of it shows up on my Macintosh at home on NetNewsWire. And I can determine which of those things show up where. And the cool thing about the way our system works then is that, you know, wherever I happen to read that content, whatever I do with it, the system knows that. So if I delete something at home, on the Macintosh, when I open up my phone and check on what’s new later, the system knows that I’ve already deleted content when I was on the Mac. That’s a pretty cool thing.

So that’s an example of competitive intelligence tracking via RSS. It’s one of the really powerful uses on the enterprise front of the application currently. One of our folks, internally, was arguing that she probably saves six hours a day of her time not now having to do all that kind of tracking for other folks internally. ‘Cause we can all do it directly on our own.

Ted Murphy:

What about search engine marketing? I mean, obviously, all of this content is now out there and it’s a lot more easily indexable than it ever was before. What types of applications are you seeing with people using this to increase organic search?

J.B. Holston:

Well, it’s a great question. The short answer is that people are trying to figure that out right now. All of this new content is being indexed through different means today than it used to be. So you have search engines like Technorati, which didn’t exist four years ago, which now have tremendous traffic as the place, or a place, people are using to find blog content, in their case, ‘cause that’s what they’re tracking.

On our side, for example, we’re indexing over a million feeds real-time. And all of our searches run against the content in those feeds. So, from a marketing point of view, from a search engine marketing point of view, the work is just starting with respect to the best ways to talk through those new indexes. From a marketer’s perspective, companies like FeedBurner, for example, are working to insert ads in posts that go into RSS feeds. So the windows RSS feeds show up in readers like ours, or are indexed by us, the ad goes along with it. So you’re seeing new mechanisms like that being created to take advantage of these new indexes that are being created alongside the traditional search engine folks.

Ted Murphy:

What are the top three things that you think marketers should know about RSS?

J.B. Holston:

I think the main three things are, it’s going to be one thing, but I’ll pretend it’s three.

(Laughter)

J.B. Holston:

The primary thing, I think, to understand is if you have an online site of any sort, right, no matter what your brand is, no matter what it is that you’re marketing, you’ve gotta have an RSS strategy. You need to have a syndication strategy. And by that I mean, you know, you really have to think about whatever your content you wanna be offering to your constituents so that they can subscribe to that content. Because your competitors are doing it if you’re not doing it. And so the first thing to understand is, this is not just an interesting phenomenon. It’s a wave, and you need to be on top of that wave. So make sure you’ve got a strategy for syndication of your content currently.

Secondly, more and more of the audience, more and more of the folks that you wanna talk to are consuming content by RSS. They’re subscribing to content via RSS. And so part of your RSS strategy, or syndication strategy, needs to be about how you take advantage of the fact that reading pattern subscription, that the folks are changing from a search paradigm, or from a chase the content paradigm, to a subscribe paradigm. And you need to make sure that if that’s where your audience has gone that you’re in front of them, over there as well. You do that partly by making sure you’ve got your own RSS based content. But also partly by making sure that you’ve got ways to reach out through those readers, these new channels, from a marketing point of view.

And I guess just to wrap that up, the third thing, which is actually just the first thing restated, is that it’s only going to become more popular going forward. So Microsoft is embedding RSS reading in Vista in Office 12. The general, that at Microsoft, is that, you know, whenever anyone turns on their browser there’s gonna be a little icon, a little orange icon, up at the top, which is the RSS icon. And if it flashes it means that that site that your visiting has RSS feeds. And you can click on it. And you can subscribe through NewsGator, NetNews, or Speed Demon, of course. But you can click on it and subscribe. But if your site doesn’t make that little icon flash, right, you may look dead to consumers in a year or two.

So it’s a really fundamental phenomenon. It’s also not terribly expensive, one to exploit. It’s very easy to add RSS to whatever it is that you’re doing in HTML right now. And there are lots of ways to get that down, lots of readers, etc. So while it’s a big game changing technology, it’s not an expensive technology to adopt.

Ted Murphy:

And I think that’s probably one of the reasons it’s caught on so fast.

J.B. Holston:

That’s exactly right. I mean, If you think about a phenomena like PointCast, a decade ago, that was a syndication model too. But it was all proprietary. There was a proprietary client. There was proprietary code at the publisher end. And it was a real bandwidth hog in a world where there wasn’t a lot of bandwidth to go around. A totally different universe right now. You’ve got this open protocol, called RSS, that is extremely simple. And a lot of easy way for folks to subscribe to that is through products like ours, etc. And, so it’s a very nice virtuous circle between the provision of content in RSS, which is very easy and cheap, and cheerful to do. And consumption of that content through products like ours, which is also now quite easy and simple to do.

Ted Murphy:

Well J.B., it’s been a pleasure having you on the show today. And for all of our listeners who want more information on NewsGator, you can go to newsgator.com. Hopefully we can have you again on the show in the future.

J.B. Holston:

Great. I look forward to that Ted. Thanks for the time.

Ted Murphy:

Thank you.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

Marketing Resources
Download Top Ten Things to Know About RSS(PDF - 669.9KB)

Listen to the RSS Defined podcast.

Contact MindComet about creating a personalized brand experience through RSS.

Subscribe to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast in iTunes.

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RSS, NewsGator, feeds, syndication, blogging, podcasting