Building Relationships and Trust Through RSS

Over at MarketingProfs, Eric Frenchman has a good overview of RSS and its potential for marketers:

RSS is simply another form of communication that makes it very easy to push out information to clients. Plus, it is very simple to create, and also simple for someone to opt in to receive it. Since the feeds themselves are not personalized, you theoretically don’t have the one-to-one communication power of email, but there is nothing simpler than signing up for a feed and gaining access to the feed.

Like all opt-in tactics, RSS represents tremendous opportunity and responsibility. Each subscriber is a captive and interested audience member who chose your feed for its relevance and potential. Your feed’s content, frequency and quality must meet those expectations. If it breaks that bond – with lousy content, unexpected marketing messages or other surprises – you’ve lost that opportunity. Audience trust can be lost in many ways, but opt-in tactics such as RSS require extra care.

As Frenchman points out, we’re still in the very early stages of RSS adoption and penetration. Most organizations view RSS as a techie tool and most consumers don’t yet understand it. Despite these trends, there’s very little downside to adding feeds to your site now. They are inexpensive to create and require no ongoing maintenance. You’ll attract those early RSS adopters and hopefully hook them on your quality content. When news readers become more mainstream (likely to happen when Internet Explorer 7 and other tools hit the market), you’ll be ready – and users will find you.