“I just want my stuff”: RSS feeds & You

I’m a relative newcomer to the world of RSS readers and am now wondering how I ever lived without my Google reader or Bloglines page. Once upon a time I would manually check each blog I liked and found that I was missing content if I didn’t stop by each page frequently enough. Needless to say, I could only read so much and gave up on some that were too time-consuming. Now I am reading blogs and topical news items at my convenience – and have expanded my repertoire to boot.

I’ve mentioned my newfound love of RSS feeds to friends who have looked at me like I am crazy. (I don’t run with a crowd of early adopters.) Now, I’ll just forward them this column, which excellently explains RSS feeds.

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. J.B. Holston, the CEO of NewsGator, succinctly explains why we should love this technology: “RSS brings the Web to you, rather than you having to go out and find things on the Web.”

Holston uses his RSS feed as a customized newspaper, which I have begun to do as well. It won’t be long before that behavior is commonplace. That means that we’ll be getting the information we want, when and where we want it. And thus a marketing challenge is born – or an opportunity, depending on your perspective.

I see ROI measurement increasing in future campaigns. Thanks to Technorati, it’s quite easy to track when an ad campaign is discussed in the blogosphere. So, now I wonder, how to reach an audience that has set limits to what it wants to read? While a marketer has the opportunity to reach a captive audience, the trick will be to reach folks who don’t know they want what you’re offering. Talk about a chance to put your brain to work to think of clever ways to circumvent the filtering process and incorporate your messages into new channels and feeds! How can that be done? Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks to Micro Persuasion for the Yahoo! link.