Using RSS on Your Website

Tightened marketing budgets. Increased scrutiny of cost per conversion. So much attention to marketing spend. Imagine if there were a cheap, practically free, way to reach potential customers.

Yes, here it comes: RSS. If you work in high tech, there’s no way you haven’t heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Version 0.9 was created at Netscape in 1999 (Did Netscape also create the 0.9 version number convention that seems so commonplace today?). But I’d say RSS didn’t really take off in a big way until blogging became hot, which was when, 2003 or 2004?

Which brings me back to the point of this article. RSS is built into blogs, so you get it for free. But RSS is not necessarily built into your Website. And if you are not using it there, you are missing out on a great syndication tool.

You see, you can have all the press releases on your site syndicated via RSS. And you don’t have to stop there. At my current company, we also re-syndicate articles about us, new online demos, new collateral. Anything that can be linked to, given a title and a short description can be syndicated.

All you need to do is put an XML file on your site that contains the title, description and link to new content. Jeremiah Patton has a good summary on how to do it here. Then when you look at your page in Firefox, a little orange RSS icon will appear to the right in the Location Bar. Adding new content just requires someone to edit the file and prepend your new content.

Now a few important things can happen. First, users who want to keep track of things (e.g. your company, your product) can click on the RSS icon and subscribe to your content. Blog search engines (yes, a bit of a misnomer here) will find your content. You can also “ping” content aggregators to let them know when you have new content. A really easy way to do this is via the mother of all ping servers Ping-o-Matic.

There’s more detail we could go into, but that’s basically it. Try this out and see what it does for your content. Do you get more visitors? Exposure in places you haven’t been seen before?

I want to add a few interesting tidbits I heard last night at a blogging panel put on by SVAMA. Michael Sippey from SixApart (TypePad, MoveableType et al) made the point that the 20-30 year old demographic is not big on e-mail, and that blogs and RSS (along with IM) are a much better way to reach them. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club recounted a story from his wife, where syndication of a product release (via Twitter, not RSS, but the same idea) brought in 8 deals where the conventional newswire brought in 0.

We’ll be getting into more detail on RSS, but get started and at least create a feed for your press releases. Hey, it’s free. I will say that, while the protocol may be simple, creating a feed for an existing Web site and seamlessly making it part of your marketing mix is not quite as simple as it could be.  Something we’ll dig into in future posts.

Using Podcasts

Do you have anything interesting to say? Well, do you?

If the answer is ‘no,’ then stop reading. Podcasting would definitely be a bad idea. If, on the other hand, you or someone in your company has interesting things to talk about, then you should consider podcasting.

Podcasts are nothing more than digital recordings. As I had surmised, and Wikipedia confirms, “The term ‘podcast’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘iPod‘ and ‘broadcast.’”So we have Apple (as usual) to thank for making podcasts and podcasting sound cool.

The nice thing about podcasting is that it’s very easy to do. There are any number of applications than you can use to create a podcast. My favorite is Audacity, which is free. I’m not going to go through the blow by blow of how to make a podcast here. For that, I recommend Make Your First Podcast and How to Create Your First Podcast.

Then, just pick a topic and a format. Have your CEO talk about his vision. Have your CTO give a tech talk (keep it brief, though, okay). A great way to tout your customer successes is to interview a customer. Send them a list of questions and then call them up and record it. Once you or one of your people figures out the mechanics, podcasts are very easy to make, and good for people that are better at speaking than writing.

The nice thing about podcasts is that they are so versatile. Put them on your Web site. Send them out to your salespeople. There are even sites where you can register your podcast for wider syndication like Podcastdirectory.com and Podcast.net.

There are some drawbacks to podcasting. They are hard to search and may not serve your SEO purposes. Some people also record long podcasts that people find off-putting, either because they take too long to download or are - how can I put this - boring. I would suggest giving your podcasts descriptive titles that also work for SEO (like, Five Tips for Architecting an SOA) and a description that will ride along in the RSS feed. Also, I like to keep them short and sweet - five to ten minutes, broken up into multiple podcasts if I have more to cover.

And in case you are feeling less than hip working at that neural-network natural language field-programmable gate array startup, you can even get your podcast on iTunes. Keeping company with this all time favorite I pulled up in a they-can’t-possibly-have-anything-on-this search: ProM - Framework for Process Mining - Process Mining research is concerned with the extraction of knowledge about a (business) process from its process execution logs. I’m going to have to download that one for my next workout…

Hey, CMO. What Do You Do All Day?

Right, then. How about getting to the point on this 2.0 stuff, you say. Quite right. Let’s get on with it.

If we’re going to be looking into some of the more current techniques in marketing, I suppose we should think like a product manager. What are our needs as marketing executives? What do we spend our time doing? Can any of this new stuff let me do it better/faster/cheaper?

So, in no particular order, here are some of the things that a marketing department must do for their company:

• Generate leads
• Create awareness
• Evangelize
• Educate
• Create buzz
• Do market research
• Do competitive research
• Train Sales
• Work with press and analysts
• and many, many others

Entire books have been written on each of these topics, so we won’t get into details here. But think of this as a litmus test for some of our new techniques and technologies. Remember back in my first entry, the VP of Marketing who said he didn’t read blogs, and neither did his customers? Well, maybe he didn’t, and maybe his customers weren’t daily blog consumers. But let’s take a look at how a blog might help out here with some of these daily tasks.

Blogs rank very highly in search engines because they are content rich and link promiscuously. So though your customer might not have a Google Reader account, he certainly uses Google. And when he is looking for tips on how he can create a wireless mesh network for his lake house, you’d better have a blog on the topic. Because if your competitor does, that’s where he’s going to go. Kiss that lead goodbye.

Seriously, though, take the next three: create awareness, evangelize, educate. Your going to tell me that well-written blog entries aimed at your target audience won’t accomplish these? Really?

Creating buzz? That’s what blogging is all about, maybe to a fault. But there’s nothing like the fast-paced and linked-together blogosphere for zapping buzz around the world.

Continuing on. Market research. Many analysts, especially smaller ones, have active blogs. That’s free research. Want to know what your competitor is thinking - read the CEO’s blog. Better yet - read their tech support blog (”Sorry for all the inconvenience those flaming batteries cause y’all. We think we can have a fix by next quarter or so…).

Have a great insight or something you want to pass along to the salesforce (”Our batteries may weigh a ton, but they don’t catch fire. Go for their jugular…”). A blog by a product manager is a great sales education tool, and longer lived than an e-mail bulletin.

And lastly, blogs are great for press and analysts. We’ll be getting into more detail in a later post, but one thing I learned is that trade reporters look at blogs for article ideas. Their inboxes are jammed and their voice mailboxes are full, but that’s not where they go when they have writer’s block compounded by a deadline. They start poking around Technorati.

So you see, you just can’t get away from blogs. They touch every aspect of your job.

CMO 2.0

If you are reading this, I commend you. You are a marketing professional that at least is looking to keep up with the pack. You are a far different animal than those that caused me to start writing this in the first place.

But first, a disclaimer. I am not a marketing guru. Nor a direct marketing god, a golden-tongued sloganeer, or a clickstream analytics wonk. I am merely a marketing VP at a Silicon Valley software company, who has watched huge changes happen in the way customers buy, and therefore in the way we must market to them.

So it was only after repeatedly hearing comments like these below from my marketing colleagues did I realize that a lot of people just weren’t getting it, and I needed to at least try to smack some sense into them (pen is mightier than sword, etc.). Here are some actual comments:

“I don’t really read blogs. My customers don’t either.”
“I’m thinking about creating a profile on MySpace to make us more Web 2.0. Maybe Friendster, too.”
“RSS? No, I don’t think we have that.”
“Del.icio.us? No.”
“Digg? No.”

Anyway, you’ve got the picture. The thing is, you can’t be in marketing these days and not at least know about this stuff. And don’t be a poser, either. Don’t tell me that you sell disk drives and your Web 2.0 strategy is to create your own MySpace page (though I’m willing to listen.).

The other thing is that this stuff really is pretty easy. Yes, there are tricks. And yes, there are people who are masters. But to deny this stuff is futile.

So, we’re going to take a look at some marketing tactics that you can use. And where I’m not the expert, I’m going to find one and shamelessly pump them for information.

Oh, and about the name CMO 2.0. There have been many online debates about what is and isn’t “2.0.” We will not be having one here. Like any true marketing person would say, I picked it because it sounds cool and I like it.