RSS and meeting marketing
Chris Hosford and I have been having an interesting e-mail exchange about his post wondering whether RSS (really simple syndication) might not be the next best thing in meeting marketing. I think it has the potential to be, but we’re nowhere near ready for an RSS revolution. How do I know? I can hear you all yawning and practically see your eyes glazing over. What the heck is she talking about? (Wikipedia RSS entry here—it’s a good explanation of what RSS is and how it works. Kevin Holland also has a succinct explanation on the XtremeASAE Blog).
And I can talk all day long about how I can’t imagine life without my news reader and its constantly updated feeds to the 100 or so blogs and other sites I monitor daily (or try to, anyway). All you need is an RSS feed on your conference site, and potential attendees who have news readers (I highly recommend Bloglines, which is where I keep most of my feeds). If you have those two elements, then you have the ability to update your attendees in real time on what’s going on with your event.
But chances are, you don’t have either, at least, not yet. People are just starting to understand the value of blogging their meetings–and since most blog providers include an RSS feed in the package, I’m hoping that RSS may one day soon leach into the mainstream.
Then again, it’s going on three years now I’ve been hammering our tech guys to set up an RSS feed for our Web sites and it hasn’t happened yet—though they promise it’s coming soon. I can only imagine how long it would take to get through an association’s committee for approval, much less implementation, much less adoption by potential attendees. My guess is that by the time that happens, the RSS train will have left the station and we’ll have something even cooler that’ll take another huge amount of time to go mainstream.
*sigh*
Related Topics: Marketing, Technology
July 20th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
As a technologist in the hospitality industry, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to define and explain the benefits of RSS. I’ve found that the only thing that seems to turn the light bulb on is “now you can put the content of any web site you want on My Yahoo!”
I think that this resistance to (or at least the struggle to help folks understand) RSS, blogging, etc. is the addition of yet another piece of software, web site, or otherwise, to an already overwhelming computing toolset. So far, I’ve tried to introduce Bloglines, FeedDemon, you name it, to people with little success. But, the fact that you can use RSS technology to add news and updates to tools that may already be used on a daily basis (e.g. My Yahoo!) makes it relatively painless. Newsgator and similar apps also work, since they integrate directly into Outlook and package RSS into the easy-to-understand e-mail paradigm.
And, once your users understand - and hopefully, demand - an RSS feed, your tech guys are sure to oblige.
July 21st, 2005 at 9:48 am
Don’t stop evangelizing - It takes time. While RSS is easy for the technically competent, it’s not easy enough for everyone else. All it will take is one ‘early’ (and I use the term loosely) adopter and the rest will follow.
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