PR Week. September 2005. RSS
Fish around a website, particularly one
in the technology sector, and sooner or later, chances are you'll
come across a small Orange button labelled 'RSS'. What the initials
stand for has been a source of some debate, but most commentators
have now settled on the term: 'Really Simple Syndication'.
RSS is a way for a web user to filter the vast amount of information
on the web and select the sites, or the parts of sites, that he
(or she) wants to get regular updates from, without having to
visit each of those sites in turn every time they want the update.
Headline updates are sent automatically to the user's RSS News
Reader, a software programme that enables the users to see the
RSS feeds, and click through to the stories that interest him.
Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, have News
Reader functionality built in, and Microsoft is building RSS functionality,
under the name 'Web Feeds' into the next version of Internet Explorer.
So much for the theory, how does it work in practice? Well, say
you're a Chelsea fan, also interested in rap music and orienteering,
and there are three or four sites you regularly go to for information
on each. Perhaps the BBC sport pages, Guardian Unlimited sport
pages and the official Chelsea FC website, for your fix of football
news. If each of those sites offered an RSS feed, you could add
it in to your RSS News Reader and get the news headlines from
each delivered into your reader each day. Do the same for the
rap and orienteering sites, plus any others you are interested
in, and you begin to see the power of RSS.
PR implications
But if RSS is potentially useful for anyone who uses the web,
clearly, it has significant implications for PR practitioners
and for journalists. For the PR, RSS offers another channel through
which to distribute corporate news, or at least make it available,
while for journalists, it enables them to select the type of news
they want to receive, rather than having their inboxes bombarded
with releases, some relevant, some not. So a journalist interested
in mobile technology, for example, might subscribe to Microsoft's
mobile solutions feed, but not to its SQL Server feed.
Not surprisingly, many journalists, particularly those in the
technology sector, are enthusiastic about RSS. Nooked, an Irish
company which, since the start of the year, has developed RSS
feeds for more than 2,000 PR agencies and client companies, has
collected a number of RSS endorsements on its website, which tell
their own story.
Take this from technology journalist Dan Gillmor:
"Sending marketing messages and newsletters via email has
become a fool's errand; the obvious work-around is RSS. I'd much
prefer to get public relations materials this way."
This, from PR guru Phil Gomes:
"The day will come when the online location of a company's
RSS feed will be just as much of a PR pro's email signature file
as his or her email address, home page and phone number."
Or this from Microsoft technology evangelist (that's a job title,
in case you were wondering) Robert Scoble:
"If you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed
today you should be fired."
In control
Charles Arthur, a freelance journalist specialising in technology
and science, has been using RSS for the past 18 months, and says
he finds it invaluable.
"It means I don't have to bother visiting the individual
sites" he says. "I can put all the news I want to keep
a watch on in a single program, rather than remembering which
sites to visit, then waiting for them to load."
Arthur estimates that in his time as Technology Editor on The
Independent, he received around 200 press releases a day via email,
around one third of which were blocked before they reached his
in-box.
"RSS just puts the journalist in control of what he sees"
says Arthur.
In an ideal world, then, PR agencies and in-house PR departments
would be busy developing multi-stream RSS feeds. One for each
client as a bare minimum, then feeds within feeds to enable journalists
to select the subject areas they were interested in. At the time
of writing, however, there are very few examples of such sophistication
in RSS. Probably the best example is the BBC, which has a feed
for news, and then 18 separate feeds for UK News, World News,
Technology News etc. The Sports section is even more impressive,
where users can drill down, not only to feeds on individual sports,
but on individual football leagues, and even teams within each
league.
The Beeb launched its first four Beta RSS news feeds in December
2002, adding additional news feeds one year later and sports feeds
in January 2004.
"RSS is part of our public service remit to make our content
available in as many ways as we can, so we have always been heavily
into syndication" says BBC syndication product manager, Naomi
Davis. "It works very well with the way our content is structured
and makes it very easy for us to distribute our content."
In the PR world, those agencies which are embracing RSS admit
that it is early days. Bruce Marshall Associates, an agency with
offices in London and Wakefield, has developed separate RSS feeds
for each of its clients on its site (www.brucemarshallassociates.com)
"Web feeds are an obvious replacement for e-zines in the
long-term, but for news releases, the technology is not quite
there yet to make it work the way the journalists want it"
says Bruce Marshall partner, Stuart Bruce. "Ideally, journalists
would be able to create their own customised feeds so that they
would only get information on the topics of interest to them.
That's not easy at the moment, but we are looking to develop this
type of customised feed as soon as possible."
Another agency which has taken the RSS plunge is Axicom, which
launched RSS feeds for its clients' releases on its site (www.axicom.com)
at the beginning of the year, after discussion with journalists,
particularly those in the blogging community, which has a natural
affinity with RSS.
Axicom CEO Julian tanner says the reaction from journalists has
been mixed.
"Some journalists see no value in it, others swear blind
it's the only way they want to receive communications from us"
he says. "The more technical they are, the more enthusiastically
they have responded to it."
At present, Axicom's feeds are limited to one for all clients
globally, or one for the clients in each of the six countries
in which the agency operates. Ultimately, however, Tanner says
he would like to take it further.
"As we go through the next quarter, it's important that we
make feeds available for each client, and also that we get the
segmentation right in terms of the markets we address" he
says.
Axicom's RSS feeds, like many out there, are powered by Nooked,
the Irish technology start-up formed at the beginning of the year,
which is riding the wave of the current interest in RSS. Nooked
CEO Fergus Burns says his client list has doubled in the last
four months, and estimates that the company has now created RSS
feeds for 60-70% of the PR Week Top 100 PR companies.
The technology, Burns believes, is moving into the mainstream,
fast. He says:
"As recently as January of this year, you would have said
RSS was the remit of geeks. Now, with the Google sidebar (which
gathers content via RSS feeds), Microsoft announcing its support,
and Yahoo embracing RSS all over the place, everyone has the potential
to consume it. By 2010, I believe anybody with an online presence
will have RSS."
Key to the development of RSS, Burns believes, is the blogging
community. Because of the number of blogs out there, the fanatical
following that some of them inspire, and the frequency with which
they are updated by their authors, there's a natural need for
a technology like RSS which can keep readers informed about updates.
At the same time, the bloggers themselves are emerging as a key
target audience for some companies, such is the influence they
wield. They are also, increasingly, demanding RSS feeds, and ignoring
those sites which don't provide them.
"There is this evolving market of what you might call the
Class A bloggers, people like Robert Scoburn" says Burns.
"They are just individual people, but what they are doing
amounts to word-of-mouth marketing, so companies are actively
looking to target communications at these people."
Axicom's Julian tanner has witnessed the same trend at work.
"We are starting to see this alternative channel of communications
emerging, where RSS feeds and blogs operate as an alternative
to the press release issued by the company and then written up
by the magazine, where the information does not touch the hands
of a proper editor or publisher" he says. "You have
some key bloggers like Guy Kewney (www.kewney.com) and Nigel Powell
(www.redferret.net) who have a lot of power because of the fact
their feeds are taken up by the key journalists in that sector.
It's probably the biggest change the PR industry has seen in 100
years."
Peer Media
This is the policy that PR agency network text 100 is adapting.
It puts RSS in the category of what it calls 'Peer Media' alongside
blogs, Podcasts and Wikis, and believes the rise of Peer Media
demands a wholesale change in the way corporations communicate
with their stakeholders.
"You can put RSS news feeds on company or agency sites, but
it's the wrong approach, because in doing so, you're still trying
to translate the push dynamic into the new way of working by putting
a filter on the news you push out" says Dr. Georg Kolb, Text
100 executive vice president, global consultancy and practices.
"If you want to make a difference, the best thing is to try
to engage directly with your audiences and understand what their
experience is and then offer them RSS feeds that speak directly
to this." And by this, Dr. Kolb is not talking about press
releases.
"I think companies will depart from this old press release
format altogether. These are polished marketing documents pushed
out in a controlled manner. Today's consumers want something different,
a more direct and authentic interaction with you. RSS is not just
another distribution channel, it's a conversational tool."
Of course, such a sea change is not going to happen overnight,
especially not if it involves the demise of the press release.
A Jupiter Research report published earlier this year found that
marketers' understanding of RSS was poor, and it's they, of course,
who control the PR budgets. Similarly, awareness of RSS is currently
low. A Nielsen/Netratings survey conducted in August among 1,000
regular blog readers found that 66% did not understand RSS and
had never heard of the technology, with a further 23% claiming
to understand it, but not use it.
Others worry that if you only give journalists what they say they
want, they never stumble across those nuggets they didn't even
know they were looking for. PR company Portfolio Communications
carried out a survey in July among 134 journalists on the usefulness
of different sources of information. Company web sites scored
highest, with 56.3% of respondents finding them 'Very Useful'
or 'Extremely Useful', while blogs came bottom with just 4.4%,
below online press centres (31.9%) and even exhibitions (20%).
"I think the results show that blogs are in their infancy
in the UK" says Portfolio managing director, Mark Westaby,
"though I'm sure that figure will be much higher if we run
the survey again in 18 months' time."
A question of timing
There's no doubt that RSS is far from being a must-have for PR
companies today. But there's little doubt either that this situation
is changing all the time. Tom Murphy, head of PR and community
affairs for Microsoft in Ireland, pioneered the use of RSS feeds
in his previous role at Cape Clear Software, which made them available
in January 2003. He believes RSS's time will come.
"It's inevitable that RSS will become part of the way that
every company will disseminate information" he says. "It's
just a question of timing. People always think these things will
happen overnight, but they always take longer than everyone thinks.
We are seeing it emerge strongly in the technology sector, particularly
in the US, but it's a push-pull thing. People need to want it
as much as companies want to provide it, but that will come. The
key driver is the fact that people everywhere are overwhelmed
with information and they need a way to cut through it to the
things that matter to them, and that's what RSS is all about."
<BOXOUT 1 NOOKED>
RSS for All
In the world of RSS, one name keeps cropping up: Nooked (www.nooked.com).
Nooked is the brainchild of affable self-confessed tecchie Fergus
Bruce, who formed the company in January 05, after 18 months development
work on the company's technology, that provides RSS feeds of varying
levels of sophistication, from a free Lite version, through Standard,
Professional and Enterprise versions, to any company that wants
them.
"I've worked in mark-up language technology all my working
life and I saw the benefits of RSS as soon as a I started using
it" says Burns. "I had seen the likes of Cisco and Cape
Clear adopting RSS for marketing and PR and it seemed to me a
very sensible application of the technology."
While it's perhaps to early to say that the rest is history, things
are certainly going well for the company, which by mid-September
boasted 2,000 clients, eager to get on board the RSS bandwagon.
"The technology sector has taken to it a lot quicker than
most others, but then you get people like Merck, a pharmaceutical
company, doing it, so it's by no means just a technology thing"
says Burns. "Then there's the BBC. It's mind-blowing what
they are doing."
Burns says he expects everyone with an online presence to be using
RSS by 2010. He says:
"There's still a lot of education going on and people trying
to get their heads round it but as an agency, you either embrace
all this or let another agency develop it and lose business to
them. That's the choice."
<BOXOUT 2>
RSS - The Agency View
Insight Public Relations, (www.insightmkt.com), which has offices
in Macclesfield and Heathrow, has been experimenting with RSS
for the past seven months. Ultimately, the agency plans to create
feeds for all its clients, and within this, feeds on particular
product areas within the client's business. Insight managing director
Chris Warham says the agency has learned a lot from the work done
so far.
"The key thing we have learned is that it's all very well
to try and create an RSS feed, but the management of it is-non
trivial" he says. "The client must have the time to
make sure it is up to date, and that the right information is
being targeted at individual feeds."
Warham believes the opportunities for companies are enormous.
He says:
"The beauty of it is that it is based round XML, so you can
do almost whatever you want. Once a large corporate entity recognises
that consumers of information want don't want tons of things that
are not relevant to them, they can use the RSS feeds to create
news and information feeds tailored to whatever level they choose.
As soon as they embrace what RSS is about, enormous no of things
they can do
Warham says that most of the agency's clients have taken an interest
in what it has done.
"As soon as you raise subject of RSS and blogs, clients are
extremely interested, even though very few of them have been asked
to provide it" he says.
But whatever the interest level from clients, Warham says he is
determined to drive it through.
"PR is all about understanding and awareness between clients
and the public" he says. "The communications world is
changing rapidly and we have to make sure that organisations embrace
the latest technologies. It's no different to putting a website
up 10 years ago."