Really Simple Syndication RSS and Public Relations PR and Online Brand Perception

October 29th 2005

Branding has been called the most powerful idea in business, yet few companies consciously take control of their brand and create it. Your brand is formed by the visual, emotional, rational, and cultural image associated with your company or product.  Now that so many people are reading news and researching products and services online, their first point of contact with your brand is most likely to be online.

Brand perception online has been linked to search engine visibility. Studies such as the IAB research shows that searchers regard companies that are placed on page one in the search engines as the major players in the field.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology that allows you to share your headlines and other web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for your site. RSS leverages the Web's most valuable asset, content.   It makes it easy to display high-quality relevant news on your site, and syndicate this news and content.

You can use an RSS feed for a variety of content – product news, press releases, technical articles.  The list is endless.

The number of people reading RSS feeds is growing by leaps and bounds. Feed Burner reports that subscriptions to the feeds they manage are growing by one percent a day.  And the people reading feds are the ones you want to reach – they’re opinion leaders and early adopters.

RSS is the perfect way to meet the needs expressed by consumers in the recent Ponemon Institute study. Over 80 percent of respondents said they want to be updated on news and offers from companies if it is relevant to them and 64 percent said they’d trust the marketer more if they were in control of how the message was delivered to them.

Spam pollution has made delivering your message via email a challenge. The world is fast moving from a push-based information delivery (where you send information via emails) to a pull-based information delivery (where the subscriber accesses your information as and when he/she wants it.)

RSS news feeds offer your visitors a way to get relevant information in a way they control. They can subscribe anonymously and judge whether your content is relevant to them. They can unsubscribe at will, without any problems and delays. There's no spam. No lost deliveries.

RSS feeds give you an edge over your competitors who are slow in adopting this hot new technology. We've all book marked hundreds of websites – and then forgotten to go back to them. With an RSS feed every time new content goes up on your site, visitors who have subscribed to the feed are alerted and enticed back to the site to read the new content.

Feeds Boost Your Search Visibility

The purpose of a feed is to deliver content and news to your public.  So by its very nature a feed has constantly updated content. It’s focused on a narrow subject matter (your business/industry) so it tends to be keyword rich. This gets the attention of the search engines and they index your feed more often. When your feed is picked up and used by other sites it creates links back to your site, which also increases your search engine visibility.

By writing news update about your business/cause/idea/industry for your feed you naturally generate a wide array of keywords and phrases about that subject.  The search engines index these keywords in your feed and within a few months you’ll find you’re getting page-one search results on many terms relevant to your business.

Searchers generally do a series of searches, narrowing down their focus on keywords as they go.  If your website shows up on page one in every search they do it builds brand awareness and value.

BTI Communications, Limited is a privately held company in the business telephony space. In August 2004, when Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones became such a hot item, BTI was faced with new competitors with deep marketing budgets. They had no online visibility at all and had to make their presence known fast on a tight budget.

BTI started a blog called VOIP Insights, http://blog/btigroup.com using the Myst Technologies Blogsite platform.  One of the features of this platform is that it utilizes RSS feeds to the hilt. Here are just some of the page-one positions BTI now has in Google.  As a result the traffic to their corporate website is up by over 70 percent.

#1 Voip vs traditional phone system

#1 VoIP solution provider

#2  VoIP small business

#2 VoIP architecture

#5 VoIP phone equipment

#6 VoIP benefits

#7 VoIP Small Business costs

Search results like these depend to a large degree on making your feed known. PRESSfeed has a great list of sites where you should register your feed www.press-feed.com

The BTI RSS feed on Voice Over IP for Small Business was picked up by an Hispanic website about VoIP.  A reporter from Hispanic Business Magazine, looking for information for an article, saw this feed and called BTI for an interview.

BTI did not even know there was a magazine called Hispanic Business, let alone that they were doing an article on VoIP for small business. That’s the power of RSS.

“Lockergnome.com, one of the most popular tech sites on the Web today, used to distribute more than 400.000 e-mail newsletters weekly,” says Rok Hrastnik, author Unleash the Marketing Power of RSS and editor of www.marketingstudies.net

”Today, they have 5 times more RSS subscribers than e-mail subscribers and their clickthrough rates (the % of people that clicked on a link in the message received) are 500% greater than their e-mail clickthrough rates, which means that now more people actually read their content and respond to it.”

Success in online marketing depends on being found in the search engines, getting qualified traffic to your site, marketing to the visitors who have been to your site, delivering relevant messages to them in a way they can control to build trust and relationships.

RSS feeds do it all.

By Sally Falkow
Sally is a Marketing Specialist Contact Sally

Keywords and misspellings:  sindication reely rely