Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Yes, in my experience the typical small bussiness owner is inept when dealing with rss. Things will get better tho.

Whoops, missing a "K" in our URL.

One of our editors was at this SXSW panel and she wrote: "Somebody else [on the panel] floats the idea that not all readers even know what an RSS feed is, so you might not want to call it that. Instead you might say, 'Get news from this site without going to this site,' which is, to my mind, a simple way of putting it while further muddying the concept. If I explained RSS feeds this way to my mom, she’d say, 'So I have to go to another site instead? What’s the point?' And I’d then say, 'Well, it would be a sort of central clearinghouse of information about all the sites you like,' and she’d say, 'Do you want me to mail you those socks you left under the couch when you visited at Christmas?'"

I'd prefer to skin this a different way. I think RSS should not try and fight for the limelight in the media - infact just the opposite. Web servces/applications need to use RSS in the most transparent way to deliver services (calender, weather, news what ever) to users without them even knowing what RSS is or that the RSS feed was even used.
The 'weakest' link' in this path to adoption is the tradtional RSS reader. The RSS button looks overwhelming enough to the average user and even if/when one has the courage to click on it, then they need to learn how to use yet another application to comsume the feed.
MyYahoo on the other had has been relatively successful becasue they sheild the user from the mumbo jumbo by simply saying "add content'.

I am a huge fan of RSS, I get most of my business information these days through feeds from news sites and blogs. Unfortunately, it is not well used or understood by the general public, so unless you have a tech-savvy audience marketing with RSS will not get you very far.

RSS needs to become more mainstream, to achieve this there needs to be more exposure in the mainstream press. RSS is far superior to email but until it has wide acceptance and use it will be a secondary marketing tool