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Brent Hill is Vice President, Advertising Services, at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider, where he cultivates relationships with both traditional and interactive marketing agencies and corporate marketers. Prior to FeedBurner, Brent was President of Classic Kids, a national children's portrait studio and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at OCA Ventures. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of feed advertising and his insights have been published in a variety of publications including Advertising Age, Adotas and DMNews

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The Future of Feeding: Why the RSS Frenzy Isn’t Just for Media Anymore

Written on
Sep 27, 2006 
Author
Brent Hill  |
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The Future of Feeding: Why the RSS Frenzy Isn’t Just for Media Anymore

IBM

Big Blue takes its feed publishing seriously. With feeds available by industry, product line, and country, IBM makes a staggering 300+ feeds (including 14 podcasts) available to current and prospective customers. A database manager working in the aerospace industry in the U.S. might find as many as 5-10 feeds of interest.

Industry – Technology
URL – http://www.ibm.com
Number of feeds – 300+

Vanguard

Mutual fund industry leader Vanguard provides subscribers with news on investing, personal finance, the economy…and of course, mutual funds. Recent posts covered legislative changes to pension regulations, asset allocation, and announcements about fund performance and new fund launches.

Industry – Financial Services
URL – http://flagship.vanguard.com
Number of feeds – 4

Zales

Shopping for a gift for that special someone? Jewelry retailer Zales makes a “Promotions” feed available to shoppers. Recent posts have included a price reduction on clearance merchandise, a sale on a specific pendant, and a Labor Day sale event. Links included in the posts take a user back to the same post on the corporate blog, from which a user can connect directly to product detail pages via a “Buy Now” link.

Industry – Retail
URL – http://www.zales.com
Number of feeds – 2

Accenture

Consulting firm giant Accenture uses blogs as a recruiting tool, allowing personnel at different levels in the firm to author blogs about their projects, careers, and work life at the firm. The firm also makes four topical feeds available — categories include partnerships, infrastructure, technology, and a podcast series on information management.

Industry – Professional Services
URL – http://www.accenture.com
Number of feeds – 11

Castrol

Motor oil marketing gets a new twist with feeds offered by Castrol. The company’s Formula 1 and sponsorships in other racing series comes to life in a series of podcasts that provide an insider’s view from the track.

Industry – Consumer Products
URL – http://www.castrol.com
Number of feeds – 8

Boeing

Boeing’s VP of Marketing for Commercial Airplanes, Randy Baseler, writes an insightful corporate blog available at the Boeing web site. A recent post described the maiden test flight for a new “Large Cargo Freighter”, and included a link to video footage of the flight. Randy also talked candidly about his work experience with new CEO Scott Carson, and posted an interview with Joe Sutter, the “father of the 747.” Baseler’s posts are frequent enough to retain his audience, and interesting and entertaining to outsiders who follow the airline industry.

Industry – Transportation
URL – http://www.boeing.com/randy
Number of feeds – 1

Stanford University

Who would have thought we’d see the day when a leading educational institution includes an iTunes link on their homepage? But that’s the case at Stanford, where a series of topical podcasts are available for download. The “Heard on Campus” podcast had a total of 215 tracks, while “Sports” had 79 and “Faculty Lectures” included 118. Can the days of podcast lectures be far away?

Industry – Education
URL – http://itunes.stanford.edu/rss/
Number of feeds – 26 (all podcasts)

The Future of Feed Promotion

Media companies already have a large audience for their syndicated content — they operate destination Web sites, and stand to gain new feed subscribers every day based on availability of feeds and user preferences. Companies in other industries, meanwhile, will need to marry their content efforts with separate marketing efforts designed to gain subscribers. As the subscriber base grows — something feed publishers can track by using a feed management service — and as marketers apply the same analytics to the RSS communication channel that they do to email and other channels, it will become increasingly clear that feed subscribers are an important asset.

We’re already seeing savvy marketers add a new message to their offline marketing campaigns — not only are they using their typical messaging to promote their products and services with interactive advertising, but they’re also mixing in ads designed to do nothing but gain subscribers. The war for new and repeat site visitors, organic search rankings, and email registrations will have a new front — the battle for feed subscribers.





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