RSS Gets Poor Marks from Marketers Asked by Jupiter

Just a few minutes ago I read on Marketing Vox News

"RSS Gets Poor Marks from Marketers (21 Mar 2005) A new survey by Jupiter revealed widespread skepticism as to the usefulness of RSS feeds among marketers, according to DM News. That skepticism may be well founded given that a recent BlogAds study showed that even the early adopters that tend to read blogs use RSS less frequently than many supposed ..."

and I made a note to look up at Jupiter how DM News came to this story ...

But Bill Flitter from Pheedo has "offered his opinion" on Jupiter's findings already:

JupiterResearch: RSS Adoption Not Really Simple In RSS Advertising

Bill writes:
"1. Insert "email marketing" where they mention RSS and go back 10-12 years. I am sure JupiterResearch did a similar survey asking marketers about including interactive advertising and email in their marketing plans. A very small universe of marketers were trying it (maybe 6%). I remember trying to convince my CEO to test email. I had to build models and justify the cost. We ended up spending about 80% of our budget with email and email newsletters. Yes, RSS adoption is small. Email did not have billions of people using it on day one either.

2. "However, RSS publishing still faces many hurdles: measuring traffic at least on a subscriber level is nearly impossible to do, which will relegate RSS to a broadcast marketing tool in the near term." Pheedo has solved these issues and will continue to innovate.

3. "RSS is not well suited to promotional-offer-oriented content because it does not offer the targeting and personalization capabilities of e-mail, the report said." This statement is simple not true. In many cases, we have cut our customer's cost-per-acquisition by over 50%.

Bottom line is I am not surprised by the survey results nor worried. RSS will continue to grow. Consumers will adopt it. It will take time but email adoption was not built in a day either. "

and finally he point an earlier entry (from March 6, 2005) at Pheedo:

"Read A sound case to include Blogs and RSS in your marketing mix to understand how RSS can positively impact your marketing efforts."


Yes, I do fully agree with Bill and suggest to all my clients to run faster to integrate RSS into their market communication, to get this extra bit of competitive advantage ... if you client learn from you the benefits of a new tool and/or service!