According to a recent MarketingSherpa report, some 75 million business people in the U.S. and UK use RSS feeds to get information. “However,” says the Sherpa, “depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS.
“That’s right — roughly 50 million regular RSS users would say, Huh? if you asked them what RSS was.”
To find out how to get people to pick up your RSS feeds, read on.
Hat tip to Emergence Marketing for the link.
A few years ago, Bruce Springsteen sang of the agony of too much choice — and suggested a Luddite response — in the song “57 Channels (and Nothing On).” These days, as Little Judy points out on the Media Center blog, 57 channels ain’t nuttin’. We’re drowning in choice. MySpace alone is fast approaching 57 million channels (personal websites), each one contributing some microscopic piece of data to the online mediasphere.
“There’s so much entertainment to choose from,” writes Little Judy, “that once in a while I miss the days when my viewing options were Combat!, Daktari, Gilligan’s Island and a hockey game, and I listened to music on a transistor radio.” The proliferation of online sources just adds to the muddle.
Judy goes on to ask: How do we manage all this information?
In a word: filters. We’re becoming experts at filtering out information and honing our web searches. But in so doing, are we missing out?
What a big difference spending a little bit of time to truly communicate with customers can make. Seth Godin recently shared a real-world example of how lifeless much emai from a corporate service department can bel, and then shared a possible remedy to that far-too-widespread problem. It involves spending a few minutes to compose a simple note that sounds as though it comes from a human being — because it does. And that can make all the difference.
If you have any thoughts about my article on new media in the latest issue of CASE Currents, feel free to share your thoughts here.
I haven’t gotten my copy of the magazine yet, but I am assured it’s on the way.
Also, once the issue is online, I will post excerpts from it here.
Readers interested in science and technology — or the latest sci-tech news from my employer, the University of Missouri-Rolla — ought to take a look at Visions, UMR’s research blog, which debuts today. While this blog is brand new, the site has been around for 2 1/2 years. It began as a quarterly webzine focusing on UMR research and student scholarship. But last fall the UMR communications and marketing staff started planning to convert Visions to a more frequently updated blog site. On the Internet, quarterly publications just don’t cut it.
So, if you want to know what’s happening in the world of UMR research, be sure to add Visions to your blogroll or RSS feeds.
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