RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) are basically just headlines that customers subscribe to and monitor. If they see something tantalizing, they'll click on it and read the details on your customer portal.

But RSS adoption is currently struggling for adoption. Consider what a customer must go through today to subscribe to a RSS feed:

1. Customer notices RSS button on web page (or "XML" or "ATOM") and clicks on RSS button. A blob of incomprehensible XML appears in their web browser.
2. Customer copies the URL Address of the RSS feed onto their clipboard.
3. Customer changes application context and opens their RSS aggregator/new reader.
4. Customer clicks on "New feed".
5. Customer copies RSS URL Address.
6. Customer enters other relevant notes and meta data.
7. Customer clicks Save.

Despite these 7 steps, the benefits to using RSS far outweigh the pains for people who monitor the headlines of several web sites a day. But for the average person, these multiple clicks and actions are a usability barrier.

Recently, browser plug-ins have become available the detect when a RSS feed is available and will allow a customer to add a RSS feed in one-click; maybe prompting the customer to categorize the feed much like a "Favorites" bookmark gets cataloged today.

This feature is anticipated to be built into several next generation application, such as Internet Explorer browser, Outlook, and Firefox within the next 12 months; so within 4-6 years Marketers should expect a critical mass of customers to have the ability to easily aggregate a web site with a single click.

RSS readers will likely become a free commodity tool since the real money will be made in advertising and click-throughs. Expect Google and others to help businesses drive even more traffic to ad-bearing web sites with free plug-ins and utilities.

Writing an effective RSS headline is no different than writing an effective press release. The first measured "conversion" is simply a click on a headline, which must catch the customers eye with a tantalizing message.

As mentioned in a previous log entry, Marketers also have the ability to execute some i-Dialogue decision tree rules and sending targeted content headlines instead of general broadcasts (assuming a self-identified RSS subscription occurred with a parameterized URL).

Is it better to have multiple RSS channels or a single RSS channel? The benefits to multiple channels is the user is left to decide which topics are most relevant to them, but you may miss out on advancing the relationship with a customer if they only get a single view of the company.

I recommend that businesses only have one primary RSS feed that gets the bulk of your publishing focus. This will ensure high frequency of new content (which search engine spiders will love) and will condition the customer to "stay on top" of your latest news.

A single RSS feed is all that is needed for the first 4 stages of your customer life-cycle:
Awareness
Education
Evaluation
Acquisition

Once a customer matures into later life-cycle stages of Service and Growth, they will naturally explore the deeper reaches of your customer portal and subscribe to specific discussion forums and knowledge base categories.

So, assuming you're publishing only one RSS news feed, how are you to sustain the frequency of content needed to keep a prospect or customer engaged? The answer is a hybrid of good old PR copy writing and automation.

The RSS feed to your customer portal will be a combination of headlines that you publish interspersed with non-deterministic events, such as new knowledge base article headlines and discussion forum headlines.