First off, if you haven't heard the term "RSS" or are just vaguely familiar with it, I highly suggest reading this primer first.

RSS is not terribly high on the list of many B2B marketers today, but it's fair to say that RSS is trending upward at an incredibly fast pace and can easily be predicted to become a top 10 "must have" marketing tool by 2007.

There's really nothing to hype-up about RSS. Providing an RSS feed to your companies news, events, and product releases is really more of a courtesy than anything else. The Internet has simply become too big of a place to manage via a web browsers "Favorites" feature. By adding an RSS link to your site, you are asking to be "aggregated" in a customers RSS Reader, which in the near future will most likely be the browser.

Therefore, your RSS headlines will often be viewed directly next to, or in the context of, other similar web sites. Conceivably, potential prospects will simply create a category in their RSS feeder when shopping for your products or services and add your RSS link, along with several competing RSS feeds, and passively monitor these feeds before making a purchasing decision.

RSS is an empowering tool for customers because it allows them to maintain relative anonymity and observe your press releases, news, and events from afar rather than revealing their email address to you through a "Subscribe to newsletter" form on your web site.

Although these prospects are anonymous, Marketers still have reports in i-Dialogue that provide basic view counts, click-through counts, and abandonment rates for each RSS news feed. This can help you gauge the effectiveness of each RSS headline.

i-Dialogue RSS feeds implement the same personalization engine as the web pages and email, so it is possible to create RSS news templates that, at view time, are replaced with personalized messages or offers.

One way to accomplish this is to invite customers to subscribe to your RSS feed in an email marketing campaign. Each email is uniquely identified, so when customers add the RSS link to their reader, each RSS headline they view and click on will be credited to that individual customer.

Now, the first few times I played around with this feature, it threw me off a bit. I'm simply not accustomed to seeing my name embedded in news headlines and I'm sure your customers aren't either (imagine seeing "Hey Mike! We've released a new product!" next to a traditional "XYZ Corp Announces 3rd Quarter Financials" headline).

While this feature would be an RSS spammers paradise, I would suggest using it's power for more subtle personalization, such as delivering personalized RSS abstracts that contain the keywords a customer would most be interested in (such as those used in SEO exercises).

Remember, personalization is NOT about substituting names and addresses in RSS, email, and web communications. It's about delivering the right message at the right time to the right person.

While personalized RSS is a great feature, don't let it over shadow the discussion of offering RSS as a common courtesy to anonymous and self-identifying customers alike.

Until L8R...