Webinar Wire

It Ain’t Live Until It’s on RSS

Posted by Amy Bills November 7 2007 4:15 PM EDT

We recently hosted an incredibly successful live Webinar on the topic of social media. We’d anticipated great turnout for this Webinar, as we’re seeing every day the enormous interest in Making Sense of Web 2.0 for BtoB Marketing.

During the live Webinar, our speaker, Paul Dunay, asked attendees, “Do you have an RSS feed on your company’s site?” The results of this poll surprised me. Only 33% of attendees said “Yes.” That means two-thirds of them—many of them managers, VPs and C-levels from a huge range of companies you’d surely recognize—don’t have something as basic as an RSS feed for their press releases (or, they have one and don’t know about it). 

RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication. Paul Dunay described it as “Tivo for your computer.” It allows your prospects, customers, employees—whatever you count as your “audience” —to record activity on a feed reader and view it at their convenience. In a Web 2.0 world where the audience is empowered to connect with you how they want, when they want, it’s a good way to make sure your press releases, blog updates, and yes, Webinar updates are at their fingertips. In fact, as one of our developers noted a few days ago regarding a new press release, “It ain’t live until I can pick it up on the RSS feed.”

Setting up an RSS feed is not hard. With a little help getting started, every single person who registered for that Webinar could set one up and maintain it. When we take that poll again in six months, I can’t wait to see how those numbers change.