RSS Feeds: What Every Business Needs to Know

RSS has been around since the late 1990s, but 2005 is shaping up to be the year it stops being a tool for early adopters and starts becoming something ordinary customers might use, whether or not they know the acronym. Microsoft has signaled it will build feed support directly into the next version of Internet Explorer and into Outlook, meaning millions of people will have a feed reader on their computer without installing anything. Apple added native podcast support to iTunes in June. For a business owner who’s been putting off the question, that’s a reasonable moment to decide.

What a feed gives you

A feed is a way for anyone to subscribe to your updates, new products, blog posts, deals or announcements, without handing over an email address and without you having to manage a mailing list’s deliverability problems. Subscribers pull the content when they check their reader; you don’t push it and risk landing in a spam filter. That’s the entire value proposition in plain terms.

Question 1: do you already publish something worth subscribing to?

A feed amplifies existing content, it doesn’t create it. If you already write regular product updates, a blog or announce sales on a predictable schedule, a feed gives that content a second distribution channel for close to no extra cost. If you have nothing regular to publish, setting up a feed first and figuring out what to put in it later usually produces a feed that goes stale within a month.

Question 2: can someone own keeping it updated?

This is the same question that determines whether a blog or a newsletter succeeds, and it applies just as directly here. A feed with no dedicated owner tends to die quietly, and unlike a dead blog a visitor might stumble across, a dead feed just silently stops delivering anything to subscribers who never find out why.

Question 3: what does it cost to set up?

Less than most business owners assume. Most modern blogging and publishing platforms generate a feed automatically. The main additional cost is a validation check to make sure the feed’s XML is well-formed, and optionally a service like FeedBurner to get subscriber statistics and a cleaner feed address. There’s no licensing fee and no significant ongoing cost beyond the time to keep publishing.

Question 4: is your audience going to use this?

This has been the fair objection for the last two years: feed readers were a tool for the technically inclined, and asking an average customer to install one wasn’t realistic. Microsoft’s announcement this year that feed support is coming built into Internet Explorer and Outlook, tools already sitting on most business computers, changes that calculation. So does Apple folding podcasting directly into iTunes, which is putting subscription-based content in front of a much more mainstream audience than RSS readers ever reached on their own. The technical barrier that justified skepticism is disappearing.

When it’s not worth it yet

If your business doesn’t publish anything on a predictable schedule, or if nobody on your team can commit even a small amount of ongoing time to it, a feed will sit unused regardless of how easy the underlying technology has become. The tool has gotten easier. The organizational commitment it requires hasn’t changed.

The honest bottom line for a business owner

If you’re already publishing regularly and have someone who can own the feed, the cost of adding RSS this year is low enough that the “is it worth it” question mostly answers itself. If you’re not publishing regularly yet, the better first move is fixing that, not adding a feed on top of an inconsistent publishing habit. Either way, the mainstream tooling arriving this year means the audience question that made sense to hesitate over in 2003 and 2004 is quickly becoming moot.