Today I wanted to do a quick little post on something that caught my eye. Something that one of the companies did out there that makes sense and is PMC 2.0 worthy. EODT has just souped up their website by putting an RSS button for their company news. This simple act, has now allowed guys like me to put their company directly into my Google Reader (RSS reader) and stay up to date easily about what is going on with them.
Why is that a good thing? Well bloggers, journalists, etc. all have time constraints, and they all do things to save time in their research. There is such a massive amount of information out there, that any tools used to make that search easier is great. Most of my time spent blogging, is actually just reading and going through all that information out there. In order to process all of that stuff, I use tools to make it easy to pick out the good stuff. I use alerts from Google Search, group pages, newsletters sent by companies, forums, and most importantly, RSS readers like Google’s RSS reader.
So with that said, if you have a website for your company and you post news or jobs through that website, it would be highly advisable to set up RSS for your news and jobs. It will make your company more accessible to guys like me, and it will also make your company more accessible and utilitarian to potential customers.
This will also help out those in the industry that are looking for work or looking for information about your company. That might catch them just in time before they submit a resume somewhere else. It also helps your employees as another way for them to keep up to date on news and jobs.
If you are constantly sending out news through your feeds, you will actually create a readership for your company too. But that is only if you make it easy to get that news, and your content is actually good. If you have a blog for your company, that should have RSS as well. The newsletter works to, but RSS feeds that post news as it happens is better.
Forum owners would be wise to set up RSS as well. There are threads that bloggers and journalists like to follow, that are filled with vital information about a subject they are researching. By making it easy to follow a thread, you might see an increase of traffic to your forum, because now you have folks who will instantly jump to that thread when something pops up.
RSS is a great feature to have on your website, and I recommend that companies follow EODT’s lead and get up to speed. This is also nothing new and to me, companies that are not doing simple things like this, are behind the times. –Matt
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RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking an RSS icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.
RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved from as early as March 1999, it was between 2005 and 2006 when RSS gained widespread use, and the icon was decided upon by several major Web browsers.
Wikipedia for RSS here.