RSS publishing is duly noted for it’s efficacy in disseminating your content,enhancing brand recognition, increasing traffic and elevating a site’s search engine visibility. But is that content there to serve your reader first, or to serve your marketing objectives at the expense of the reader?

The subject comes up in a discussion at MediaPost about Freakonomics’ recent partnership with the NYT. In particular,it brings attention to the debate over Freakonomics’ decision to reduce what had been a full RSS feed to a summary. That Freakonomics is so highly regarded, is, in part, due to the passionate and articulate community that they serve and a portion of that community is clearly communicating their discontent.

“…roughly six hours after Dubner published his announcement, roughly 100 of the 120 comments were in protest of Freaknomics’ move from full to partial RSS subscription feeds, forcing feed subscribers to begin their flow and then abruptly transfer attention to the NYTimes site via a separate browser window!

A sampling of the comments in Dubner’s post underscores the dilemma that online publishers face as they adapt to a more open Web, heightened competition, attention scarcity, savvier readers, rising expectations and RSS syndication…”

Attention and engagement are the coin of the realm and are quickly withdrawn if inconvenience is introduced. I far prefer and value full content, daily updated, and soon remove a feed that fails in both. It seems to be a common practice. But much, as well, depends on the site. I get my political fixes directly from the source because the comments are where all the treasure is found. People will click through according to what serves them best. It doesn’t seem too difficult a decision to provide a choice, unless traffic trumps community expectations.

“So the million-dollar question is: How should the Freakonomics authors and NYTimes — and publishers in general — interpret and act on such community feedback?
[...]
Audiences are no longer just about aggregating lifeless content consumers. Today, we must now consider reader participation, a powerful proxy of engagement. Participation now is content itself, and the glue that binds audience into meaningful community.”
(Source)

Sphere: Related Content

Tags: attention, brand_recognition, community_expectations, engagement, increasing_traffic, marketing_objectives, RSS-publishing, rss_syndication, search_engine_visibility

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under RSS Marketing Strategies, Search Engine Visibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.