Rocky Mountain ROI, RSS and Blogs

Quick: can you define blogs and RSS? If you bumped into your CEO in the elevator and he or she asked pointedly, “So tell me all you know about RSS and these blog things,” could you fire off your best virtual elevator speech faster than the express car racing to the top floor of your office building?

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what they are, because a lot of us in marketing don’t know either.

And I speak from first-hand experience:  I just returned from the Association for Equipment Manufacturer’s 2005 Marketing Council Seminar in Colorado Springs, fittingly called Rocky Mountain ROI. More than 145 really smart people, including manufacturers (like our client Bobcat Company), agency folks (like me) and trade media, attended.

Each of the presentations employed instant-polling technology, so speakers could query the attendees with a variety of questions. At the Marketing Technology ROI session, Jordan Ayan of Create-It! Inc. asked: What is a blog? What is RSS? He provided multiple-choice questions, to which we had to “lock in our votes.”

On the blog question, 26% of the respondents had no idea what it was; 35% had an idea of what it was but had not yet used a blog. When he asked who in the audience actually had posted to a blog, only two of us (from Sundog) raised our hands.  When asked to define RSS, more than half of the respondents selected the wrong definition.

Okay, so it was a teachable moment, and those attending left the conference confident that they not only knew what the terms mean, but also had a glimpse for how these emerging technologies are impacting our marketing lives.

For instance, the marketing folks from the travel and tourism department for the State of Pennsylvania are using blogs this summer big time by having six different bloggers chronicle their travels.

Another example: we just helped one of our clients launch a blog to help promote GoEfuel, North Dakota’s own brand of ethanol-blended fuel. The blog will follow the GoE Guys on their summer roadtrip to promote “random acts of ethanol.”

Finally, with 10 million blogs out there (according to Technorati), the business press is now covering this too (Business Week cover story, May 2, 2005) and even the mainstream media is taking notice—Newsweek now has a weekly “BlogWatch” to provide a weekly snapshot of “what’s hot and what’s not in the world of blogs.”

In case you want a refresher, here are some quick definitions:

Blog. You’re reading one!  Wikipedia defines a weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) as a web application presented as a webpage consisting of periodic posts, normally in reverse chronological order. See:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblogs

RSS: Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a technology standard for publishing content over the Internet. It allows web publishers to quickly distribute their latest updates to consumers. Using information “feeds” and an RSS reader, you can easily subscribe to news updates, blog postings and other types of information. The feeds continually gather the latest information for you - in one source, so you don’t have to find a bookmarked page to see what’s new on a site.  In fact, the blog you are now reading has an RSS feed, over on the right hand side of our Sundog main page …look for the RSS Feed and a little red box with “RSS” in it.

So, armed with this knowledge, corner one of your managers. See if he or she knows what RSS is. Have they used a blog? No? Well, tell them to buy you lunch and you’ll show and tell them all the new stuff you just learned. And welcome to the world of blogging and RSS.