If you know me at all, you know I’m big on access. I don’t believe necessarily in fighting habit or changing people’s preferences. Instead I like to work with them. Trends are important to follow–when you know what kind of trends exist, you can modify the way you distribute your information in order to reach the most people possible. While I don’t support the tendency of big-business to exploit demographic groups to get rich, I do understand the value of marketing. I have always strongly encouraged those in fields generally diametrically opposed to marketing to embrace it and learn to use it to their advantage. It doesn’t have to be a big, nasty practice. There are simple things that all writers and artists can do to help distribute their work in more effective ways.
I write this out of frustration as I am discovering more and more blogs about museum practice and art theory who make it extremely inconvenient for me to follow them with any kind of regularity. So, my rant follows:
Truncating the content for your RSS feed is never a good idea. All you’re doing is making me never read your article. Very rarely do I click through to continue reading. The only circumstance I can think of is when I read a full article in my RSS reader and feel compelled to comment. But I never click through to finish reading — often the two-sentence excerpt provided is so uninformative that I don’t even know what I’d be clicking through to. I know I’m not alone.
Your site has an RSS feed because, in most cases, Blogger or WordPress or any other CMS has provided one. So it may not be your ideal method of content distribution. I understand that. But RSS readers are so convenient, and so many people are using them, that not having an RSS feed is suicide. So use it, and use it well. Let people read your articles in their entirety within their RSS readers, and if your content is meaningful, you might receive more feedback about it.
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COMMENTS / 2 COMMENTS
Amanda Laird added these words on May 12 08 at 1:01 pm…not having an RSS feed is suicide.
Hear, hear.
I love RSS, like to the point of getting that obnoxious little orange symbol tattooed on my ass. If I come across a site that doesn’t offer an RSS feed, chances are I won’t be back again, even if I find the content to be interesting.
But I would say this has less to do with marketing and everything to do with public relations. An organization should know their audience. And trust me, their audience wants an RSS feed, even if they don’t know it yet. If you provide an RSS feed, your audience will take advantage of it and then they will love you for it.
Marissa added these words on May 12 08 at 4:53 pmI agree! Of course PR is a critical component of general marketing programs, and you’re completely right in pinpointing RSS as an important PR strategy.
It’s one of those things where, as disappointed as I can be about the fact that no one reads, no one goes out of their way to find information — I also know that if I want my work to be read I need to modify my work to the behaviours of the people reading. And I’m no fool — I know that some of my essays here that are 2500+ words are NEVER read from beginning to end. It’s too bad but also my own fault for posting them in their entirety.
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