One minute how-to podcast: understanding RSS

This is a great site, one minute how-to podcasts from 'How to cook a proper steak' to 'How to look like a zombie' to 'How to write a resume cover letter'. There are over a 100 podcasts on the site that recently won a Podcast Peer Award.

And then there's my personal favorite, 'How to prepare a Guinness for consumption'.

Last week, I did a one minute how-to show with George on 'How to create a Web 2.0 org'. It won't be out until the middle of February, but it was a pretty cool experience (when my Skype headphones weren't on the fritz). We're also planning on a one minute how-to on 'How to organize a river cleanup' to help us promote National River Cleanup Week.

But I digress. Today's one minute how-to was 'How to understand RSS' which was great and I love the analogy to TiVo. We're planning on having several different feeds for our redesign, so the more this type of information gets out the stronger (IMHO) our communication efforts will be targeting our intended audience, community leaders.

I've been spreading the gospel around the office (to the annoyance of a few I'm sure) and this is a perfect opportunity to reach out one more time to follow up with our RSS brown bag last December. I'll probably also include Marshall Kirkpatrick's Intro to RSS which is a great piece.

The showdown: feeds vs. email

This redesign process has made me hungry for feeds. I eat them in the morning, at lunch time, and at night. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has definitely changed the I receive my information, attempt to stay on top of my field, and enjoy my momentary breaks at work. My appetite ranges from BBC world news to techcrunch to ZeFrank. And the more feeds I devour, the less I read the paper stuff: Washington Post, Newsweek, The Economist, etc.

I've even evangelized the use around the office, at home (it's a sore point now, don't ask), and with friends. As we're going through the redesign, I'm constantly thinking about how we can RSS-ize the experience. But how much is too much?

When I search our partners, there aren't many who are using them. But even those who are, I wonder how many readers are even subscribing to the feed. And does that matter? The eNonprofit Benchmark Study reported in March 2006 a 10% drop in email open rates for non-profits; could the growing use of RSS and desire to control flow of information be one factor for the drop?

I'd like to think, but I don't believe email communication will ever be replaced by RSS (shucks). I know Feedburner has the option of tracking feeds, but we don't pay for that service. I would however, like to see some statistics on the use (Anyone, anyone?). For us, 12% of our audience surveyed said they'd like more dynamic content/RSS and another 26% said they would like more frequent updates.

If 38% of our audience wants regular updates, I will assume the same 38% also wants a way to manage those regular updates. I'll consider these folks as our prospective RSS audience. Not a bad size, but then again 62% still want our emails. Jacob Nielsen wrote:

Feeds are a cold medium in comparison with email newsletters. Feeds do not form the same relationship between company and customers that a good newsletter can build. We don't have data to calculate the relative business value of a newsletter subscriber compared to a feeds subscriber, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that companies make ten times as much money from each newsletter subscriber. Given that newsletters are a much more powerful and warm medium, it is probably best for most companies to encourage newsletter subscriptions and promote them over website feeds.

This make sense to me since I rarely remember where my information came from, but regardless of the source I still want the information. However, for those who continually provide me with the most targeted, relevant information, I will remember you, you, you, you, and you.

Too big to email? Upload, store, and share it instead

Anticipating the need to share large files in the near future, I thought DivShare was pretty cool. And it’s free…and no registration…and up to 100mb. I decided to test it out with the 8mb PowerPoint presentation that I put together for the RSS brown bag lunch last month. I’d rather have these pages live online, but didn't think it was worthy of space on our servers. So, I think DivShare will be useful for us to share high resolution photos and video clips with our design firm partners.

Brown bag lunch #2: Creating & Using RSS

I continued my RSS tirade in the office last Friday with our second brown bag lunch (see the first), Creating & Using RSS. My push is probably getting annoying, but again, if we’re planning on offering this service on our website, I’d like for everyone to know how they work.

We hope to do some cool things online and staff involvement will be key. And, it’s not just necessary for program staff; I think it’s equally important for development and finance folks too. Sure, it’s relevant to our outward communications, but I’d also argue for the importance internally.

Streamlining our in house communication is a big issue, like many organizations, companies, associations, etc. How we manage documents, engage one another with our individual work, and collaborate on projects will greatly impact our success conserving rivers (um, so me think).

I guess that’s why this redesign is a big issue as we have the opportunity to expose the entire organization to a few new communication tools. If the redesign is phase 1, then the next step for us will be addressing how we as an organization communicate with one another. I’d love to know what non-profits have begun looking at their inward communications as well as dabbled with the idea of blogging, wikis, feeds, etc.

Anyhow, more on that later, back to the RSS brown bag. Eleven people showed up (one caller) to the brown bag lunch. We explored many aspects of feeds from what they look like to how they can make us more effective communicators—or the thought goes.

The biggest and best ‘ah, ha’ moment was the realization that one can subscribe to Google News tags which translates to no more visits to the site or hourly emails. The message of the day: information control—you get what you want, not what is sent.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of confused looks…hopefully, it was a healthy amount of confusion. But sensing the 11 attendees as our new feed evangelists, I followed up with an email inviting them to a free lunch where I would come to their desk and create an account, identify feeds, and subscribe them to the feed(s) of their choice. I’m not above a food bribe, but beer may work a little be better (note to self).

I don’t have my 40-slide PowerPoint presentation in a web format, so if anyone is game for a read, just let me know and I’ll send it to you separately in an email.

I’m not sure what out next brown bag lunch will be, but thinking about wikis. Any ideas for our January brown bag lunch? Would blogs be a better topic as a follow up to RSS?

Hungry for a Feedburner feed

Last August I visited Convio in Austin, TX, and asked them when they would fix their RSS feature—I could never get it to work properly. At the time, it seemed pretty shabby, but I don't think many clients were clamoring for it. However, to their credit, Convio addressed the faulty feeds.

For this blog, I wanted to test out Feedburner for our future web work, so I signed up and got the ball rolling—look down and to the right in the blog bling area. You can add the feed to your news reader / aggregator or sign up to receive new posts via email (a new feature that is very cool). And, what’s great about Feedburner is that I can track everything!

I was a little bummed that I couldn’t use this service on our national site since we’re working within a closed box, Convio. Anyhow, I just assumed we couldn’t utilize Feedburner until a friend said:

Mmm. Couldn't you just burn a feedburner feed from a working feed? In other words, burn a feed from a feed? If that makes sense?

Duh, perfect dorky sense—hadn't thought of that. Thanks man (you know who you are) and we're doing just that now, burning a feedburner feed from a working feed. Cool. I really want to track the subscriptions since our reporting metric indicates the Convio RSS link is one of the more popular links on the site—I find that a little surprising, but maybe we’re on to something here.

Do our supporters prefer feeds over email? Wouldn't that be great.