I often give classes about online marketing. A common observation is that monitoring RSS feeds is just another chore for a marketing staff to do. Who has the time? In reality, RSS is a huge time saver, rather than yet another time-demand.

And remember: any technology that is saving time for marketers is probably also doing the same thing for customers, who are generally more interested in saving themselves time than in viewing your marketing messages.

And what does this mean for your marketing messages themselves? RSS puts pressure -- lots of pressure -- on the subject line for each individual feed, which have to be shorter, more focused and relentlessly to the point.

A case in point: I’m generally interested in the topic of energy and petroleum. (These days, who isn’t?) Now, I’m not so interested in the topic that I’ll scour the internet and LexisNexis looking for every report, tidbit, rumor, and so on. However, over time, I’ve come to discover blogs like The Oil Drum and Land of Black Gold. These folks do consume energy-related news voraciously. By subscribing to their RSS feeds, they’ve become my "information processors" for those topics.

Similarly, by using a feed reader or aggregator, your customers can handle and act upon much more information, and so can you. Here's a snapshot of what one feed reader looks like:

Notice how much information the user (me, in this case) can scan on the left-hand column.

Next: RSS is Measurable