Category, Granular, NicheNov 2

Brooks Jordan 0 comments

Bill Flitter, who is the founder of Pheedo, an RSS marketing solutions company, left a comment on this blog the other day. So, I dove into his feed to see what he's paying attention to.

Recently, he's been at the direct marketing association's (DMA) annual event where, apparently, RSS is a topic that's alive and well. Bill links to an article by Heidi Cohen of Clickz that's a summary of a panel that she was on with Bill and Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines.

There's some good stuff there, and if you're interested in what RSS has to offer marketers, you should check it out.

What I get out of it is, feeds would really be most effective if thought about and delivered at an individual level. Let's look at the points she makes (or summarizes) about types of content feeds:

There are "category-level" feeds, she says, (e.g., digital cameras) for people early in the buying cycle. Second, there are "granular-level" feeds (e.g., data on a specific camera) for people further along in the buying process. Finally, there is "niche content" related to the offering to keep people engaged with your brand.

Hmm. Doesn't it suggest that to go from level one, "category," to level two, "granular," to level three, "niche" that you have to have a way to individualize the feed. I mean how do you do this well without going at it one feed at a time. It's all about personalization: one RSS stream per person with just the right content.

Because if you can generate a unique URL for the feed and figure out a way to find out what the person at the other end of that feed stream needs - what she gets excited about - you're really cooking. And in my opinion, it's not so much about delivering content, it's about asking for feedback from that person. Then, the content should mirror, whenever it can, the feedback.

I think we're still at the stage, mostly, of generating a unique URL and delivering generalized, if somewhat tailored, content. There's no mechanism, though, for really finding out what our subscribers want. But what if . . .