RSS

How Feedio (Kinda) Changed My Mind About RSS

A few months back, I asked the question as to whether it was time to get rid of the trusty RSS option on your blog.

My key reasons were simple: RSS offers less one-to-one interaction than email, the format of RSS can be clunky and unwieldy for non-techy folks, and the traffic to my blog from RSS was far outstripped by search, email and social network traffic.

The post received some interesting thoughts, both in the comments section and across Google+ and Facebook. Many agreed that RSS is no longer a required option; others felt it offered much better benefits based on niche and industry.

My own personal take remained – RSS was a platform that was out-of-date and no longer the lead choice for bloggers and content creators.

While that’s still mostly true, Feedio has made me look at RSS ?a little differently, and have it actually show value. Here’s why.

User-Friendly and Clean User Interface

One of the biggest bugbears of mine when it came to existing RSS platforms (with perhaps the exception of Feedly) is the user interface (UI) on the front-end could be very unwieldy.

You click the “subscribe by RSS button” on a blog, and it usually takes you to a page where you have a list of RSS subscription options to use. Unless you know what various RSS terminology means (Atom 2.0, RSS 2.0, SubToMe, BittyBrowser, etc.), it can be overwhelming for the average reader.

Feedio does away with this by offering a clean and simple subscription option for your reader.

By offering just RSS or Feedly, Feedio makes it easy to use your existing RSS set-up without having to go through a whole list of confusing options.

A much better solution, for this non-RSS fan.

Simple, Quick Stats Dashboard and Analytics

The main “complaint” I have with RSS is the lack of details about your subscribers. When compared to the insane amount of data available to you from email providers, RSS is sorely lacking in this department.

While Feedio doesn’t (yet) go to deep levels of analytics, it does give you some useful information via both the Dashboard and the Posts navigation tabs.

Quick Stats Dashboard

When you log into Feedio, you’re greeted by your dashboard, that gives you a quick breakdown of subscribers and post reach.

Since I recently switched over to Feedio from Feedburner, the importing/redirect process is still going through. However, even with the subscribers imported so far, you can start to get a feel for how they’re subscribing, as well as what type of content they’re consuming the most.

One of the more interesting features is the “Unlock” option, which you’ll see in the right-hand column of the Newest Posts section (click to expand if required).

This comes into play if you also use Feedio for email subscriptions, and lets you know which post resulted in a new subscriber. This is a really cool feature that can help you laser in on the type of content that will grow your email subscriber base.

Simple Site Analytics

As well as the RSS and subscriber data, Feedio also gives you a little more insight into your posting frequency, and where your content is being shared the most, with the analytics on your Sites tab.

As well as showing you the Total Reach of your posts from RSS, Feedio lets you see how many times your post was shared on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Again, the benefit of this is if you have certain goals for awareness of your content by channel, this gives you a quick look into how well you’re doing in achieving that goal.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not super deep analytics, but it’s a nice little feature and beats having no insights into that data at all.

Smart Engage to Build Community and Loyalty

Perhaps one of the smartest features (no pun intended) is the Smart Engage option.

Currently set up for Twitter (though I believe more networks are in the pipeline), Smart Engage gives you an overview of who’s sharing your content on Twitter.

Given you can miss this information pretty easily if the person sharing doesn’t tag you with your username, Smart Engage ensures you can see not only the type of content being shared, but who’s sharing it and how often.

Using this feature, you could create a Twitter list called “Content Advocates”, for example, and then begin sharing their content too, as well as finding out more about that person and the kind of content they enjoy.

Additionally, you could simply send a quick thank you, and start to build a relationship with that person, growing not only your reach but finding a potential new avenue for ideas, shares and comments.

[clickToTweet tweet=”It’s not just RSS that @GetFeedio grows, it’s community and loyalty. #content” quote=”It’s not just RSS numbers that Feedio grows, it’s community and loyalty too.”]

It’s a simple but useful solution that does more than your average RSS reader, and offers more reward because of it.

Simple Promote Options

While your blog readers will always be able to choose between email and RSS subscriptions, there’s still a lot of traffic and subscribers that you could be missing out on – social media connections, for example.

Feedio takes care of this with their simple promote option, like this one for Twitter.

By providing some recommended tweets, you can let your followers know about your Feedio subscription options, which in turn should (hopefully) grow your subscriber base as well as awareness of your content.

There’s also an email section that provides some recommended emails, which you can copy and paste into an email of your own and send to past connections, chosen peers and colleagues, etc.

What Feedio Needs Next

As you can see, despite my continued misgivings about RSS as a subscriber option, Feedio does do a lot more than your standard RSS providers on the market today.

The fact it does it so cleanly and elegantly is a major plus. However, there are still some features I’d love to see added to take it to the next level of RSS providers.

Google Analytics implementation. One of the things that separates email from RSS is the way you can get really granular on the data, via Google Analytics. It’d be great if Feedio could connect to your GA account, and show which post (based on Reach and Shares) drove the most activity around the content from RSS.

Trending content. One feature I’d really like to see is that of trending content, with a little Up/Down arrow next to the posts in your dashboard. This could let you take advantage by sharing again on your own networks, or writing a complementary piece and linking to it from the trending post.

Deeper analytics on Smart Engage. While it’s great to see who’s sharing your posts on Twitter via the Smart Engage option, it’d be great to see the actions taken on that tweet by followers of that person (retweets, favourites, clicks). I’m not sure how feasible this would be, but it would definitely be a great addition.

More personalization options for your profile page. Currently, Feedio offers some personalization options for your front-end profile (the one subscribers see). However, it’d be nice to have some more features like colour picker for links, hyperlinked URL’s, etc. A small change, but one that would make a nice addition.

In fairness, though, while I’d love to see the suggestions above make it into Feedio somewhere down the line, I have to tip my hat to?Justin Butlion and the team behind Feedio.

They’ve clearly looked at the current RSS landscape, and understood the pain points for both bloggers and readers, and actually made RSS enjoyable again.

Not only that, but while they haven’t fully converted me into an RSS lover again, they have made me reevaluate my take on the service.?Given I’m a stubborn bugger when it comes to stuff like this, that’s no small feat, so kudos. 😉

You can check Feedio out for yourself here – and if you want to subscribe to this blog via RSS/Feedly, you can do that here.

Important Message for RSS Subscribers – This Feed is Moving

Two and a half years ago, I moved my blog from Google’s Feedburner service to Feedblitz, due to concerns over the continuation of Google’s service.

Because of these concerns, it made sense to make the switch to Feedblitz to ensure delivery of this blog by either email or RSS.

Unfortunately, the experience with Feedblitz has been a poor one. Very limited email templates, delivery issues, and wonky metrics that fluctuated all over the place made for a frustrating time – especially for a paid service, and one where its competitors offered far more for the same price.

So, I moved my email off Feedblitz a few months ago, and this weekend I moved my RSS feed off Feedblitz too, and back over to ~~Feedburner~~ Feedio.

If you subscribe to this blog by RSS, there’s currently a 30 day redirect from the Feedblitz feed. This means you’ll still get any posts I publish between now and the end of February, at least.

To continue receiving posts after then, you need to update your feed with the following address:

http://www.feedio.co/@dannybrown

And that’s it – simple! Thanks for subscribing so far, and I hope to see you around after I finally close the door on Feedblitz.

Cheers!

Email or RSS – Feeding the Inbox

If you’re a blogger, how easy are you making it for people to subscribe to you?

Sure, just having the standard RSS feed is fine, and a lot of blog readers use this and this alone. Yet email subscription ? or the option of one ? is becoming more popular and offers your readers more choice ? always a good thing.

My personal preference is email subscription. I do use Google reader but I find I can miss some great posts, as well as get swamped in the amount of updates. Maybe I don?t use it effectively, who knows?

But here?s the thing.

As I write this, approximately 30% of my subscribers use the Subscribe by Email option you see at the top of my sidebar and end of my posts. If I didn?t offer that option, there?s a good chance I?d be missing out on not only their readership, but my chance to interact with them via blog ideas, comments and more.

The best of it is, setting up an email subscription option is pretty painless. Set yourself up with a Feedburner account and claim your blog. Then use the Publicize option to both set up your email subscription form and get the code to place it on your blog.

If you?re a blogger that doesn?t currently use an email option, think of it this way. Have you ever signed up for newsletters from your favourite business or brand/product? If so, why? I?d hazard a guess it was because it allows you to keep up-to-date with the latest news from people you want to hear about.

Wouldn?t it make sense to let your readers know more about you in the same way?

Image: mkalz

It’s a Crisis – Where Are You?

Financial Crisis / Finanzkrise — Image by alles-schlumpf via Flickr

One thing that’s irrefutable is that social media never sleeps. A good example of this is the recent Motrin video ad that upset a selection of mothers who felt it was demeaning. Cue an uproar on Twitter that was akin to the best viral marketing campaign and soon everyone was looking for the Motrin ad, and not for the right reasons.

What made the Motrin example particularly interesting is that for almost 48 hours there was no response from either the company or the ad agency responsible for the video.

While the Internet was ablaze with blog posts, forum discussions and Twitter conversations about Motrin and its agency, the silence from both was deafening. When Motrin eventually acted by removing the video, they also said that one thing they had learned from it all was how important it is to listen to what’s being said online.

I find this just a little scary, and yet sadly I’m not surprised. Too many companies are in the same boat as Motrin were – they’re not really listening to their audience. They haven’t connected with social media and it’s hurting them and their reputation.

As Motrin realized, once social media picks up on something it’s an instant result. Yet if they or their agency had had any kind of crisis control in place, they could have reacted to all the negativity coming out about them much more effectively.

Perhaps they do have a crisis control plan in place – yet evidently it didn’t include weekends. If someone had been monitoring their brand, the whole episode could have had a very different outcome. Instead, Motrin and the agency were left with a damage limitation exercise that, while it may not have been avoided, could have been easier to manage.

So what do we learn from this? For any business, large or small, listening is key. Your brand is your name and reputation and what makes you stand out from your competitors – you have to protect it fiercely.

I often hear the reason many companies are so slow to react to a crisis like this is because of the international time zones. I don’t think businesses can afford to let this be the case. As the Motrin example and others like it show, social media and conversations don’t take into account different timezones – why should businesses?

For large businesses that have have international offices, this weakens that argument even further. They of all people should be monitoring their brand worldwide. For smaller businesses it may not be so easy, but there are ways to stay on top of things.

For example, why not outsource on an “as needed” basis? There are many professional freelancers and virtual assistants worldwide who can act as your eyes and ears. If you can outsource to the main countries that your business deals with, surely that has to be worth the cost involved?

They can act on your behalf and come out with a company response, and depending on the severity of the crisis you can either deal with it the next day, or have someone from your company be on call to deal with it immediately.

By using tools like Google Alerts, Twitter monitoring software and other applications, your source will know as soon as something needs to be dealt with. They can then take the appropriate course of action. And because it’s on an “as needed” basis, there’s no extra expense except when it’s required.

It may not stop crises like the Motrin one from happening in the first place, but it would ensure that it was dealt with sooner rather than later. That’s got to be worth any business’s time, hasn’t it?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment and subscribe to my RSS feed or via email to ensure you can enjoy the latest post(s).