RSS Feeds: A Great PR Tool and a Timesaver

RSS Feeds are one of my favorite Web 2.0 tools. If you don’t know what they are, let me try to explain. They essentially allow you to subscribe to news (or blogs) that are of interest and read new entries/posts all on one page.

Yahoo and Google both have RSS feed readers. Another popular reader is bloglines, but my favorite way to subscribe to and read feeds is now through Internet Explorer 7.

Look for the orange RSS button on your favorite Web site, click on it and choose subscribe to this feed. Then click on the yellow star on the toolbar in IE7, choose the feeds tab, and you’ll always have the latest content from that site’s feed. I subscribe to a variety of marketing and PR blogs and web sites, as well as notifications from my Facebook profile, the Wall Street Journal and more. So I only have to go one place to read everything.

Now, as far as PR goes, journalists are a big user of RSS feeds. It helps them save time and get information in a timely fashion. If you regularly post news releases to your site about your company, set them up so journalists can subscribe to them via an RSS feed. This allows them to choose to receive your news, rather than you “pushing” your news releases on them. And this way, they’ll always have your latest news.

I also helped a client recently set up feeds of search terms on a variety of blog and Podcast directory sites to help them monitor mentions of themselves and their clients. This can be a big timesaver that keeps you from having to go to each page and do a search every time you want to see what’s being said about you. You can subscribe to services like Google Alerts also via RSS to reduce the number of emails you’re receiving.

All said — RSS is a cool tool!