Enterprise RSS - are you using it now too to save time and money?
Ralf Haller
January 16th, 2009
RSS is a way to turn information distribution from a “push” to a “pull” type of activity. While at first you might say “so what’s the deal as long as I get the information that I need”, it is actually a very big deal.
E-mail is the standard “push” type of information distribution. Its overuse has come to the point where we start hating it, though, because it consumes so much time every day and has become so ineffective that many people are simply not using it at all anymore (execs in large companies). One of the reasons for that is also the many unsolicited e-mails sent out on top of the even more annoying spam e-mails that can only be partly filtered out and every so often land in your e-mail client’s inbox.
Now RSS is making the - inevitable - information exchange a much more pleasant experience because you decide what you are interested in, and RSS checks those sources and pulls new information into your RSS reader. There you can read it whenever you have time, and most importantly you can subscribe and unsubscribe from it easily. While RSS has been used prominently in the bloggosphere to collect new blog posts with RSS readers, it has yet to take off in enterprise, it seems. But this is changing rapidly.
How RSS is now being used in enterprise is described with some very practical examples by Greg Reinacker, the CTO of Newsgator, in his blog post Enterprise RSS - The state of the industry. How it can be used nicely for Online Marketing and PR we will write about shortly here too. One of Greg’s examples is for a bank, which, not surprisingly, also brings cost savings:
Competitive tracking. Or tracking any other external news for that matter - many companies wish to track media mentions and online conversations about themselves, their competitors, or anything else; once they have this information, then, they need to filter and distribute it appropriately. Increasingly, these systems are being used as a replacement for high-end premium content services. We have a large bank who reduced their premium content subscription expenses by over $1M per year by using our solutions - we’re talking about real savings here.
Tags: Enterprise RSS, Newsgator