RSS Feeds: An Opportunity to NOT Be Like Everyone Else

For a while at least RSS Feeds were a blessing. The ability to have news and information come to me without being forced to view every billboard, banner, and popup was just too good to be left alone. As outlined by Rok Hrastnik at Marketing Studies.net the feeds spilling into my aggregator will carry everyone else's idea of what I should buy, and I'll have to begin again to puzzle out where the real content is hiding.

The opportunity for professional services firms is to NOT use their own RSS feeds to push "advertising", but to continue to use the feeds for their designed purpose; keeping an interested audience informed.

Professional services firms live and die by their ability to create and sustain face-to-face relationships. The marketing of professional services needs to create an aura of care that would suggest to people that you would treat them like a person that matters.

RSS is a way to show your concern for their needs while giving you a tremendous return for your effort. When advertising starts to show up in their news aggregators, they'll feel exactly the way you're going to feel; irritated. Soon we will all be more aggressive in filtering which feeds we'll keep, and we won't care what we're missing because, like spam, it's too big of a hassle.

Don't be like everyone else! With some bandwagons it's best to just watch them go by and listen to their music until it fades away.