Had lunch last week with my friend Doug Kurkul of the National Association of Manufacturers, and enjoyed a freewheeling conversation on a number of technology trends affecting association communications. One thing we talked about was RSS and its potential impact on associations and how it will play with email marketing, communications, etc.

There’s a lot to like about the RSS concept. (I won’t explain the details of how it works — here’s a really good in-depth primer, and I did speak more about it in an earlier post.) Lots of people are excited about RSS because it allows content providers (associations) to bypass email spam filters and give you a direct connection into a member’s desktop.

The idea is that a member/reader can subscribe to your RSS newsfeed, and then through the use of "news reader" software, receive automatic updates whenever you add content. As the technology is more and more accepted (driven primarily by blogs, which make it easy to produce an RSS feed), we’ll probably see browsers and email clients add newsreader functionality directly so that separate software is no longer needed. (Firefox already provides this through its "live bookmark" feature.)

So, by incorporating RSS into your web strategy, you’ll be able to distribute content immediately to the desktop of those who are interested in what you have to say.

Sounds great, especially as email gets harder and harder to distribute due to spam filters.

But is it a panacea? I don’t think so. I think, as RSS is adopted by a wider audience, it will become another (important) communications tool. But I don’t think it will replace email.

In my heart, I’m really a direct marketer (or direct communicator, as the case may be). Newsfeeds will make it easy for members/readers to access your content directly — but they will still need to go to the trouble of actually looking at your newsfeed. To use the cliche, it’s a "pull" technology, just like your website. It’s not a "push" technology.

The reason email marketing became so popular so quickly is because everybody needed a way to get people to visit their websites. In most cases, even if you update your site every day, your members probably aren’t visiting your website everyday. By communicating with them regularly by email, you give them a reason to come.

This doesn’t mean email is perfect — you’re going to get blocked more and more, you’re going to get people unsubscribing, you’re going to run into all sorts of difficulties. By incorporating RSS (as it makes sense for your audience), you get a way to get around that. But that doesn’t mean you eliminate email as a communications tool. While email marketing is becoming more difficult, email marketers are also getting savvier about providing the service. (I suggest you use a third-party service to send emails rather than sending them yourself. The big third-parties have relationships with the major ISPs that most associations can’t have. Many associations brought their email list maintenance in-house, and I’ve heard from several that are finding it takes huge time and energy to try to keep themselves whitelisted.)

I can just go by my own experience. I’ve tried using various newsreaders, subscribed to many blogs and sites, and am even using Firefox’s live bookmark feature with a bunch of sites I would like to keep up with. The problem: I find I don’t use the feeds. While it’s relatively easy for me to check the feeds (I’m on the Internet all day long), I don’t do it. I’m usually able to keep up with blogs I like once a week or so, when I get a chance. There are a few I check everyday as a matter of routine, but not that many.

And when I do check them, I don’t look at the feeds — I just go to their site through a regular old bookmark.

Will my habits (and those of my audience) change as RSS reaches critical mass, new technologies are created, younger generation members come in who are more familiar with this kind of browsing, etc? Possibly, maybe even probably. But at the end of the day I think we’re still going to have to deal with the same issue associations have been dealing with since the dawn of time: getting information to our members (as opposed to expecting them to come get it).

RSS is great. But when your organization’s survival depends on getting your message directly to a wide audience, it won’t work by itself.

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