Could RSS Kill Press Releases?

If you’re using an RSS newsreader to read this blog, chances are I have just two sentences to get you interested in what I have to say. It's enough to make any prolific PR pro feel like Elmer Fudd at a SpeedDating event.

PR pros already have a hard time paring down press releases to their news essence. As RSS catches on, we may really be forced to be brief because the press release as we know it may be dead.

For the uninitiated, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a common technical standard that news sites and blogs use to publish brief summaries of stories/posts through what's called XML news feeds. These feeds can be scanned either using a dedicated newsreader application, like FeedDemon, or on a Web site like Bloglines or even My Yahoo. RSS may sound very techie, but it's catching on fast and is starting to seep into the mainstream psyche. A good primer can be found here.

Let's just assume that two years from now most journalists are so fed up with spam that they demand that PR pros publish news via RSS. Does this mean that we will need to convey our news in pithy phrases instead of paragraphs? Does it mean that the press release we have come to know and love might become a dinosaur? I think it's possible.

Comments

[Dana]

Steve,

I hope you're right, to some degree. I read over 120 blogs via RSS and no, you don't have 2 sentences. You have 1 - your headline. Whether your RSS feed has full text or just excerpts, I don't care - I look at the headline and decide my level of interest.

Now, I'm no journalist, and I don't get PR coming to me from dozens of sources, but seriously, if I'm a savvy company with something to say, it's in my best interest to get my journalists that I've already developed relationships with to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Now - here's where any academic study comes in. Are press releases fed through RSS - today - more likely than not to be picked up? How many journalists get Apple's RSS feed for their press releases? Does it help or hurt them?

I don't feel that the press release and all that it entails will change all that much, just the vehicle for delivery, and a few tweaks to make your PR "RSS Friendly".

Then we'll have pundits hawking articles on "How to make your press releases get read via RSS" - just like we have every charlitan in the web marketing world writing about "how to make your website content more search engine friendly" Same stuff... It's all content...

[Andy Abramson]

Steve,

As a member of the PR community, who is also a daily member of the press via both my VOIP blog, VoIPWatch and the audiocasted KenRadio's World Technology Roundup, I can't agree more.

Blogs and RSS will become essential especially with Spam levels increasing to a point where media members just can't see what they need to see when they need to see it.

The key will be when BusinessWire and PR Newswire both, start RSS feeds of the press releases. Right now, they both offer email notifications and web based access to their client's press releases. Since they feed into the major news services and publications systems already, along with the major web sites for news, they are more than likely the two tipping points for when what you are propsing can occur.

Andy

[Steve Rubel]

Andy, PR Newswire already offers RSS feeds. Is anyone aware if BusinesssWire has matched this yet?

Steve

[Andrew Losowsky]

Personally I unsubscribe off feeds that only have a headline, as they're usually too cryptic to capture my interest. I MUCH prefer full text; there are dozens of websites now that I only read in full feed and never visit their page. And dozens of other websites I don't check because I don't have time just to go their feedless page.

If you change your feed template in Typepad, you can include the full text, images, even some html in your feed, although that can have some bandwidth implications for those on low-budget servers. But I wish more people would.

[Denis de Bernardy]

@Dana:

> "how to make your website content more search engine friendly" Same stuff... It's all content...

Obviously, my selling search engine optimization services makes me biaised, but I suggest you take a closer look at how Google initially calculated its PageRank nevertheless.

To put things simply if you are math unsavvy, each page has a PageRank score that is ventillated among the links present on it. This process is repeated recursively. Since the web is an inhomogenous graph, you end up with aggregated zones, which is a very mechanical way of identifying a page as being more 'meaningful'. So via a proper linking strategy, you can significantly boost the PageRank of your selection of pages.

As an aside and for your information, the mechanism behind latent semantic indexing and other methods to identify related and/or meaningful words within a document work in a similar way. So likewise, with a proper writing strategy, you can significantly boost the keyword friendliness of a page.

That to say: From a search engine's perspective, content is the least important thing. And from a marketer's perspective, ending up on top of Google's search results is akin to being at eye level on the shelves of a Wall Mart store.