Meeting with Fergus Burns - Nooked

I had  the chance to spend quite the all day yesterday with Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked, who came to visit me in Paris as we are working together on finding ways to inform PR folks about the potential of RSS chanels in their clients communication strategy.

I am definitely convinced about the added value of RSS for my client's PR campaign but it seems there is still a lot of awareness to raise on this issue. I am actually providing RSS feeds for two of my clients, Six Apart and EMC Dantz, and companies like Nokia, Macromedia, Sun and many others are using RSS feeds to provide informations on their services or technologies. With the growing spam problems, development of ISP spam filters, overwhelmed email boxes, what better answer than RSS feeds could we have ?

RSS is non intruvise, light, requires a subscription from the reader and not from the editor, I see only benefits there. Till recently, the reporting fonctionality was an issue, but isn't one anymore as services like Nooked are abble to provide information on hits, click through, popularity of the feeds, etc... More than that, online services like Bloglines can provide additional informations on the subscribers of your feeds, as soon as they are using an online service too, but it still gives a flavour (it appears that bloglines would represent something like 15 % of the RSS world, says Fergus) which is usually very interesting.

If you want to know more on this issue, you should see for example this great article from Jos Hallett, A guide to media monitoring with RSS and also Neville Hobson from Nevon, talking about this issue here and here, and finally this interview from Fergus Burns in a very didactic angle.