RSS Explained in “Groundswell”

How do companies take advantage of emerging technologies when everything is constantly evolving? The book “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff discusses the shift in the relationships between companies and their customers. Customers are now controlling the conversation with new kinds of media to communicate about the products and services they use.

Companies want to be in these conversations, listening and learning about their customers. Ratings, reviews and Wikipedia entries are constantly monitored. The deeper you get, the more you need help getting information on these things. The more social content there is, the higher the acceleration of the content is.

Instead of companies spending hours upon hours researching the information they want, “Groundswell” discusses the use of RSS. RSS, otherwise known as really simple syndication, is a tool that brings you updates on what you want. Instead of actually visiting the sites you want to monitor, the content is brought to you through RSS. I liked the explanation “Groundswell” gives for RSS. Even though it is easy to understand what the tool is, it is important to understand how it works. RSS is like a transmitter and receiver:

           

Transmitter: generates a feed and provides all new content from a site.

Receiver: you need a receiver to see the RSS feed, the relevant new content.

You, the consumer of this information, can do what you want with this feed of content important to you. As discussed in the book, a low percentage of Americans use an RSS feed. Why? Why wouldn’t you utilize an RSS feed? The benefit of this tool is too great to not take advantage of. Instead of searching for the content you want, it is delivered to your specialized home screen in an easy to understand and follow feed.

As discussed earlier in this post, the digital world is constantly evolving. Many online conversations today discuss RSS as a tool that is slowly dying off. In my opinion, I think RSS is more important today than it ever has been. RSS can be utilized to update multiple social media pages without feeding your updates to each site separately. So is RSS slowly dying? I disagree with this statement. RSS is a useful tool that is still utilized today.