The Stages of RSS in Business

At my attention pitch a few weeks back in New York at Syndicate, I shared a little bit from our experience at Attensa about how RSS finds its way into business. Clearly, as with consumers and RSS, it starts with blogs. This might be obvious to many but I am asked about it so frequently, I thought it warranted a more detailed post. I have seen how RSS can rapidly proliferate in organizations once it is utilized for true business purposes. My observations have convinced me that RSS seems to make its way into business, organically, as follows:

1. Blog Post Updates, Mainstream News - Perhaps obvious but this is how it starts. An individual from anywhere in a company starts using RSS to get updates from blogs and more than likely it is not work related. The other introductory use of RSS flows from subscriptions to news sources such as BusinessWeek, major newspapers, or even more useful an industry publication such as eWeek. This is getting progressively easier with toolbar products that auto-discover feeds. IE7 has this new feature, and Attensa has a toolbar today for IE7 and firefox that detects and displays multiple feeds on one page. Of course, I am biased but it is hands down the best implementation of its kind PLUS includes delicious tagging tools as well. See it here.

2. Marketing and Competitive Intelligence - Rather than cluttering email inboxes with Google alerts, RSS often becomes important overnight for business as a means for marketing folks to keep informed about both their brands and the activity of their competitors. Sales people can use RSS to monitor both current customers as well as prospects. (And, by the way, Attensa's Outlook based RSS reader lets you search for terms across up to 16 search engines.)

3. Business Blogs, Wikis and Collaboration Software - There are numerous players in this space ranging from enterprise class solutions like SocialText and Confluence, collaboration tools like BaseCamp and CentralDesktop, and lastly even offerings such as Six Apart's TypePad (which I use.) All of the applications support RSS, enabling them to communicate updates to those in the relevant groups that are subscribed to the appropriate feeds. This is an exciting growth area that is affecting not just large businesses but even small and medium sized businesses. Also worth noting, Attensa's new partner, Six Apart, has an enterprise offering looming. Details here so far.

4. Enterprise Applications that utilize RSS - Although early, progressive enterprise application vendors are enabling their applications with RSS. There is probably no better place to look than to Spanning Partners' application of RSS to SalesForce. Charlie Wood, the company's founder, is already a leading expert in this area. I've already learned much from him and through his efforts about where enterprise the enterprise app vendors are going. Also, a few months ago Charlie wrote on this subject, see this post.

So, where does that leave us? It doesn't take complicated math to see that before you know it individual users are going to be receiving THOUSANDS of RSS items per day. Some people today (most?) are still in stage 1 described above and if subscribed to two or three hundred feeds for news, blogs, smart searches, etc - they might already occasionally get 1,000 items in ONE DAY. Granted, they are asking for these feeds and it's not like getting 1,000 emails a day where half of it is spam.

I think RSS will mirror the success AND the negativity that email has brought to us in business. Most businesses couldn't imagine trying to work productively without email - but email also brought us spam, viruses, inappropriate use, the "RE: RE: RE:" annoyance, security challenges, etc etc etc. Same will be the case the RSS. RSS will bring to all (and already is for some) unprecedented business productivity. The difference is, I am convinced, that the sheer volume (sans abuse or spam) will dwarf e-mail.

Ideally, Attensa will be there to help cut through this information overload!

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