RSS Marketing Therapy: Word Associations

Here’s an interesting (and statistically invalid) market research experiment for you to try. In ‘Jaywalking’ fashion, go to a busy crosswalk and start asking anyone who passes by to tell you how they use RSS.

According to the Yahoo! / Ipsos Insight white paper entitled RSS—Crossing into the Mainstream, for people who are ‘RSS aware (From the white paper: “Only 12% of users stated that they had heard the term RSS.”), the types of subscription content the consumers are accessing (ranked in order of popularity) are:

- World news
- National news
- Entertainment
- Science and tech news
- Weather
- Local news
- Blogs
- Sports scores/stats/news
- Regional news
- Games
- Local information
- Health issues/news
- Music or video
- Investment/financial info/banking
- Podcasting
- Job/career sites/links
- Travel sites/info
- Shopping/online commerce
- Bookmarks
- Maps
- Photos

The white paper also makes the following interesting observation:

“The real story, however, is the much larger population of “Unaware RSS users” who consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN).”

Whether consumers know what RSS is or not, they’re making use of it, and that use is on the rise. So, if you’re wondering about ways to put subscription technology to work for yourself or your company, this list offers several ideas for you to brainstorm about. There are enough good ideas here that I suggest we stop talking about using feeds for the rest of the day, and spend the rest of our time today actually doing it.

Now, let's get to work!