The RSS Engagement Problem
Last Friday, at the SNAP Summit (basically a Facebook conference), I sat down to have a chat with Newsgator’s Jeff Nolan and we stumbled onto the topic of RSS engagement. This is a really, really thorny problem not only for companies like NewsGator (our client), who build the RSS infrastructure but for media entities that publish lots of RSS feeds (like, say, the NY Times blogs).
If I were able to define the solution, I’d have a bestselling book on my hands. My conversation with Jeff only defined the problem, and I hope this becomes the start of a larger conversation about RSS engagement. We temporarily labeled this problem The Loop. Maybe I called it that because I lived in Chicago for a few years. But this loop is a loop that stubbornly remains open. The question is this: how do you effectively put a metric on one’s engagement with an RSS feed?
I have a few blogs that I read when I’m at home on the weekend; I have them set up in both NetNewsWire and my Google Reader, and I’ve read over the Google Reader’s stats a few times. Google has a real basic approach here; they can put a metric on which feeds you’re clicking on, so the reader can understand how valuable each feed is to him. Let’s call this the UTILITY metric. For example, if I realize that I’m only reading 20% of what comes in on the Oakland Tribune’s feeds, and there’s a high volume of feeds, then that feed has really low utility to me.
But let’s say that I’m reading 100% of what’s coming in from the Entrepreneur Watch blog. So, that blog is a high-utility blog for me. But if that’s all the information I can get, then I’m stuck, as a publisher, wondering what the next-action is for someone who reads that blog. RSS feed readers and enterprise content-management systems lack an effective way of tracking what the reader does as a result of the information they read in an RSS feed.
RSS readers can map out discrete metrics. Google’s Reader can tell whether you’ve shared an item on their service (which ports over to Facebook and a host of other social networks via in-network applications) and NewsGator’s Enterprise Server product surfaces the most popular feeds and articles within organizations, which is really useful. And they also do the Facebook thing well with their NewsFriends application. But no one, so far, has figured out how to close The Loop and really map out any kind of ENGAGEMENT metric. (By the way, this FeedHeads Google Reader application is seeing really low adoption - like under 300 users).
This is only the beginning of this conversation, and a little work has already been done on this in the social media blog space, but the thing that’s clearly come out of that writing is that somebody needs to do something about it (and waiting for metrics companies like Factiva, Buzzlogic or Buzzmetrics to just come up with the answer is probably not the soundest business strategy). I’m beginning to wonder if some sort of engagement consortium is in order, because this is one big question mark.
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The Top Button : Venture Chronicles
Posted on October 31st, 2007 at 9:03 pm.
[...] I ran into Adam Metz on Monday while lobbycon’ing the SNAP conference. We had a really fascinating conversation spanning a broad spectrum of topics but one in particular is spurred him to write an introductory post. [...]