RSS has been around for what seems like an eternity now, but truly since the late 1990s. If you are not familiar with RSS, here is a great video that gives a simple explanation.

Since its inception, RSS has been a great tool for technology teams, and a great way for end users to consume the content of their choice at their leisure. Historically, however, it has been a tricky tool for marketers to justify, since it is not measurable. A few (OK, maybe five now?) years ago, some great tools popped up that allow us to begin tracking your consumption at an aggregate level (Feedburner). That was definitely a step in the right direction. Recently, technology has stepped up again, and now offers the ability to track subscribers and the articles they read at an individual level. Big Brotherish? No more so than the ability to track at this level on e-mail and Web usage, which we’ve had for quite some time now.

Earlier this week I led a discussion about the recently released RSS functionality from Eloqua, the marketing automation platform company we use here at Bulldog. Here is a link to my presentation about the different ways the Eloqua functionality can be leveraged.

To prepare for the discussion, I learned more about RSS than I ever wanted to know, and set up some live demos to prove the point. At Bulldog, we are not shy about public experimentation. We’ve set up a dedicated subdomain (dogfood.bulldogsolutions.com) as our test bed. (The name refers to the concept of “eating our own dogfood,” but I’m sure you guessed that.) This is in no way intended to be a production site, and items we publish normally have a short shelf life.

Here is some of the stuff we’ve been playing with:

Different ways to create, manage, customize and aggregate content:

• Yahoo! Pipes: Great way to aggregate and filter different feeds
• Google Alerts: Great way to stay current on news you and your audience are
  interested in
• Eloqua: Provides a simple way to create, manage and publish your own content
  as RSS feeds

Different ways to publish content (for the moment, these are specific to the Eloqua application):

• General Web content: Keep your Web site fresh by publishing different feeds (see example below)
• Personalized Web content: This is based on Eloqua’s PURL (personalized URL) functionality where we can serve up different feeds that you have indicted interest in
• E-mail: Last, but certainly not least, Eloqua provides the ability to embed a feed directly into an e-mail with the same personalization as above. Need newsletter content?

Sound interesting? Give it a shot.

Here’s an explanation of what we’ve actually done and how to try it out:

• This page contains a feed that is the consolidation of the most recent posts from all of our blogs in our Blogroll. To consolidate the feeds, we’ve used Yahoo! Pipes. I’m not going to go into much detail about this application, but I will say it is a pretty slick tool. However, as with most betas, there is some work to do before it is totally ready for primetime.
• When you go to the page you will find a link to subscribe to the feed. Upon subscribing, you will be given your own personal feed URL that you can plug into your favorite reader. Trash the subscription immediately, if you want, or hang on to it: We don’t put slouches on our blog roll, and you might find some new content you really like. (I realize this comment is probably going to cause me extra work somehow, some way, but I do question the Gilligan on Data blog at times, authored by Bulldog’s Tim Wilson.)
• Now, if we already know who you are, then we’ll trigger an e-mail within 1 business day to let you know that we’ve got your subscription. If we don’t know who you are, we’ll still be tracking your activity, but until you bite the bullet and engage with us on a deeper level, by registering for one of our Webinars or white papers, for instance, you can continue to enjoy the anonymity.
• If you’d like to guarantee that you receive that confirmation e-mail from us (proving the technology works), you can subscribe to our monthly Marketing Watchdog newsletter. If you wanted to get fancy, you could subscribe to the RSS feed anonomously and register for something after the fact. This will show the ability to tie back to you after becoming known.

Ready? Click here and subscribe!