RSS Feeds Must Be on Candidate Sites
In class this evening, we had a few representatives from Campaign Solutions come speak. Though, I think they do well on their sites, I must say, I think they are completely missing the ball on RSS feeds for campaign sites, due to the simple fact they do not understand their value.
It does not matter how small your campaign is or how rare the news portion is updated, YOU NEED TO HAVE RSS FEED ABILITY ON YOUR CAMPIAGN SITE!
- Speaker: We don’t put RSS feeds on our clients’ sites because most of our clients don’t update their news content often enough.
Conventional web-publishing wisdom says that the way to grow and maintain your audience is to publish often. This is in part because people actually have to remember to visit your site... If all your readers are subscribed to your RSS feed, they don't have to remember to check your site.
Why make it hard on the user? Again, it is ALL about your user!
- Speaker: Another reason we don’t do RSS feeds is because we want to bring people to our site instead.
You can set up your RSS feed to only show the title and the first sentence followed by an ellipsis. Interested readers are then required to click on the article, which takes them to your site, to continue reading.
7 Comments:
I too was a little confused at their lack of a grasp about the benefits of RSS feeds. Considering they are working for one of the biggest campaigns going on right now, is that any indication about how far off RSS feeds are from being a convention on candidate sites?
I think this displays how reluctant the world of politics is generally with technology.
I think the best argument against an RSS feed is the one he mentioned, that he wants people to go to the actual site. But you're right: it's easy to give just a tease of the news item. the RSS feed may need to be put together manually to get the cut off in exactly the right place, but it can certainly be done.
The thing they certainly don't seem to get is that the beauty of RSS is that it tells the user when the site is updated. Rather than passively waiting for a potential voter to visit the site, they can actively seek them out. That alone seems like it would make it worth it...
Great point, Kathie! Some day you'll apply that knowledge to your own consulting firm!
thanks shadow... hopefully one day!
I disagree. I think that RSS feeds have a small to negligable audience right now and that those with RSS feed are not a very good target demographic (I imagine they are younger and less likely to vote). You have a point in that you can just provide a teaser on the RSS feed, but you don't only want people going to the one article on the site, you want them to search around the site. I'm not saying that RSS feeds won't be a good thing in awhile, but now I think they are unneccesary. Good post though.
jd, i'll bet those with RSS feeds are Influentials... and so therefore you do want to target them.
But thanks for the comments
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