I am not a techie, affectionately know to many as a geek. I don’t know how to code. I can barely get Technorati tags to work. I am simply a marketer who loves this new media 2.0 technology because of what it can do: increase awareness, further reach, build relationships, tell the story my way. In other words for the end results.

One of the techniques that I believe will impact new media word of mouth buzz is RSS – Real Simple Syndication. However, I often find it’s not so simple to explain. If you can’t help people get it .. they’re obviously not going to use it.
Deb Franke, e-Marketing Manager at Emerson Process Management faced the same challenge when she wanted to bring blogs and RSS to the company’s emarketing efforts. Deb knew that the RSS adoption rates were low and needed a to find a way to increase those numbers. She told me that her team created an RSS Starter Kit as a way to help customers with the learning curve. By the way count EPM as the newest F100 blog.

“We hope to help the entire process manufacturing community see the value that we see with RSS and be able to immediately work smarter and faster because we believe RSS can short-cut the learning process. We hope one of the ways they use RSS is to more easily fnd the experts around Emerson who can help address some of the challenges they face on a daily basis.”

EPM is making their RSS Starter Kit available to all. The kit includes a how-to subscribe-to an RSS reader video along with all the who-what-whys of RSS. You may have a different favorite reader but the video does show the process of how easy it is to get started and provides clear answers to the basic who-what-why questions.
If you really want to jazz up a news aggregator and use it as a marketing tool – BuzzHop will create a branded reader with the elements of your logo.

Diva Markeing has examples of companies using RSS as a website strategy.