After talking to more than 500 people one on one at SES San Jose over the last few days, I now know that very few people understand the power of RSS.  We asked questions of eveyone who came by our booth and this is what we discovered:

Most people know what RSS is, but only about 10% are using it on their websites.  Of course everyone who has a blog has a feed.  But the big surprise to me was that they don’t know what it can do – or why they should pay more attention to it.

In our panel about News Search Nan Dawkins of RedBoots spoke about how to use your blog and pitch other bloggers to get coverage in Yahoo News and Google News. I followed with our case study on the use of RSS and content syndication to get broad pick up and coverage in Yahoo News. (Featured July 21 in PR Week)

The question I got most frequently after that session was “How did you do that?”  When I asked them if they have a feed of their content, many who blog said yes.  But they has not done anything with it. Their feed was not even registered with the 100 + news aggregators.  Many bloggers don’t use Technorati tags or leverage the power RSS feeds can offer. 

They know they have a feed, but they have no idea what it does or how to promote it.

Over the next six weeks I will be writing a series of articles on The Power of RSS and Syndication – a little mini-course, if you will. If this is of interest to you, please let me know