In reports that strangely mirror the presentations (intro | in-depth) I gave in Salisbury last week, Charlene Li at Forrester has just released two reports on the uses of RSS in marketing. Check out the comments on her June post asking for creative examples of RSS in marketing.

I haven’t had a chance to read the reports yet, but one thing that jumps out is her finding that “Young consumers between the ages of 12-21 were more likely to be using RSS” — a finding that might intrigue college and university marketers. It correlates with the strong subscription response we’ve seen with some of our RSS feeds on education.yahoo.com, particularly the word of the day feed.

A full week has passed since the Web Communications and Strategies Conference, so it seems like a good time to take stock of the online output from the conference, and look for ways to increase it next year.

The conference was hosted at Salisbury University, in Salisbury, MD, a town near Maryland’s eastern shore, approximately 30 miles west of Ocean City, MD. Many of the 150 in attendance were university webmasters or marketers.

Conference Website

For starters, there is the conference website, which links to several presentations, podcasts, and blogs. Of the ten links to presentations (of a total of approximately 24 presentations given) , six are for presenters from the corporate space, three are for presenters from universities, and one lists both a corporate and university presenter.

Blogs

Several blogs have covered the conference. Here are the ones I’ve encountered that cover the conference with more than a passing mention.

Eduweb: Many reports filed under Higher Ed Web Conference.

Collegewebeditor: A number of reports filed under Conferences.

Sinkingships.net: Lengthy reports and outlines filed under 2005 Web Communications and Strategies Conference.

Audio/Podcasts

Using a wireless lavalier microphone, a small mixer, and a PowerBook, I recorded a few sessions from the conference. The audio is posted on petersons.com for two keynotes and four regular sessions. If you really want to, you can subscribe to the feed, although the last of the audio has already been posted. Regrettably, an inadequate mic setup for an afternoon panel discussion rendered the audio from that session unusable. I had planned to conduct some interviews and post the audio of those, but I was too busy to do the interviews. The conference web site also lists a podcast from the conference by TargetX.

Other Media

There was a TV crew at one of the sessions I attended (I’m fairly certain it was this session), but I didn’t catch the call letters, and I haven’t been able to find a related video or article on any of the local TV station websites.

Search Engine Results

What do some search engines turn up about the conference?

Google: Pages linking to salisbury.edu/webconf. Right now, this returns 15 pages.

Google: A search of .edu pages containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference” today turns up salisbury.edu and only one other .edu, bloomfield.edu.

Yahoo: Pages containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference.” Right now, this returns 238 pages. This turns up one or possibly two additional blogs beyond the ones I list above.

Technorati: Posts containing the terms “salisbury web conference.” Right now, this returns 107 posts, many of which do not pertain to the conference.

Technorati: Posts containing the phrase “web communications and strategies conference.” Right now, this returns 20 posts from the last 26 days.

Commentary on the State of the Online Output

So I have to ask the obvious question. Why do there seem to be so few bloggers among the university web communicators and strategists in attendance at the 2005 conference? I realize that there is some debate about the effectiveness of blogs in the educational process (and this was the subject of many a discussion at the conference), but is there really any debate about the effectiveness of blogs as communication tools on the Internet?

There was free wireless at the conference and in two hotels where most attendees stayed. There were laptops everywhere. But, despite what one observer suggests, the laptops almost certaintly weren’t being used for blogging - at least not blogging about the conference. At most, four or five bloggers posted about the conference, and very little in the way of non-blog web pages have been indexed by Google and Yahoo so far. Am I using the wrong search engines?

Compare this to the output from the recent Syndicate Conference (May, 2005, NYC), for which Yahoo today turns up “about 14,600 results.” My guess is that approximately 300-400 attended this event. (I was among them.)

Promotional Ideas

This gives me an idea for an inexpensive way to promote the conference next year - if the conference occurs (the conference founder and organizer, Shelley Wetzel, is leaving Salisbury University). How about beginning the conference with a mini-workshop on setting up a blog? Using one of the free online blogging tools (e.g. Blogger), a facilitator will walk the audience through the process of setting up a blog and creating their first post. Those with laptops will be welcome create their own blog. In turn, they can use the blog they’ve created as a place to publish their notes about the conference.

I can think of several benefits to doing this. First of all, it’s important for university webmasters and marketers to know how to use blogging software. Second, this will almost guarantee that next year’s conference will dwarf this year’s in terms of online output.

Aside: Come to think of it, Dave Winer’s new outliner/blogger seems particularly well suited to conference blogging.

In the process preparing for this conference, I learned that RSS can be a very useful thing for promoting material that’s yet to be published. Before the conference began, I created a podcast feed and a simple “Welcome” podcast and registered it with iTunes. Conference attendees were able to subscribe to the feed through iTunes during the conference (and I watched several of them do it), before the audio of the sessions had even been posted. By now, the audio has made its way to the machines of those subscribers, without them having to take any further action. So, an additional promotional idea would be to set up an official audio RSS feed for the conference, and maybe even a video RSS feed, and give people who record audio and video from the conference a way to add their material to the feed. Attendees, and anyone from the public, can simply subscribe to one or two feeds, and they will automatically get all of the material that’s posted into that feed.

Last week I gave a talk entitled “A Plain-English Introduction to RSS for Marketing” at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury, MD. Links to the slides and audio are provided below. In this presentation, I introduced web syndication and talked about how marketers outside .edu are taking advantate of RSS to promote more than just news headlines.

A Plain-English Introduction to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) for Marketing

Slides: .zip 2M, 48 .jpg’s | .pdf 4.3M

Audio: mp3 19M, 58 minutes

Last week I gave a talk entitled “The Importance of RSS to a University” at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury, MD. Links to the slides and audio are provided below. In this presentation, I describe in-depth the state of public syndicated feeds from college and university websites. I also present three mini case studies about the use of RSS– two from .edu and one from Thomson Peterson’s.

The Importance of RSS to a University

Slides: .zip 3M, 66 .jpg’s | .pdf 7.5M

Audio: mp3 19M, 58 minutes

Oklahoma Christian University hosts several student blogs. Among them is a blog called “Chase & Chase,” which is authored by a couple of freshmen at the university. But this is no ordinary blog: it’s a video blog. What’s a video blog, you ask? It’s a blog that has video clips instead of text posts. This seems like a great way to help prospective students learn about freshman year at OCU. There are videos on topics ranging from freshman soccer matches, to the new furniture in the dorm lobby, to Chase’s prom date.

I have one little suggestion. I can’t subscribe to this video blog using a video aggregator. While the blog offers an RSS feed, the feed doesn’t contain enclosures, which are necessary for subscription to video blogs (and, for that matter, podcasts). Even if they did offer enclosures, the videos are only offered as streaming media, which wouldn’t give my video aggregator a file to latch onto and download.

This situation is easily remedied, in a way that will still take advantage of the streaming server for those who want to watch the video from within a browser.

1. Create a .mov or .wmv version of the video clips.
2. Point to the .mov or .wmv from the enclosure tag in the RSS feed.

If there isn’t an easy way to create an enclosure tag with the software you’re using, set up a free Feedburner account and simply place the link to the .mov or .wmv in your blog post (make sure those file extensions are present), and Feedburner will automatially create a feed with enclosures for you. Then provide the Feedburner feed URL as a link from your blog, and label it so that people know it’s the one that includes the enclosures.

Putting these things in place will help open this excellent resource to the world of RSS video subscribers.

Thanks to Bob Robertson-Boyd for bringing this blog to my attention.

So you want to offer RSS feeds on your college web site? Go for it! But remember, colleges and universities are not major online newspapers. The possibilities for RSS on a college website go far beyond the headline-oriented feeds offered by online newspapers. You will probably want to take advantage of the inherent flexibility of RSS to publish much more than, say, headlines from your college newspaper. Offered from the perspective of someone who’s subscribed to hundreds of college RSS feeds, here are ten quick pointers that will help maximize return on your efforts.

1. You’ve worked hard to create your feeds. Now feature them prominently! Several colleges promote their feeds on their home page; this is a great idea. It tells visitors that you’re interested in giving them information they want, in a form that’s convenient to them.

2. If at all possible, create a central page where you can list feeds from across the college website. (It won’t hurt to mention a feed in more than one place on your website.) Organize feeds on this page so that people can easily spot feeds that might interest them. The University of Utah provides an excellent example.

3. Link to your central feed page from the college web site home page. Link to your central feed page from anywhere you’re offering RSS feeds.

4. If departments and programs are creating their own feeds, give them an easy way to promote them on the central page you have created.

5. Where you promote feeds, provide a link to find out more about how to take advantage of the feed. Remember, many visitors to your website are new to RSS, and they will need some hand-holding.

6. Be sure that the feed channel title includes the name of the college or university. This will allow people to spot your feed easily in their aggregator. It will also help enable more accurate RSS search engine indexing. (Look for more about RSS search engine indexing in a future post.)

Good example: “Albion College Choir Tour 2005�
Avoid: “Choir Tour 2005�

7. For the same reason that you want to include the name of your college in the channel title, you want to avoid using acronyms alone in the channel title.

Good example: “Arizona State University Digital Media Instructional Technologies Podcast�
Avoid: “ASU DMIT Podcasts�

8. Take advantage of the channel description to explain what’s in the feed, rather than repeating the channel title.

9. If the subject of your feed is seasonal (e.g. baseball), or temporary (e.g. a spring choir tour), you might want to consider indicating this in your channel description. People who use your feeds may unsubscribe when they don’t see a feed being updated; providing them this additional information will let them know when it’s ok to do so (after all the items for a spring choir tour have been published, versus when it’s not—baseball will be back in a few months, and there may also be off-season news you want to hear about). In the case of something like a feed for a spring choir tour, you may even want to let your readers know that publishing has concluded by creating, as the (chronologically) last item in the feed, an announcement saying that postings have concluded for this feed.

10. If you want people to click through to your web site from your RSS feed, make sure you include enough text in the item description to entice them to click through.

There are many more basic best practices. Should I use chicklets to draw attention to my feeds? Should I allow users to add their feeds easily to the MyYahoo home page? Should I enter my feeds in a feed directory? How can I take advantage of the category tag? Should I provide an entire article in the feed, or just an excerpt? I will attempt to answer as many of these questions as possible in the future. In the meanwhile, feel free to drop a comment and share best practices you have found helpful.

Below is a link to slides from my afternoon presentation The Importance of RSS to a University on 7/19/2005 at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury, MD. As with the first presentation, we had a super group of people and some lively interaction.

The Importance of RSS to a University (.zip 2.8M, 66 .jpg’s)

I will be posting the podcast of this presentation shortly; meanwhile, take a listen to some other sessions from the same conference.

If you have any questions about this presentation, please feel free to drop me a comment.

What does podcasting have to do with RSS? This is one of the questions that came up in several sessions earlier this week at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference. It seems fairly common for people to use the term “RSS” in reference to text feeds (i.e. feeds without enclosures), and they don’t automatically connect RSS with podcasting.

So I thought it would be helpful to provide an extended explanation of why, when I talk about the importance of RSS, I talk about podcasting. Some of the reasons were provided at the conference; others go beyond what we had time to cover.

1. A key appeal of RSS 2.0 is the enclosure element, which supports podcasting. Previous versions of RSS did not offer this feature.

2. A podcast isn’t a podcast unless there is an accompanying RSS 2.0 (or Atom) feed. Anything else is just a file (mp3, etc.) sitting on a server.

3. The experience of locating and managing enclosureless RSS 2.0 feeds is similar to that of locating and managing feeds with enclosures. It just happens that most of us use different tools for each.

4. As aggregators converge into a single hybrid type that allows you to manage any kind of feed (iPodderX is one such tool), feeds will no longer need to be distinguished as “text” or “audio” or “video.” Publishers of feeds (feed pubs) will be able to offer feeds that contain a mixture of, say, text and audio. (There’s nothing in the RSS spec that precludes this.) A user will be able to tell the aggregator whether or not to download enclosures that happen to appear in the feed, probably on a feed-by-feed basis. If there’s an enclosure in the feed, the aggregator will know what to do with it. It will be simpler for me, the feed consumer, because I won’t need to go to the effort to subscribe to podcast feeds and text feeds separately.

5. In the future, it will be simpler, and perhaps more effective in some cases, for feed pubs to provide a feed that contains a mix of media types, where one complements the other. Think of the way you blog. If you are including audio in your blog, why be forced to feed it out-of-line as a separate feed from the feed that contains your text posts? We are in a mode where text feeds and audio feeds are kept separate, but this mode coming to an end. I can see reasons why a feed pub might want to keep text and audio feeds separate, but I think this will be the exception.

6. A syndication strategy should consider the variety of syndication options available (text, links, audio, video, etc.) rather than limiting itself to one or another.

Below is a link to slides from my morning presentation today at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury, MD. We had an interested and engaged group. In my opinion, this is what rescued the session from being dry and boring. Thanks, everyone, for the great questions and participation!

Introduction to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) for Marketing (.zip 2M, 48 .jpg’s)

I will be posting the podcast of this presentation, as well as the slides and podcast from my second presentation, shortly.

If you have any questions about this presentation, please feel free to drop me a comment.

Today at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference, we’re announcing the coming launch of the College and University Feed directory, a free resource to help colleges and universities promote their sydnicated feeds.