Open The Dialogue

• Over on Twitter, MarketingProfs point out a great item from Mack Collier, who suggests that we’re all becoming extroverts. And by all, he means, people well beyond the “usual suspects” in the Web 2.0 space. (TB)
• Between this mention on Twitter from Constantin Basturea regarding “complaints” on FOX’s “Family Guy” and Doyle Redland’s rant on ranters at The Onion (probably NSFW for some of you), I’d say that someone’s trying to say a little something-something about complainers on the Internet. (TB)
• Thomson Reuters has issued a new code of conduct for employees of the merged company, some of which touch on blogging. While it’s apparently alright to mention you work for T-R on your blog you are restricted from mentioning competitors as well as any conflicts you might have with fellow employees or the company itself. (CT)

Wake up, publishers, developers, and PR people. RSS doesn’t mean a thing to the “users” of the Internet.

This morning, Adam Ostrow published an awesome essay at Mashable! about RSS and its (mis)use, entitled “RSS Needs An Easy Button,” and I seriously couldn’t agree more. If I stopped doing all the other great work I get to do at this agency and focused on one part of it, it would be the inclusion of, and education on, RSS to the masses.

When I say the masses, I don’t mean those of us probably reading this blog, Mashable!, TechCrunch and a host of others. I mean my mom, my sister, Chris Thilk’s family, and those of all of our friends and family who use the Internet regularly but don’t have a clue what that little orange (or whatever) icon means and how to use it. To this day, it still continues to fail to work like 99% of the rest of the Internet does when you click on it, and only those who have those RSS links take you to a page explaining RSS and offering a host of feeds and ways to use the feeds manage to take a step towards solving this problem.

Sure, a lot of us are using RSS feeds every day, and we know how powerful it can be and how it truly allows you to scale on a huge level. Every single “boot camp” that our DialogueMedia team does with an MWW Group staffer or a client’s PR / marketing team that goes through RSS is met with an “OMIGOSH, howcome I wasn’t taught about how to use this in college?” when it’s people fresh out of school or “WOW, so I can subscribe to ALL of this content, sort it, and manipulate it this way on my mobile, desktop, or on the Web?” And yet, unless you’re running a new versioned browser (and trust me developers, the MASSES are not using IE7 and unfortunately not consistently using Safari or Firefox or one of the others that knows what to “do” with RSS once it’s clicked on.

Back in late 2005 I slammed the people behind the “redesign” of the RSS icon to the nifty little square most of us are probably seeing in the address bar right now, and how they were missing the point. Well guess what, nothing has TRULY changed. It’s two and a half years later, almost, and what HAS changed? Well, anyone with a new browser is at least greeted with a page showing you that there are ways to use it and it doesn’t react by throwing a ton of code up on the page. Other than that, it might work sort of like a multimedia link does, opening up a second piece of software if a feedreader is installed on the computer, or if Outlook were auto-configured to snag feeds when people clicked on them. Oooh. And RSS adoption has moved like molasses that’s going slightly downhill rather than on a flat countertop.

At the end of the day, I am not sure what the best “solution” is for this problem – which is widespread, frankly – but I think it’s up to a lot of “us” to figure it out. Publishers and developers need to consistently have an “explanation” for what it is on their site, or an easy link, and that should come out of the box with blogging and CMS software. Major publishers need to either better explain how people can get their news and information on their terms. Sites like Yahoo! and AOL’s portals do a great job of incorporating RSS use into their “My” pages, but not everyone is sure that that’s what they’re looking at – great start, but there’s more work to do.

This last part begs me to ask the question as to whether publishers and others are lax to move on RSS as a subscriber option because they know that right now, the “masses” are still coming to their site, clicking around, surfing through this and that, and that would all but change significantly. Obviously I don’t want to be so cynical about it, but could that be a reason, or will that be a reason of concern once the advent of RSS and its true impact reaches a boardroom somewhere?

From a development standpoint, I’m not sure what needs to be done, exactly, but any way to make it a little less “odd” of a thing on the page – and trust me, having it in the address bar is nice, but people STILL don’t know what to do with it – would be my best recommendation.

As far as PR people go, why hasn’t RSS gotten its due in every single “tech & lifestyle” section of every single daily newspaper in America, and I’m not talking about in the “ask a question” column? Want to get people to start using it and be able to hold their attention better? Let them know it actually exists in the first place. RSS, in THIS form, isn’t SUPPOSED to be invisible, at least not yet. Get it to the point where when you say “RSS,” “feeds,” or something like that a blank stare isn’t the response when you’re speaking with people are pretty big Internet users but not super technically savvy. RSS can distribute to my TiVo, power your My Yahoo! page, and make widgets work left and right, but until someone has a clue of what to do with the damn link on some crazy large percentage of pages on the ENTIRE Internet, its usage will never be what it should be.

For my latest question to be answered, I’m wondering why I can’t select any sort of “I don’t know anyone here” option on LinkedIn when it comes to fellow students at schools I’ve gone to, like I can with companies I’ve worked at.

The always-awesome Mario Sundar already responded to my short video over on Flickr, stating that he’s sent the suggestion to the production folks. Let’s see what happens! (it’s like we switched their coffee to Folgers or something…)

New research from Nuance Care Solutions brings to light a number of interesting statistics on how social media is playing into consumer attitudes:

• 72 percent say they research a company’s customer service reputation online prior to making a purchase.
• 74 percent are actually basing their decisions on who to do business with based on what they find.
• 59 percent use social media to express their frustrations with their customer service experiences.
• Only 33 percent say they think companies take complaints voiced online seriously, though a couple brands in particular were singled out as doing a good job along these lines.

More than all that, though, is the fact that, as the story says, search has impacted how people expect customer service to react to them. Through search, which often leads to social media like blog posts, communities and forums and other such platforms, people are expecting to get helpful answers immediately and are frustrated with customer service experiences.

This study also identifies the gaping void that exists for companies to pay attention to what’s being said about them online and interact there in order to solve problems. Problems are only problems as long as they remain unsolved, and posts with complaints are going to be updated with positive resolutions, but only if someone’s listening and reacting.

Along these same lines, Leigh Householder has a good post up on monitoring Twitter as a way to identify brand reputation management issues that might be floated there before being turned into full-fledged posts detailing all the problems someone has with a company.

• Wired is working on a journalistic stylebook that’s specific to online writing, focusing on things like best linking practices and web-specific terminology. Seems like a great idea that’s long overdue. (CT)
• The Wall Street Journal gives a “Blog Relations 101” lesson to its readers, but also includes a mention of Twitter, which is where it probably lost a lot of people. [via Todd] (CT)
• Some good corporate blogging tips from Jason Falls. [via John Cass] (CT)
• Greg Verdino correctly identifies the “Ooo…ads…let’s go somewhere else” syndrome that seems to afflict a good number of free online platforms as soon as monetization is introduced. (CT)
• More thoughts, this time from Lee Odden, on using SEO as a PR tool. (CT)