Morning is always my favorite part of the day. The world is just starting to wake up. The sun peeks through the windows and floods the home or office with rich warm light. The world is relaxed and the hustle and bustle of the day has yet to begin. These are the times I love to sit back and catch up on the news. I always told my friends they would know I had it made when I had the milk and the newspaper delivered to my home. The milk comes every Wednesday but the paper never shows up on my porch, its on my phone.

The advent of the newspaper was the beginning of a billion dollar industry that created some of the first millionaires in the United States, but those days are disappearing. Depending on the source it appears newspaper readership is down 25-40%! Almost all newspapers are losing clients except the Wall Street Journal who saw a small uptick to a little over 2 million viewers. The main reason the Wall Street Journal increased was due to the simple fact that they are one of the few papers charging for their online news publications. They now have over 400k online viewers (I am one of them).

The writing is on the wall and that the newspaper will soon be an item only viewed in museums. The advantages of the News Paper were numerous, but perhaps the biggest advantage they brought to their clients was the fact that they were literally going into customers’ homes everyday! Think of the power you could have if you could get in front of millions of people everyday. The exciting news is: you can! With the advent of social media you have the ability to talk to your prospective clients every day. The main reason newspaper readership is down is because there is no need to buy a paper and read about news that happened 24 hours ago, or longer, when you can get real time news on multiple websites and social media platforms across the Internet. The world has evolved to the point that the faster you can get information the better off you are. Thus enters the RSS feed. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. Although the development of RSS Feeds has had a somewhat troubled and often contentious start (see wikipedia for a detailed history), RSS Feeds have given people the opportunity to get information they desire delivered directly to them almost instantly.

An RSS Feed is simply a way for people to get access to any content you post without those people having to go to your site everyday. This gives people the ability to request information from multiple sites and have it all delivered to one convenient location via a Feed Reader or Feed Aggregate. There are multiple Feed Readers on the market. You can go to http://bit.ly/lXvG6 for more detail about the options available to you. Typically it is simple to start getting RSS Feeds. All you have to do is click on the Orange box with the radio waves in it (this has become the universal symbol for RSS Feeds). Choose which reader you would like to use. I prefer NetNewsWire just because I like the format and the ability to comment on blogs without leaving the feed reader.

Interestingly, one of the largest Feed Readers, Bloglines which is a subsidiary of Ask.com, will be discontinuing their reader service as of November 1, 2010. As they said “The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregate usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact.. The writing is on the wall”

Does this mean that RSS Feeds are dead? Absolutely not. This is a fantastic way to stay in front of your clients daily, but Ask.com does bring up a good point. We are in a social world. Is your content being published socially? We all want the best effect we can get from our marketing but the simple fact is times have changed. If you want the most out of your marketing you need to change with the times.