I get these questions frequently: “What’s an RSS Feed?” and “Why should I care?” The answer to the first question is an easy explanation. The second one is a more interesting discussion depending on what you’d like to do with your own workflow and getting your message out to your audience.

The basics of RSS

RSS is short for “really simple syndication.” In a nutshell, RSS feeds are a way to have the updated information you want pushed directly to you rather than your having to remember / take the time to check all of your bookmarks for updates.

Feed readers like GoogleReader make it incredibly easy to have all of your RSS feed subscriptions in one place. When content you’ve subscribed to is updated, it automatically pushes that new content to your feed reader. Instead of visiting each of your selected blogs or media outlets to see if they’ve posted anything new, you can sit back with your cup of coffee and let the updates come to you. Really, it will change your life.

There are a great many articles and videos out there explaining the basics of RSS feeds, so I don’t have to reiterate here. There’s a good one by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger if you’re interested, which also contains a nice little video by CommonCraft:

So what else can we do with this?

The meatier conversation comes when we’re working on a website together. Creating RSS feeds for your own site is standard these days, and it’s a great way to help your audience stay connected with you. So it really helps to be comfortable with RSS feeds already when we have the discussion about dynamic content and how to push YOUR information out to YOUR audience.

When setting up RSS feeds on your site, visitors can sign up for one single feed covering all of your content updates or sub-feeds for one or more specific areas. RSS feeds for your comments are also a great community-builder. When someone posts a comment on a blog post, they can sign up to receive an RSS feed of any other comments on that post, which encourages conversation not just with you but also between your site visitors. This is a very effective way to develop community on your site, keep yourself in front of your audience and provide useful information that encourages repeat visitors, links and search engine attention.

Now, single feeds are useful, but we can also tie them together to create aggregated feeds. This sounds complicated but really just means a group of feeds tied together into one single stream. You can create simple aggregated feed streams directly on your site, or enlist any of the user-friendly tools such as Yahoo! Pipes to combine different feeds from multiple sources related to a particular topic. You can then create a new feed that you can filter, sort, map, manipulate and post on your site for others to enjoy.

How could you use this on your site? Say, for example, that you’re an international research organization and you want to provide your audience with a collection of current resources, updates, training, tools, etc. to help them do their jobs better. Your audience could really benefit from a consolidated source of news and updates from a group of sources you’ve tailored to their specific interests. Or you could get fancier with a feed pipe that “mashes” together layers of textual and mapping data to show a dynamic map of, say, HIV/AIDs infection rates by country. More complicated feed pipes can take time to build, but they can be very powerful and useful to your audience.

Using RSS feeds for your internal workflow and on your site are fantastic ways to increase the flow of useful information into and out of your organization. Although you do need to generate some of your own updated content, aggregated feeds let you attract visitors with fresh, useful content you don’t necessarily have to generate yourself. The result? More efficient information sharing, an engaged audience of repeat visitors, better traffic, more incoming links and better search engine rankings. Nice.

How do you use RSS feeds in your organization? Leave a comment!