Enterprise RSS

Employee Portal RSS

Follow on to thoughts about ecommerce RSS, here's the employeesportalblog's thoughts about RSS invading the world of employee portals:

let's take a look at how RSS works within the realm of an intranet or employee portal.

Most obvious, departments publish content using RSS. This enables employees to subscribe to content they are interested in, increasing the likelihood that content will be read when it's new or has changed (employee's don't have time, nor tendency to regularly check multiple intranet site any more so than people check external websites to see if there's anything new that interests them).

Conversely, organizations that deploy RSS readers for internal content enable employees to create their own personal news or content update site to keep track of changing information that's relevant or interesting to them. This is the true definition of a "My Site."

Some basic areas where RSS is perfect include employee communications and internal news, HR communications and benefits updates (helpful for annual enrollment information, year end and new year changes), facilities information (very timely in the NY area with the current transit strike affecting business operating hours), management communications, and sales force related content (product updates, customer data, etc.).

The simplified RSS-trail has been blogs (2003), media (2004), enterprise (2005) (including portals), and now e-commerce...

E-Commerce RSS

Emerging big-time.  As we said over at Newsgator;

Is this the next big application for RSS? Blogosphere in 2004; mainstream media and enterprise (emerging) in 2005; ecommerce RSS for 2006?

Most of the biggest ecommerce sites have launched or are about to launch their first RSS feeds.  All are starting to consider the various ways they can leverage their marketing spend with RSS.

E-commerce sites think of marketing around customer acquisition and retention, and on average spend about 6% of sales on marketing.  Historically, sites spend their acquisition money roughly as follows;

1. 50% search
2. 40% affiliate marketing programs
3. 10% comparison search bots

Note that much of the money spent in the latter two categories is ultimately spent on search, too ... feeding the Google monster...

The leading ecommerce players are starting to experiment with RSS feeds as a way to lock-in affiliates with richer content .... one benefit of which is avoiding the channel conflict inherent in affiliates trying to buy the same paid search terms the ecommerce site wants themselves.

Retention marketing spend is largely (historically) for e-mail and upgrading the basic site experience.  RSS looms for both.  Every major ecomm player is considering how to substitute RSS for email for retention, and most are looking at ways to enrich the site-based user experience around RSS-aggregated content.

The ultimate vision involves enriching the customer relationship around broader and deeper content, available to the customer through whatever device they wish, on a fully synchronized basis.

Stay tuned....

Travelocity , eBay, Orbitz , Amazon....

Vertical RSS era emerging....