RSS isn’t only for blogs and online news sites anymore: Corporations are beginning to see potential in this increasingly popular communication channel for keeping in touch not only with customers and partners but also with employees.
Such is the obviously self-serving assessment of Michael Terner, CEO at KnowNow, a Kleiner-Perkins-backed software integration specialist that has hopped aboard the RSS bandwagon with unbridled enthusiasm.
“RSS in the U.S. today is a mechanism for blogs and media, primarily for news,” Terner says. “What we have begun to see is the adoption of RSS on a broader basis by enterprises for moving any sort of information more easily.”
KnowNow’s trophy customer is ING Group, a European business services company whose chairman is apparently fond of communicating directly with all 115,000 far-flung employees on a regular basis. “They’ve embedded our [RSS] reader into their IBM WebSphere portal,” Terner says, and are looking to expand the use of RSS into a number of areas.
Customer care and feeding is a fertile field, according to Terner. Companies that offer e-mail updates to customers who are willing to register for them typically can expect participation rates of only 10% to 15%, he says. “Users don’t always register, because they’re afraid of getting too much e-mail or inappropriate stuff,” he says. “And, in fact, that is the case most of the time. The publisher owns the subscription, and if it gets sold you might get a bunch of spam along with it.”
Giving customers another option – RSS and its inherent anonymity and user control – might bring another 20% of the target audience into the communication channel, he says.
But how can the consumer masses, who only recently gained comfort with simple e-mail, possibly be counted on to embrace something as exotic as RSS?
“That’s a really fair question and I agree with you that there is a problem,” Terner says. “RSS today isn’t simple for consumers. It’s pretty straightforward for the early adopters, but something even simpler is needed. That is part of what our offer is. We’ve put together a product that is used by enterprises and allows them to deliver a preconfigured, preloaded RSS reader to the customer. The customer doesn’t even really need to know that they’re getting RSS feeds.”
The issues are different within a corporate environment where employers may need or want to control the number and types of RSS feeds that are being accessed in the workplace.
KnowNow’s LiveServer “works significantly different from a regular RSS reader where the user controls everything,” Terner says. “In an enterprise we need to get somewhere between the e-mail model where the subscription is controlled by the publisher and the RSS model where it is controlled by the user. We bridge that gap because we’ve got a server.”
Among the stakes of allowing an RSS free-for-all is a possible repeat of the bandwidth issues seen during the heyday of push technology, he says.
“If everyone goes and gets a standard RSS reader then you could have the situation where you have 10,000 employees subscribing to a variety of internal feeds and some external ones like the weather,” he says. “You could literally have 10,000 readers checking at the top of every hour to see if the weather has changed. That will bombard your internal infrastructure.”
Terner also sees a tangential benefit for networks from RSS-based communications: better spam control.
“If you have general-purpose information flows being sorted out and managed using an RSS mechanism, you can crank up the spam filters on e-mail until it’s getting closer to a white list,” he says.
E-mail remains the communication channel of choice here. The address is buzz@nww.com.
