re: RSS - probably the worst advice I've heard so far

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I'm sorry, but I'm going to have a good old rant here...

PR Week quotes Dr George Kolb, VP of PR agency Text 100 giving probably the worst 'professional' advice I've heard on the subject of RSS. It is verging on the astonishing.

"Agency Text 100 is developing its own response to the RSS phenomenon, although by taking a slightly different approach.
'You can put RSS news feeds on company or agency sites, but it's the wrong approach, because in doing so you're still trying to replicate the push of press releases, except you have a filter on the news you put out,' says Dr Georg Kolb, Text 100 executive vice-president (global consultancy and practices)."

a picture of someone looking astonished

I'm sorry, but did he just say don't add a RSS news feed to your company website? Well, not quite, he said it was the 'wrong approach'. Why...?

'If you want to make a difference, the best thing is to try and engage directly with your audiences and understand what their experience is and then offer them RSS feeds that speak directly to this.' And Kolb is not talking about press releases."

'If you want to make a difference'. ..? He means a difference to the road known as common sense, surely?

With all due respect to Dr Kolb, he needs to understand this: if a company doesn't have an RSS feed on their company website, I can't subscribe to the RSS feed. It really is as simple as that. To be fair, Dr Kolb isn't saying don't publish RSS on a company website, he's just advising the one should sophisticated about doing it. But I couldn't disagree more.

Start basic. Get your RSS feed out there. Provide your press releases in RSS, in fact provide whatever you publish today as RSS. Then, and only then, should you start trying to be clever and 'engage directly with your audiences' (pr-speak for 'research') and provide RSS feeds that take things to the next level. Why? Becasue you'll end up faffing around for ages trying to be clever, not get the basics done and not get a single RSS subscriber in the meantime. In the 'pr' business this is sub-optimal.

So if you happen to have anything to do with running a company website (pr, marketing, IT, whatever) my advice to you is to do exactly the opposite of what Dr Kolb advises (in this case at least - Dr Kolb has provided more sensible thoughts relating to RSS previously).

Btw, to whoever runs Text 100's website: I dare you to add an RSS feed on your site (I've looked - no RSS feed to be found on a website run by so-called communication professionals, not a single RSS bean). Hey, once they do I might even subscribe (unlikely though).

/rant.