Emerson Process has recently adopted RSS, as reported by Steve Rubel. Unlike most RSS publishers out there, Emerson Process takes the extra effort to provide their visitors with the RSS Starter Kit. The kit contains the what, why and how to get the started in subscribing to web feeds.

Charlie Wood at Moon Watcher named Emerson RSS adoption overkill. He blogged that their implementation serves best as an example of what not to do.

If you go to the Emerson Process homepage, you will see that they promote RSS diligently. The well-thought process is what other marketers should model on. They make the bold headline RSS related, although I guess they could have done better with a better headline. Note: The headline as of now reads Do ou RSS? We do.

According to Charlie, the form that prompts you to customize your feed by specifying your job function, department, industry, product interests and service interests is overwhelming. The process should be easy instead of complicated.

He further explains why he thought the approach is problematic:

1. It takes control away from the user - Just provide different content feeds for users to choose.
2. It creates needless complexity for the site administrator - Extra work to add new content type and program the web application to display the form and geenrate dynamic feeds.

As to the first point, I would say that it is partially accurate. There are a lot of RSS users who simply don’t realize they are using the technology. Thanks to web portals such as My Yahoo! and MSN. Your visitors can subscribe to your feed by clickig on a button or searching on Yahoo! Very simple yet powerful process.

Emerson definitely don’t want to miss this, which they did. Providing quick links for users to access their feeds is important to increase subscriber rate.

On the other hand, the approach gives more control to the user. Simply think about Google News. I find it virtually impossible to subscribe to a topic full of news. But it is far more feasible to consume news returned by keyword based search.

Regarding the second point, I have to disagree though. Segmentation and personalization are two powerful tactics to better qualify your susbscribers and increase response. Having accurate and detailed data is marketers’ gold.

Users who are willing to take the steps through the form are very interested in highly focused content. They may subscribe because they have the control to get just the content they want instead of being bombarded by bulk content.

Via: Micro Persuasion.
Source: Moon Watcher.
Link: MyEmerson News.