The Librarian in Black brought my attention to this survey.

According to a MarketingSherpa survey, at least 75 million consumers and business people in the USA and UK use RSS on a regular basis. However, only 17-32% of RSS users actually know they're using RSS. Why is this? Most of the RSS users use MyYahoo or MyMSN to monitor their news and interest stories. They don’t realize that MyYahoo and MyMSN are RSS readers compiling their selected feeds. Even though these users are using RSS feeds they are likely to bypass the orange RSS button on a site because it is techie gibberish to them. However, if it is viewed as a news feed within their reader (MyYahoo or MyMSN) they are more likely to subscribe to it. “It's the newsiness of the content that makes RSS compelling to them, not the whiz-bang coolness of RSS itself.”

So what does this mean to libraries offering RSS feeds to their users? Obviously our users do not associate the term RSS with the concept of getting news feeds. Remember, most of our users don’t know what ILL or Interlibrary Loan means, they just know the library doesn’t have the book and they want it. So, it shouldn’t come as a shock that they are also unaware of what the term RSS means. If you want them to subscribe to our RSS feeds you have got to stop using the word RSS, plain and simple. Dump the orange button and call it a news update link, a current library events link, etc. Who cares what you call it as long as it make sense to them.

Next you need to get people to want to subscribe to your feed. You need to publish frequently (daily or weekly). People want current and relevant information. If you or your library doesn’t have the time or people to maintain and update the feeds, it is worthless. MarketingSherpa also recommends that the content be “newsy” (newsletter articles, fact-of-the-day, offer of the day.) I am not sure if a library specifically should stick to that recommendation. Perhaps libraries have other types of uses for a feed that my not be considered “newsy” but are successful. It is all about content, if you don’t have it and you don’t update it, why should they subscribe to it.

Brand your feed. Users tend to identify the news feeds as coming from their reader (MyYahoo or MyMSN) not from the original source. They may subscribe to various sources but the information is still collected and read from one place, their reader. In other words, “they love their reader more than they love the particular brands within it.” Including your library name automatically as a part of every headline increases your visibility and helps combat the idea that it is just another feed within the reader. Simply put, it gets your name out there and on their minds, and that is almost always a good thing.

Use feed aggregators. MarketingSherpa says to “get your feed included as a part of one the ever-increasing numbers of aggregated feeds.” Aggregated feeds are RSS feeds that are themselves clumped together feeds from several sources. I am not sure how well that works for libraries, but I would be interested to see if anybody has done this successfully for their library feeds as a way to reach out their users. One thing a library can easily is to offer your own aggregated feeds. Many bloggers are now offering their own aggregated feeds, people can see what news and sites the author is reading. This would be perfect for any special library. For example, medical libraries could show a list of feeds from medical journals, medical news sites, etc.

If you need some examples of what other libraries are doing to get the creative juices flowing check out:
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library -Check it out on the MAIN PAGE! Library News and Health News on the right hand side. They have up to date information under their news and they have an aggregate list of health news displayed on their site from the New York Times Health, Reuters Health, MEDLINEplus, and Google Health News.

Georgia State University Library -Unfortunately their Library News and Subject Blogs are not displayed on the main page, but there is a link to them on the main page. What I find neat is not only do they have subject blogs but they list the most current posts (off all their blogs) in the center, and then have links to the specific subject blogs on the right. It is a long list perhaps that is why it is not on the main page.

Ann Arbor District Library - Posts from all of the blogs appear front and center on the home page, with a link back to the rest of that subject’s blog. What is really cool is that they allow patrons to comment, and the patrons most definitely comment. One post has 32 comments!


Bottom line, RSS feeds offer a lot of opportunities to reach out to users, we just have package it in a way that is meaningful and useful to them. But isn’t that what we should be doing with all of our services?