When is an PR RSS feed appropriate?

I just had an interesting e-mail discussion with a friend of mine regarding when it’s appropriate to have an RSS feed.

He is working with a client and has encouraged them to provide an RSS feed for corporate news. All good right and true so far…

However, they were a little sceptical.  As a small company they only have probably a limited number of news items every month – two on average and they are concerned that it doesn’t warrant an RSS feed.

My advice is that there is no critical barrier on the number of news items you push down your RSS feed. The beauty of RSS, is that even if you only publish an item every six weeks, your audience’s RSS reader will flag the new item as it’s published.

We don’t really know at this point how people will use RSS readers, however it’s very likely that individuals will subscribe to companies they track and even small companies can participate.

There may even be a role for PR agencies here, just as with the G2B Group example last month, where journalists subscribe to agency RSS feeds, and there they can read about all the clients – or as Elizabeth Albrycht has suggested, the agency could provide sectoral feeds for “Semiconductors”, “Developer Tools”, “Gardening Tools” etc.

This stuff is still in its formative stages, but journalists (primarily tech to date) are already using it.  Can you afford to ignore any audience? Remember it’s not the size of your RSS feed, it’s the quality 🙂