What? No RSS?!

Scoble blasted a member of a marketing team deep within Microsoft recently when he asked Scoble for some tips and freely admitted that his team didn’t even use RSS feeds on their site.  His post was mistaken for a rant about the necessity of having RSS on a site but as he pointed out, it isn’t just about RSS.  It is about having an interactive site that draws and retains traffic and these days this really only happens when your site has interactive features like RSS.  Given that a lot of traffic comes from bloggers, it becomes more and more important to make sure that the content on your site keeps bringing them back and you don’t achieve that with a static, feed-less site.  This is something I am learning with one of my projects and also why I am going to be restructuring that site soon.

Dave Winer says it quite clearly when he says that:

Not having an RSS feed for a business site is like not having
business cards. The cost is so low, and the price so high for
alienating the small number of people who will actually use one. (And
maybe it’s not such a small number.)

These days and for the forseeable future (and the past for that matter) the profit in business comes from relationships
with customers. If a potential customer wants to deepen the
relationship by subscribing, the wrong answer is "RSS is for geeks."
That would be like saying that business cards are for people with
phones.