Nooked recently performed a small survey, "Nooked - Influencer survey", to establish whether key influencers, such as journalists, analysts and bloggers are using RSS to collect key information and are adopting RSS as an information gathering and tracking tool.

According to Nooked, over 200 individuals from a variety of online & offline media participated, with the following break-down: 25% Journalists, 15% Analysts, 45% Bloggers and 15% other interested parties.

The key finding of the survey is that 87% of influencers are in fact using RSS to keep up with news and other information.

Of course we have to take in to account that these influencers are mostly early adopters, so the results are not surprising at all. But it's still good to have some hard data backing this up.

This is yet another sign for marketers, and I'm including PR people under this umbrella as well, that they cannot afford to overlook RSS as a content delivery channel to deliver their corporate communications to interested parties ... especially given the fact that RSS publishing can be free of any charge whatsoever.

It's a small move to make, but one that can have a profound impact.

Other findings from Nooked include:

a] "40% of participants are consuming between 20-50 individual feeds, with more than 15% consuming over 200 RSS feeds." These numbers produce mixed feelings: if key influencers are only subscribing to 20-50 feeds, how big a space are they really watching? If they're only watching certain big players, which this would imply, how can small companies even get through? Of course, if they're subscribing to services such as news.google.com and PubSub and others that changes the picture, actually giving small companies more leverage to get their content out.

b] "Journalists and Analysts are demanding RSS feeds." The message is clear --- communicating with journalists demands RSS content. With the low barrier to entry, this should make it clear to every company to start providing RSS feeds immediately.

Thanks to Alex Barnett for the heads up.