When thinking about a certain marketing channel we usually think from the viewpoint of the hat we're wearing.

If I'm a direct marketer, I can only use RSS for my outbound communications, pushing my sales messages to my audiences, right?

Of course not.

Getting the most from RSS demands taking a wider view. Not thinking only with the hat on your head.

So what are some of the things direct marketers can do with RSS?
[and everyone else as well, of course]

• Front-end: Advertising & promotions
  • Affiliate advertising
    (1) Providing your affiliates with RSS feeds they can either use to publish the latest content/products from you on their websites or promote to their visitors, getting a commission on every sale made.
    (2) Communicating with affiliates using RSS, both for training content and for delivering the latest offers or sales collateral.
    
    
    
  • Search Engine Optimization
    Using RSS to improve website search engine placement (enriching the website content with relevant content from other sources; getting more inbound links from relevant websites through a smart syndication strategy or RSS directory submissions) and to further distribute website content to the News Engines and Content Aggregation sites, where this content can be discovered by relevant target audiences.
    
    
    
  • Merchandizing (other sites)
    Using RSS feeds to deliver the latest product information, ready made for automatic on-site publishing, to other webstores for their inclusion in their product catalogues.
    
    
    
  • RSS Advertising
    Using third-party RSS feeds as an advertising medium.
    
    
    
• Middle-end: Family of websites
  • Enhancing Website Content
    What if Amazon used RSS to tap into thousands of online content sources, to bring their visitors all the latest news, blog commentary and reviews about each individual product it carries? This would enhance the visitor experience (since visitors could directly use Amazon to get all the information on a specific product from multiple sources, directly through Amazon), increase visitor-to-customer conversion, increase web-site stickiness and visit frequency, as well as provide Amazon with even more relevance for specific products for the search engines. With RSS this can all be done using RSS aggregation & filtering tools.
    
    
    
  • Capturing Additional Leads
    Since RSS is easy to subscribe to, without any spam concerns from the consumer, offering RSS feeds on a website increases the number of leads or subscribers that the website is able to capture.
    
    
    
• Back-end: Follow-up and Call Center
  • Follow-up
    Using RSS for all of the different types of customer follow-up, such as e-zine publishing and transactional messaging.
    
    
    
  • Call Center
    Using RSS to improve the flow of information within the Call Center, as an internal communications channel.
    
    
• Business Intelligence
  RSS is one of the best business intelligence and market research tools available today. For direct marketers and e-commerce professionals that means being able to more easily get information on competitors, detect dissatisfied customers and respond to them, manage their reputation and also quickly receive all the pricing changes made by their competitors.

The point?

If you're a direct marketer, direct messaging to your prospects and customers is not the only thing.

The same goes for all the other marketing & business jobs anyway.