Press Releases & RSS – Will they ever mix?

This week the Syndicate conference is being held in San Francisco. One of the themes is Syndicated Public Relations, which according to the show press release: “Shows how leading PR pros are using blogs, podcasting, RSS, and a new crop of search and tracking tools to build relationships with a new group of influencers while finding innovative ways to stay in touch with established target audiences and communities of interest.”

What’s amusing is how hard it is to find RSS feeds of press releases from either high tech vendors or high tech online media. I’ve been trying to aggregate the press releases from several high tech vendors only to find that in most cases these RSS feeds don’t exist. Take IDG for example. I’m picking on IDG since their subsidiary, IDG World Expo, is running the Syndicate conference. Here is an organization made up of some of the most popular high tech publications, such as ComputerWorld, MacWorld, InfoWorld, … all with an online component. Many of the publications have scores of editorial based RSS feeds, but just try and find an RSS feed of their press releases. As far as I can tell IDC is the only IDG company that provides their press releases as RSS. By the way it’s not just IDG, check out CNET and JupiterMedia — both have long pages of RSS feeds to choose from, but none for their own press releases.

I’ve always found it extremely amusing that high tech media companies push the importance of RSS to syndicate their editorial, while abandoning the concept from their own marketing. While at OSDN we implemented RSS feeds for press releases — now it seems they’ve gone all the way back to availability in pdf format only.

Let’s hope this conference can start to educate and explain how RSS can be an effective marketing and PR tool. Let’s also hope that the public relations teams of media companies will pave the way, by using RSS feeds to get their own PR and marketing messages delivered more ubiquitously.