Dear The Wall Street Journal: Please Fix Your RSS Feeds
I’m loath to use this blog to just complain about things that annoy me, but this is one that REALLY annoys me. For some reason in the last couple of weeks the Wall Street Journal has taken to publishing a new RSS entry every time an article is updated. This has been bearable so far, but this morning I was faced with at least 20 different entries pointing to the same Yahoo!/Microsoft search deal (see below). I have yet to unsubscribe completely, but am thinking very hard about it.
For marketers there is a clear lesson: RSS, and social media in general, have a very low switching cost for users. A simple click and I’m gone. If you spam users, get too “salesy”, or get too far off topic users can easily move on to something else. The reward of an engaged audience can be high, but the risk of alienating them, or tripping over your own feet is high as well. Experiment, but be careful.
For The Wall Street Journal, please, for the love of God, fix your RSS feeds!
