We’d been merrily blogging away for several weeks when we heard from a client that not posting the full text of our posts on our RSS feeds was discouraging him from reading them. As with many of the more obscure aspects of blogging (obscure at least to neophytes), this was news to us on two fronts. One, we didn’t know anyone was actually subscribing to our blog yet. And two, we didn’t know full feeds weren’t being syndicated. (Easy, folks - we can hear the sneers. Give us a break; we’re learning.)

Of course, as soon as we found out about the situation we also discovered yet another area of ignorance: the parameters of the debate (if any) around the topic of full vs. summary feeds. In my capacity as a marketing guy (if not a user-centered design consultant), my reflex was to view summary feeds like news headlines, search results, or initial screens from a database retrieval effort. That is, as signals that might or might not interest me, but which were easy to scan and took up fairly limited space. Also, of course, I was psyched about any increase in pageviews that might result from people having to click through to our site to read posts.

As occurs so often at Catalyst, however, particularly when a client is involved, the reflexive view was run through the wringer. Interestingly, around the same time, some particularly visible debate in the blogsphere on this topic appeared. Steve Rubel noted Chris Pirillo’s decision not to syndicate full content any longer. And Pirillo, naturally, explained himself thoroughly - but still received an ocean of mostly negative comments.

Where did we emerge after our own discussions? We turned the full feeds on right away. We probably would have done this even without fine-tuning our thoughts - since we like to make clients happy. And if the client is also a regular reader…well, what sort of user-centered designers would we be to ignore a user? But more authoritatively, we reached several supporting conclusions around this decision:

- Anything that makes our site/blog more accessible is a good thing. And judging from the tone of the comments on Pirillo’s post, full feeds are currently an accessibility driver. Maybe this will change…but for now, it seems clear people want them.

- As a corollary, full feeds bring our blog TO people, rather than forcing them to come here. Although that sounds crazy from one marketing perspective - from another, it’s perfect. If it’s awareness and engagement we’re after, going to the user is terrific. It might curtail undifferentiated traffic, but this a) doesn’t matter because we are not selling ads on the site; and b) is perhaps good, in that the people who do arrive at the site might be more self-selected for high interest.

- As our new friend Chris Halvorson from Stonyfield Farm and his CEO implied in their BusinessWeek appearance a month ago (which we commented on), blogs - even business blogs - should probably not “sell” anything. We’re not trying to directly convert anyone into Catalyst customers here. So, again, traditional marketing priorities get mediated. I don’t want to compromise readership with an orthodox view of sales.

- We have to post with an awareness that we’re being read inside a reader. And not an assumption that people are viewing us on the site. This means that if we want to preserve some element of the whole-blog flavor outside the site, we need to maintain that “true voice” and also link self-referentially as well as externally. So that even if someone reads just one complete post, they’ll have a chance to see others.

JF

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2005 at 10:12 am and is filed under Interaction Strategy, Diary of a Business Blog.