Using RSS Radars in B2B CRM

RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.

Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.

David's idea is simple:

• Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us
• Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated

This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application:
"The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."

But, there are two problems:

• Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David
• Tagging relevant articles every day takes time ... time that busy B2B marketers usually don't have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients

This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.

Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.

More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)