Web Business Marketing Blog

Blogs are streams of articles, and a blog software produces a machine readible feed of the its recent articles in an XML format. This makes it easy to integrate a blog into other sites as a ‘what’s new’ stream, a process called syndication:

Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. This could be simply by licensing the content so that other people can use it; however, in general, web syndication refers to making Web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website’s recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts).

The advantage to the feed producer is another website providing traffic for the feed, while the feed user has the advantage of an automatic ‘what’s new’ page. A win-win for both parties.

While deceptively simple, syndication however is only sparsely used in B2B marketing, because of its many non-technical barriers. If you’re a company, it is not obvious for your suppliers or customers to syndicate your feed. And for non-profit organisations (e.g. industry associations), syndicating a feed from a commercial organisation can be a bridge too far. It might work the other way around (an association syndicating a blog to its members), but members may consider the blog an ‘association matter’, and have concerns about competitor members being mentioned. Like-minded organisations, such as ngo’s working towards a common cause could be the best fit, but they worry about the integrity of their campaigns. And irrespective what type of organisation you are, space on your home page comes at such a premium that the rationale to give up some of it must be really compelling. And syndication to a subsidiary page just won’t have the same efffect.

Therefore, syndication is likely to remain a small niche in the (b2)blogosphere. But there are some cases where it makes sense:

• You’re running a specialised website, and want to attract a broader audience by integrating a more general content stream
• Your organisation has many business units around the globe, and you want to establish a common corporate communication stream. Or you want to integrate messages from business units into a feed for internal communication.
• A member-organisation or industry magazine publishing a news feed on a sector.
• …