BBS Day 3 Kickoff: Attensa Breakfast Session

Scott Niesen, of Attensa, starts off the day with a presentation on the practical business applications of RSS, and RSS enterprise solutions. I’ve dropped my usual bullet-list of running thoughts below:

• The holy grail of marketing is getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
• The feed tools at Attensa, says Scott, are designed to use RSS feeds to get the right information to the right people instantaneously, without overloading them.
• There are stages of RSS in Business:
  1. Blog posts and news headlines come in.
  2. They start using them for business intelligence alerts.
  3. Then they get circulated around with internal blogs and wikis.
• Then businesses get RSS-enabled enterprise systems to really harness RSS as a business tool.
• RSS readers allow you to access what is essentially an indispensable research tool, for example, monitoring RSS feeds from the blogosphere lets you do pretty intense brand monitoring, just by running a constant keyword search.
• Persistence and Subscription: RSS is an indispensable collaboration tool in its ability, in an internal blo for example, to make new developments available instantaneously of changes or updates. In short, a great way to track team projects.
• CEO blogging is a great way to build a shared vision - Attensa CEO keeps a private and a public blog, both of which help keep the company headed in the same direction.
• RSS connects to a ton of different data types that go beyond traditional blogs and wikis - they use RSS to deliver podcasts within the company.
• Sales force leads can be delivered to blackberries very conveniently with feeds. Good idea.
• RSS is a double-edged sword - old methods of getting information are not going away - so RSS is convenient, but it’s also another possible way to get to information overload.
• The difficulty is creating a system whereby you get the news you want (or need) without getting overloaded with millions of feeds (anyone who uses an RSS reader knows how difficult this is).
• This is kind of cool: in the new Attensa reader, the feeds you look at most automatically rise to the top of your list. Kind of like the “most played” list in iTunes.
• When you’re looking at enterprise RSS options, Scott has a list of 7 things to check, some of them:
  1. Is it easy to install and deploy?
  2. Access it anywhere? Offline, web and mobile?
  3. Synchronization - critical!
  4. LDAP integration and Exchange support (I don’t know what that means…let me see if Wikipedia does…I’m guessing this one)
• Question: What’s the smallest size company that this enterprise type solution is practical for? Scott says: well, a company of one can download the Attensa reader and get a lot of benefit about it. But for the more complex systems, they recommend you start around 100 employees.