One aspect of Bing that seems to have been overlooked by many is the RSS (yes I’m still obsessed). You can create an RSS feed for ANY search, simply by putting “&format=RSS” on the end of the search string. Thats pretty damn powerful.
So if you want to keep tabs on a particular topic then you can run a query and create an RSS for your feedreader. You can so a similar thing too with GoogleAlerts too.
Lets assume for example I want to keep track of “Pfizer”.
http://www.bing.com:80/news/search?q=pfizer&go=&form=QBNR&format=rss
Simple. You can of course also use that as a news feed on your site. You do of course get a lot of rubbish returned, but hey, its free.
I think I am getting obsessed with RSS feeds. However it occurs to me that you cant do much digital marketing with them. And feed reading is much easier now it is build into most new browsers. (Safari, Opera and Chrome are all good!)
Why use RSS?
What’s Going On
How can you find out what’s going on in your field? Well, I use an RSS reader (actually I use the build in reader in the Opera Browser) to display feeds from a range of sites. that way I can scan down and see what’s new. It certainly saves opening a dozen or more websites. I read feeds for most of the major pharmaco’s PR(where they have them), and a selection of other sites. (reuters, bbc health, Department of Health etc.)
Tell The world
If you have content of your own, make sure its available in RSS! and make sure as many variations as possible are on RSS. Better still, allow your users to define their own feeds. For example, candidates who save a job search on PharmiWeb.com have the ability to read their job alerts as an RSS feed.
This blog has an RSS feed, and so you can subscribe to it and find out when I update it without checking back every day!
Keeping Control of your own RSS feeds
One thing I’ve had problems with is keeping track of the feeds that I generate. Enter Feedburner. Feedburner is one of Google’s goodies that allows you to log and track your feeds, so you can see how many subscribers you have and also modify elements of the feed without going back to your website developers. I’ll do more on Feedburner later, because there are some cool features, but essentially you can add your feed to feedburner and it creates a new XML/RSS feed which you can modify, log, publicise, etc etc. Well worth doing.
