Is RSS a good way to reach high school students?

In one of my latest posts about RSS titled “Why RSS can help you in your recruiting efforts,” I explained why and how “RSS can be a great way to keep in touch with members of the campus community, but is also a very interesting, non-intrusive way to create long-lasting and mutually-beneficial relationships with future students when they are still in high school,” before announcing the launch of the brand new University and College Feed Directory

Last week, Bill Denneen, the Director of Internet Marketing in the Office of Communications at Mount Holyoke College, made this interesting comment about this post:

“I agree that RSS has great potential in college web marketing, but I’m not sure it means a whole lot to high school students. I’d love to see some evidence that they’re using it, but for the time being I think RSS has greater potential for media relations, alumni relations, and intracampus communications.”

Obviously, some hard numbers would be the perfect reply here. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard of any studies conducted on the use of RSS by high school students (If you have, please do share by emailing me at karine@collegewebeditor.com).

However, I can list a few facts to back up my “theory” that RSS is actually a good channel to communicate with this important target audience of ours:

• According to the “Consumer Technographics Q1 2005 North American Youth Devices & Access And Finance Online Study,” a study conducted by Forrester Research with 5,216 North American youths aged 12 to 21 in April 2005, 5% of teens and young adults use RSS feeds. Even if it doesn’t sound like a lot, it’s actually pretty good in comparison with the RSS use by adults as reported by Sean Michael Kerner in “Who’s Using RSS,” an article published by ClickZ in early August. These 5% are especially good when you add that, “Forrester Research Analyst Charlene Li notes the RSS user numbers don’t include users who unknowingly use RSS, such as via a portal like My Yahoo! for example.”
• In the report published in July 2005 and titled “Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation,” the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that, “76% [teens] get [their] news online. That represents about 16 million people and signifies growth of 38% in the number of teens getting news online since 2000.” Because RSS has become the tool of the trade for online news junkies, chances are good that teens — and high school students — will rely more and more on this new delivery platform to get all their online news (including news about colleges).
• Because it can deliver news alerts in the most basic format — text-only, RSS will probably become the next channel of choice to feed content to mobile phones and other small-screen devices, which definitely makes it the next big thing to deliver news to the majority of high school students on the planet ;-)

Not sure yet I made my case?

Well, Dan Karleen, the director of Online Product Delivery at Thomson Peterson’s and the blogger behind “Syndication for Higher Ed,” not only concurs (well, that’s no surprise: isn’t he about to become the “higher ed RSS Guru,” after all?), but also offers an interesting analysis on the topic:

“I’ve seen evidence that a younger audience is picking up on RSS, if not necessarily by that name. Education.yahoo.com hosts a “word of the day” RSS feed for Peterson’s, a feed that’s promoted mainly in the college search area of that site. New subscription rates — people adding this feed to their My Yahoo page — are considerable. The interesting thing is that it’s presented both as an RSS feed and as an item someone can add to their My Yahoo home page. So, there are people taking advantage of RSS without necessarily knowing or caring that it’s RSS, which is exactly how it should be.

The Google Sidebar, for instance, refers to RSS as “Web Clips.” There’s no mention of RSS anywhere. Microsoft has promised that the next major release of the Internet Explorer browser will be RSS-aware, as the Safari and Firefox browsers already are. This in turn will expose a huge audience to RSS. Subscribing will be easier, and probably even automatic, as it is with the Google Sidebar. As more and more of these very popular applications with broad age-appeal take advantage of RSS, colleges are going to want to be there with their information. With this in mind, colleges may want to consider offering their recruiting-oriented feeds as items that can be included in a prospective student’s My Yahoo home page, for example.”

And, when you factor in that all the blogging platforms offer a built-in RSS feed generator, I guess there’s even a bigger chance for a high school student to come across and fall in love in with this communication channel…

However, that doesn’t mean that admission offices should drop all the other traditional (and even online) channels. This only mean that RSS should be integrated in the marketing mix.