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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:

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.