We took a quick look at corporate, trade association, and non-profit websites. Seems like less than 10% have set up an RSS feed for their news releases. Here’s an example. Here’s another. Notice the and icons.

RSS is the increasingly standard way content get passed around the web — among blogs, websites, and news aggregators. And anyone can subscribe to such feeds for automatic updates of favorite sites, blogs, podcasts, etc.  It’s a contemporary version of an email alert, yet it appears in your browser (and can be turned into email).

So what’s the big deal? If you want to increase the distribution and circulation of your news releases among your journalists, target customers and audiences, and those who move and shake your market or arena, you need to offer RSS feeds of your news releases. For most sites, this is easy to do.

So PR folks and communications managers, tell your IT department or web consultants to turn on the RSS feed feature!