This week the Syndicate conference is being held in San Francisco. One of the themes is Syndicated Public Relations, which according to the show press release: “Shows how leading PR pros are using blogs, podcasting, RSS, and a new crop of search and tracking tools to build relationships with a new group of influencers while finding innovative ways to stay in touch with established target audiences and communities of interest.”

What’s amusing is how hard it is to find RSS feeds of press releases from either high tech vendors or high tech online media. I’ve been trying to aggregate the press releases from several high tech vendors only to find that in most cases these RSS feeds don’t exist. Take IDG for example. I’m picking on IDG since their subsidiary, IDG World Expo, is running the Syndicate conference. Here is an organization made up of some of the most popular high tech publications, such as ComputerWorld, MacWorld, InfoWorld, … all with an online component. Many of the publications have scores of editorial based RSS feeds, but just try and find an RSS feed of their press releases. As far as I can tell IDC is the only IDG company that provides their press releases as RSS. By the way it’s not just IDG, check out CNET and JupiterMedia — both have long pages of RSS feeds to choose from, but none for their own press releases.

I’ve always found it extremely amusing that high tech media companies push the importance of RSS to syndicate their editorial, while abandoning the concept from their own marketing. While at OSDN we implemented RSS feeds for press releases — now it seems they’ve gone all the way back to availability in pdf format only.

Let’s hope this conference can start to educate and explain how RSS can be an effective marketing and PR tool. Let’s also hope that the public relations teams of media companies will pave the way, by using RSS feeds to get their own PR and marketing messages delivered more ubiquitously.

In a recent report by Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy, reported in Clickz , the tipping point for offline ad dollars moving to online will be in 2006.

“We believe online media now receives about 5 percent of total marketing spending, up from 3 percent two years ago. However, online is on its way to a 10 percent share much faster then we anticipated, and we believe we are now approaching an inflection point when spending growth could accelerate,” Rashtchy wrote in a newly-released report. “This point is likely to be in the second half of 2006, as the full impact of some of the recent allocation increases from major marketers becomes evident and creates a momentum that will attract more spending by advertisers who are on the sidelines now.”

The big winners of all this online ad spending are predicted to be Google and Yahoo. Additional spending will be on smaller vertical sites.

As more and more people are turning to the internet to get their news, shop and answer their basic questions, good online ads can help readers, consumers and researchers find what the items they are seeking. In my opinion this can only be good, and will allow internet sites to be more innovative as they see an increase in revenues.

I have noticed an increase in the number of companies deciding to put their code in the open source arena. Here’s my concern: Open Source is not a silver bullet for ailing enterprise software businesses. Yet, entrepreneurs going into open source today seem to assume they will not need to budget money for sales and marketing. I disagree with this.

To be viable as a commercial open source company, management should consider emulating popular open source products. Most of the “successful” ones have been available as projects for several years, built a significant web presence and have thousands (even hundreds of thousands) of downloads. Getting to this enviable position can be left to chance. Is that a good idea for a commercial entity?

With several hundred thousand open source projects, it is easy to get lost in the melee. Having a better mouse trap, and a free one at that, is not enough. More and more open source companies are turning to traditional ways to get their product known. Firefox, last week, announced it would be turning to its user community to create and produce video ads for future TV and Web campaigns. Other successful open source companies such as SugarCRM and JBoss are turning to Google AdWords and web banner advertising campaigns to get noticed.

Given that users will have even more choice among open source products, gaining more downloads and converting them to paying customers will require innovative and potentially costly marketing and sales programs. If commercial open source company management teams don’t plan how to grow their businesses, we will end up with a dot com fiasco once again.

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