Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I was having dinner with my love last night at Toro Bravo, a delicious new tapas restaurant in Portland. We were talking about my propensity to have my head in the clouds (or other, much darker places) when it comes to communication tools.

Here’s how it went:

“This is way better than Patanegra,” I said after about my third bite, referring to another tapas place here. “I wonder how they’re doing now that this place is open?”

She’s a foodie, and reads Portland Food and Drink (a local food blog) religiously.

“Well, there’s been this thread about Patanegra’s service on Portland Food and Drink lately,” she said. “Apparently, there’s some server there who thinks he’s Jack Black - a dirty Jack Black - and people are talking about how to avoid his section.”

“Good grief, do you think they know these discussions are going on?” I was aghast. “If they were smart, they’d subscribe to Portland Food and Drink and know every time their place was mentioned.”

At which point she said, “I have a confession to make. You might want to hold on to the table for this, (I grabbed the table and quietly held my breath - she’s not one to exaggerate) …but I don’t know how to set up an RSS feed, and I’ve been listening to you for months now, talking about how feeds are so great. And it’s not making sense to me. I’m not stupid, either.”

“And you go through the world assuming people know how to do things you take for granted, and they don’t,” she continued.”So if I’ve been listening to you for months and still don’t know how to do it, what makes you think people who’re not as involved with it would get it? I keep telling you, tell me how and why I should care, and I will do it. But make it concrete and personal, or I won’t care.”

“Oh.”

“Well, people used to surf for information when the web first came out,” I said, sheepishly. “Then they searched for information, and now they’re beginning to subscribe to information, so they don’t have to go further than their email or home page in order to get news and information about their favorite people, bloggers, restaurants and such - automatically.”

“Now that makes sense to me,” she smiled.

So after discussing the danger of too much knowledge (that can lead to arrogance and its own kind of ignorance she advised me); we determined I’d be best off removing all assumptions, and talking about the benefits of RSS vs. the features, as it were.

Humbled by the interaction, I’m determined to make RSS make sense in much more concrete terms.

The folks at Patanegra should follow a few simple steps to be automatically notified when their restaurant is mentioned online:

1) Go to www.attensa.com - they’re another Portland company (and client, which is why I’ve been pontificating for months about RSS) who makes an RSS platform for large companies, but they also make free RSS readers (what you use to subscribe to feeds) that anyone can use.

2) Download one of their free RSS feed readers - let’s say they want to have feeds delivered into their Outlook mail program - which is how I use it.

3) Once you’ve installed the reader, you’ll have a little series of icons added to your browser that look like this:

4) Click the “Configure” button, which will open up your configuration options, and set up a Search, by clicking the “Search” button:

5) Once the Search box opens, type in the search phrase, in this case, Patanegra; and I’d just “Select All” to point Attensa to grab any mention of Patanegra from any place on the web.

6) Click the “Add Feed” button and you’re done.

Now the folks from Patanegra will have mentions of their restaurant immediately fed into their email inbox, into the Attensa folder. They never have to go out looking for mentions of their restaurant, mentions will come to them. And maybe they’ll take Jack Black outside and have a little chat with him regarding his service, as a result.