Forrester Research published a new report on the state of RSS entitled What’s Holding RSS Back? In short, while there are bright spots, it does not paint the picture of a technology that’s going mainstream anytime soon.

On a positive note, the resarch says that nearly half of marketers have moved to add feeds to their web sites. Further, RSS adoption among consumers is at 11% up from just 2% of users three years ago. RSS feeds usage is more dominant among men.

According to the research, of the 89% of those who don’t use feeds only 17% say they’re interested in using them. In fact Forrester spends much of the report helping marketers better explain the benefits of RSS to their customers.

Read more at Micro Persuasion…

According to a study [pdf] done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

Software functionality came in at 1% surprisingly, with organization change at 16% and process alignment at 13%.

“You can have the best software in the world, with the most sophisticated features, analytics and integration, blah blah blah - but if people don’t use it, it isn’t going to add value. I can’t tell you how many RFPs and software selection processes I’ve been involved with in prior lives that focus almost exclusively on tiny little features that few people will ever use. This study shows that focusing so much on features is missing the boat entirely.”

Read more at ReadWriteWeb…

Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has projected that over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. But, he added in an interview with CNET News, 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.

“Businesses will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail.” Adam Sarner

What does he mean by a “mutual purpose?” Any social media campaign has to be an authentic involvement with a community. A successful campaign will serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it and finding that balance is not easy.

Read more at socialmediatoday…

“At some point every few years (or every year in some cases) organisations decide that the most effective way to improve productivity or profits is to reduce expenditures.

Intranets are a common target of cost cutting, either by delaying improvements to infrastructure, cancelling new functionality, reducing author training or cutting intranet staff numbers.

In some cases these decisions are justified, however with intranets often lacking high-level representation and sponsorship, there are cases where these cuts have serious negative impacts on the entire organisation.

So are there ways to position an intranet to avoid damaging cost cuts, and even increase the budget to the area in order to generate savings elsewhere?”

Read more at eGov AU…