MTBR and RSS

I've been a big fan of MTBR since using their product reviews (checked yours lately?) while doing some new product research for Chris King back in 1998. For marketing geeks like me, all those unedited reviews are an invaluable source of feedback from real users (of course, they could be fake reviews, but that's another topic).

I recently asked Gregg Kato about how RSS is figuring into their plans. His response was that they've already got feeds for most of the site. You can see all the available feeds for MTBR (and the other Consumer Review sites) on their RSS List.

Someday soon I hope to see customized RSS feeds available for individual brands. That way, I can subscribe to my client's feeds and easily keep track of any new reviews on their products. Gregg says they're working on that as we speak.

Of course, the ultimate would be to get RSS going in their forums. It would be great to be able to subscribe to feeds of certain topics and better yet, brand names and keywords. Can you imagine getting an RSS feed of every post that includes your brand or certain keywords you'd like to monitor? That would be a very powerful tool for marketers and consumers. They've already got a great forum search function, but RSS would be much easier and more efficient.