Time to look at my own little "neck of the woods" here in Belgium and see how my Belgian PR colleagues are using (or nog using) tools such as blogging, podcasting, RSS feeds etc... in the context of business communications.

Two little surveys are helping me to fine-tune my own personal impressions:

First there's the results of the social media survey of Leads United - Blackline's sister agency - which were published this afternoon.

My colleagues at Leads United collected feedback from 70 PR professionals working in companies across all industries located in Belgium.

Here are the major results:

• Only 24% of respondents use RSS feeds.
• Only 1.4% are active wiki users.
• The implementation of blogging guidelines has risen from 4% in 2007 to 20% in 2008.
• When speaking about strategically applying social media tools, it is seen in this order; first external communications, second internal communications and third, crisis communications.

You can find more details in their social media press release here.

And then there's my own, personal, non-scientific, listing of PR agencies located in Belgium, who are using (or not) RSS feeds to distribute their own (or their client's) content.

As with recent years the trends are not improving that much....

Here are my findings:

• From the 27 PR agencies surveyed, only 9 are using RSS feeds on their website.
• 1 PR agency decided to finally start with RSS feeds on their website in 2008.
  
• 4 didn't optimize their feeds to be recognized by a browser.
• 1 PR agency website was not available.
• 1 PR agency website had RSS feeds in 2007, but not anymore in 2008.

As I wrote on numerous occasions before, RSS feeds and their use is a basic & fundamental skill for someone, or an agency who claims to have experience in "social media" or "online PR".... I can't understand that some PR agencies claim they have those skills and then not implement RSS feeds for their own use on their own website....

You can find the full list and results on my public wiki. Comments about the list and the results ? Please let me know..

Also, for those of you who have heard about RSS and are willing to spend a couple of hours this summer to learn about it, go here and check out my 2 new Summer Courses .

Everyone is welcome !