There’s a company out there called FeedBurner. (Already know ’em? Skip ahead.)
They take your blog’s news feed, do a little high-tech hocus pocus to it, and pow – out pops your feed, but souped up. Suddenly you can see how many people are reading your blog via your feed, which articles they’re clicking through to, and whether they’re wearing underwear at the time (still in beta). You can even
Your readers, meanwhile, get more rigorously standardized feeds, and – if you’re feeling like giving them a little eye candy – nicer-looking ones to boot.
The cost to you: zero, unless you want to opt for the pro features.
Maybe I will… because if the level of responsiveness I’ve received as a non-paying customer is any indication, I can expect weekly backrubs and daily hand-delivered Americanos if I’m actually paying them money.
Earlier today, I filled out their contact form to gripe that one of their features, Headline Animator, doesn’t work with Microsoft Entourage – even though the page describing the feature has a screenshot of it in use with, yes, Entourage.
In less than an hour, I received this reply from FeedBurner co-founder Matt Shobe:
Entourage supports self-created HTML email signatures, but there’s no easy way to include our dynamically-generated Headline Animator (or any outside block of raw HTML code) as a signature in Entourage that I know of. The illustration on our Publicize page is indeed from Entourage, but it’s just being used as a general illustration. Apologies for the frustration we’ve caused you with this misleading graphic; I will either update the graphic or provide an Entourage workaround!
On top of which he happily gave me permission to blog his mea culpa.
So, to recap: a useful free product, a complaint, a near-instant response, a promise to fix it, and no discomfort at all with the harsh glare (well, given the traffic on this blog, it’s more like the “barest glint”) of publicity.
That’s how you create fans – and damned if Matt didn’t just make another one.
