New Media is HUGE. If one wants to excel in business in general (but especially media and marketing), one has to have a basic understanding of new media. But what exactly is “New Media?”

It’s things such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, podcasts, Youtube, websites and any other interactive media online. For college students: I highly recommend you add, “Set up New Media Sites” or “Highly knowledgeable of New Media” on your resumé if it somehow applies to the job you are applying for. This applies to marketing and mass communications majors the most.

This actually was the aspect that landed me an internship with Magnolia Pictures. Although I don’t support movies with haram aspects such as music and inappropriate scenes, what I’m doing right now with them is viral marketing research. The assignments I get are all tools to help me learn how to market a film (Google ads are huge!).

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So lesson #1 for everyone to benefit from and understand: “WHAT ARE RSS FEEDS?”

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The name fits just right because it is extremely simple. It lets you subscribe to sites that you frequently visit and every time the administrator of that site adds something new (like a new post) it’s sent you you.

This is the way it works:

1. You’ve all seen the symbol on the left (minus the head phones). This is an RSS feed symbol. And for this blog you will see a link at the end of this post that says “Subscribe to RSS feed.”

2. For those of you who don’t use Google, I HIGHLY suggest you create an account right now. (I’m going to use it for this demonstration).Google makes the world so much easier and convenient. I love you Google.

3. Go to “Google Reader” and sign in with your Google account. This is a place where you can send all your subscriptions and check them as many times a day as you want. I think this is the most convenient because a person like myself, I used to spend a lot of time going to my different bookmarks everyday, and sometimes to find nothing new on those sites. This way, you can go to one site that will tell you if there is anything new on ALL your favorite sites.

4.Next, go to your favorite blog (which you’re already here ) or site, and if you use Firefox this is even easier: Click on the RSS feed symbol.

5. It should take you to this page. Click the “Add to Google Reader” button.

6.Next, It should take you to your reader subscription page you can click either expanded view or list view. Then you can just click the title of the post or scroll down to read the rest of the post. Sometimes it will give you a link that says, “If you want to read the rest of this post click here” This link takes you to directly to the site.

And it’s as simple as that.

The cool thing about Wordpress is that we have an option to see how many people are subscribing. MashaAllah, A lot of people visit the site through their subscriptions. We know you’re out there… So don’t be shy to leave comments - that’ll be a later post inshaAllah.

But I hope that was helpful if you have any comments or anything you found as a cool option with RSS feeds post it below.

WAllahu ta’ala ‘alem,

Umm Ayoub.

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