FeedMagnet, agencies, and a walrus.

We came out of the agency world. Prior to starting FeedMagnet, each of us spent most of our careers doing marketing and web work for clients at various agencies. Much of the inspiration to build FeedMagnet came from the frustration of not having the right tools available to implement our ideas from within agencies. We have a special place in our hearts for agencies and love partnering with them.

One of our first agency partnerships has been with Attention!, based in Manhattan. Attention is a social media marketing and communications agency, and their strategic approach to word-of-mouth marketing is a perfect fit for FeedMagnet. In addition to working on several client projects with Attention, we recently launched an experimental site together that aggregates brand content from Facebook. As a bonus, there's a walrus involved.

Wallrss.com

The idea is this: Every major brand is posting content to their Facebook fan pages, but it is hard for consumers to take all of this in. Updates from Pepsi compete with Farmville updates. And there's no way to share groups of brands that are worth following together, like every NFL team or Fall TV shows.

Attention wanted a way to create the Facebook equivalent of Twitter lists, and saw FeedMagnet as the perfect tool to do just that. By pulling in Facebook wall posts and aggregating them the way an RSS reader would combine blog posts, you end up with the Wall RSS, or Wallrss.com.

Here's what Attention had to say:

On average each employee at Attention “likes” 72 brands on Facebook (some people like up to 300). And while 38% of online U.S. consumers like or follow brands on the social networking site, 70% don’t realize they’ve subscribed to marketing messages, according to a study conducted by email marketing firm ExactTarget . It’s hard to filter the information you want from the information that’s just, well, there. You need a single feed, a feed organized by affinity and a feed free of Farmville, Mafia Wars, and sadly, even friends. So we slapped an RSS feed on 200+ brand pages on Facebook as an experiment to streamline brand communications. Basically, we made sense of all that nonsense.

Even more interesting is the stability offered by FeedMagnet. Just today, Facebook went down. Twitter is notorious for its Fail Whale. But FeedMagnet stores a copy of every update we pull in, and we don't rely on Facebook being online in order for us to deliver those updates.

The Wallrss site stayed up even while Facebook was down. Granted, we didn't pull in any new content during that time, but content that is 15 minutes old is better than a broken section on your website that you'd get from any other Facebook or Twitter widget.

Why we love agencies

Agencies bring a lot to the table. They know their clients' needs and can connect the dots for them to help them understand how FeedMagnet can further their marketing efforts. They can often provide the design and HTML front-end coding to ensure the output from FeedMagnet fits in with the overall brand look and feel.

And for agencies, FeedMagnet represents and opportunity to build really interesting expressions of social content without having to re-invent the wheel each and every time.