RSS Feeds

FeedMagnet is a new social media aggregator developed by a former colleague, Jason Ford. FeedMagnet is quite a bit different than social media tools such Gist or Seesmic. Both of those are consumer tools designed to help manage an individual’s interactions on social sites. FeedMagnet is for companies or organizations.

The initial product is essentially an aggregator for marketing purposes. Let’s say your company has 5 executive tweeting plus official company accounts for Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. FeedMagnet would let you pull content from all of those sources into a single, integrated stream – with videos and photos embedded directly in the content (so you don’t have to click over to TwitPic or YouTube). Once the content is integrated together, you can filter it, moderate it – and then the real value is in getting to post that content back on your website. I have created the graphic below to help you visualize how the technology works.

In addition to pulling in user feeds from a person (i.e. @pedrolaboy) or a company (i.e Coca-Cola) it can also pull in search queries. So let’s say you have a website that sells Rock Band for the Wii. You can run a series of searches on Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and other media sites to pull in user-generated content of people talking about and playing Rock Band. You can then filter the content based on keywords (to exclude curse words for example) and moderate the content if you choose (to make sure nothing obscene gets through). Once you get everything set up, you have a feed that is rich with photos, video, and text of people enjoying Rock Band that you can put right on the purchase page on your site to increase conversion rates. Here is another graphic using Echo to illustrate how FeedMagnet works.