Outrider and SimpleFeed to Support Search Marketing Campaigns with RSS Feeds

WebKnowHow
Monday, November 6, 2006; 04:44 AM

SimpleFeed, leading provider of RSS publishing and analytics services to major corporations, and Outrider , a WPP group company and the designated search engine marketing agency of GroupM, WPP's media buying and planning arm, announced a partnership to bring RSS technology, strategy and services to their combined customer base.

The partnership is already breaking ground and experiencing success with the recent launch of RSS Feeds for major retailer and Outrider client, Sears, establishing the world’s first true e-commerce RSS Feeds. The two companies have been working together since April, when they launched Feeds for Sears.com (www.sears.simplefeed.net), offering RSS Feeds of Sears’ weekly product specials. After six successful months, Sears has expanded the content offerings to include email content in the Feed.

“Our partnership with SimpleFeed is an effort to keep major advertisers in-tune with emerging technologies and trends to enhance their search marketing efforts and support their overall online and offline marketing,” said Andrew Barnett, Manager of Organic Search and Emerging Technologies for Outrider. “By partnering with SimpleFeed, Outrider customers get the best RSS Feed program in the marketplace, with a combination of ease of use, Feed presentation and measurability.”

As a pioneer and thought leader in the search marketing, Outrider began investing in RSS as part of their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Practice. RSS is an emerging SEO best practice as Feeds encourage linking and are often easier for search engines to parse and understand.

“Outrider provides outstanding strategy and services to its customer base and has a keen understanding of Feeds and Syndication strategies,” said Mark Carlson, CEO of SimpleFeed. “Together we’re helping advertisers adopt RSS Feeds as a part of their marketing mix.”

The Sears RSS Feeds include a product image and description, as well as pricing information and a “buy now” button enabling ecommerce in RSS. Through SimpleFeed’s personalization technology customers can opt into Feeds of Sears’ product information.

Outrider capitalized on SimpleFeed’s templated RSS Feeds to create Feeds that look like the Sears web site and email programs, preserving Sears’ investment in their brand and making the Feeds more familiar to the customer. SimpleFeed’s analytics allow Outrider to measure the success of the marketing content to better drive business results for the retailer.

Representatives from SimpleFeed and Outrider will be available to answer questions at ad:tech (ad:tech) in New York, November 6-7, 2006.

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of syndication technologies that has emerged due to the explosion of blogs and podcasts which use RSS as a way to alert subscribers to new content. Every major portal (Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL), browser (Internet Explorer 7, Safari, FireFox, Opera), operating system (Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Linux), and email client (Yahoo Mail, Outlook 2007, Thunderbird) have incorporated RSS reading technology. Since RSS readers pull in new, relevant content automatically, customers can quickly review content and click through to the designated website if they find something of interest. Thus, RSS is often called “the TiVo of the Web” as it allows customers to subscribe to sites and have content downloaded automatically. This saves customers time and puts them in control of the information they receive.

Companies benefit because RSS is a new, wide open, SPAM and virus free medium that does not require an email address. It provides a channel for companies to send direct, unfiltered messages, giving consumers the opportunity to opt-in to receive information. E-Commerce companies also appreciate that RSS is an excellent tool for affiliate marketing and also has search engine optimization benefits.