Widgets for Content Distribution

My fascination with widgets has been documented from the early days. About a year ago I wrote about Google gadgets and suggested that marketers check them out and see how they work; they can be DIY. If you search widgets on the blog search bar at the top of the page, you’ll find more widget posts, most about marketing campaigns that have a widget component.

Whatever you call it—and Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing term is one of my favorites—marketers have to get the word out and bring people back to their website (or blog) for information or action. For most websites, search is primary in generating traffic. Another important way to bring traffic to your site is to get content out with links back to your site. Widgets are perfect for that; see the McKinsey widget on the sidebar of this site.

Last week’s post on applications and widgets emphasized some of the large players in the space. Can a small blog/a small website use this technology cost-effectively? The answer is “yes.” “Free” is more difficult.

This aspect of the subject came to mind when I received an email from Wowzio.com about a new hosted widget service that’s the brainchild of former Yahoo! social media and software powerhouses. I was interested and checked it out. They have a good explanation of white-labeled widgets. It’s a hosted service, so there are charges. It’s still in Beta, so they are offering free services for personal blogs. I took advantage of their offer, requested and invitation, and took the widgets for a trial run.

The way it works is simple. You provide your blog or website address. They make some connections on the back end and send you a link to your widget page. At present, they have six widget templates from which to choose, as the graphic shows. The “Customize This” link leads you to a page that lets you size the widget and choose background colors. Then it gives you embed code. Even better if you have a blog on a standard platform like Blogger or Typepad, you simply click the button for the platform and it inserts the chosen widget on your blog. Then you configure the sidebar content as you want it. I tried tag cloud and live activity widgets and they showed up on my blog, just as Wowzio said it would. Look at the right sidebar; they are interesting, fun to look at. The content distribution issue is that, if you want to Grab This widget, you can put it on your own blog or website, just like I put the McKinsey widget on mine. Your content has just been made available to readers/visitors of other sites!

I was intrigued, so I asked for an invitation for the natural history blog I edit. It has many beautiful images, so the photo gallery widget was an obvious choice. It’s lovely, but it’s far enough down on the sidebar that it’s below the bottom of some posts, meaning many readers may not see it. I need to work on the sidebar design more and see if I can move it up further without decreasing some of the important subscription and search items—all of which are widgets of one kind or another!

Wowzio enters a space similar to other app platforms like Kick Apps, which has been around for awhile. They have a lot of explanation about how it works and there’s a link for pricing at the bottom of the home page that gives you an idea of what these services run. I don’t see doing this one myself. It really would take a developer, but from what I’ve seen that would be a one-time cost of a few thousand dollars, depending on your location (and how busy free-lance developers are!). Wowzio doesn’t seem to have set a price for small business customers yet, but that will certainly be forthcoming.

The critical question for a small business is whether it’s worth a hosting fee—say $100—each month plus a developer if you need one to create the widget.

I think there’s a pretty simple answer. Do you have content that a clearly-defined target audience would like to include on their own blogs or websites? That would be content that is relevant, engaging and continuously updated.

If you have great content, you may be ready for a widget to distribute it. If you don’t, you need to be working on the content. Great content always comes first!

Kicked-Up Marketing with Apps

Ad Age hosted an Apps for Brands conference last week that produced some interesting advice and case histories. There’s no doubt that apps for Apple’s iPhone represents market leadership with, according to last week’s email, 75,000 apps and 2 billion downloads as of today (the CNET article says 85,000 apps; I took Apple’s word for it). To marketers a more interesting issue is what other firms are doing in the space since few of us have a brand that can attract developers like the iPhone.

First, a couple of layperson’s definitions. An app (application) is software designed for end users. A widget is a graphical interface that allows users to interface (easily) with the application. In practice, the two are often indistinguishable from one another, since marketers are delivering a lot of apps, especially the mobile ones, as widgets. Examples from the conference include:





The Kraft iFood Assistant













Bank of America Mobile Banking















Benjamin Moore’s Catch-a-Color








Ad Age advises that apps must be real time and easy to use and to pay for if not free. They point out that people will pay for value if the apps are useful enough. They also point out that people are even more annoyed by intrusive advertising in the mobile environment than on the desktop as Major League Baseball found out. On mobile, click-through isn't the only metric that matters. Are people recommending your app? Or trashing it on Twitter? "We measure click-throughs, but we don't measure pissed off," said Mr. Bowman, referring to when MLB put an intrusive ad into its At Bat app.

They also point out that apps need to be part of an integrated marketing message, although people are most likely to learn about apps by WOM. Their recipe for success is utility, frequency and viral. Good advice.

Each of the apps above has a demo page; they are all worth looking at. The Benjamin Moore color app clearly wins the prize for most creative, but the other two offer genuinely useful services, and that’s really what it’s all about. The three firms above are all trying to sell a product or a service. Only Kraft charges; 99 cents. The MLB At Bat app (see it on their home page) is $4.99 at the Apple App Store; they are offering a value-added service. Make sense?

But is this another strategy that’s only for corporations with big advertising budgets? Not necessarily—more about that in a few days.

Monitoring for Monetization

There are two common themes in most writing about marketer use of social media:

1. It’s difficult to monetize
2. Managers are afraid to trust their brands to the social media environment.

Glam Media has come up with a creative way of monetizing, in this case a widget, by developing an environment that managers would find comfortable. Here’s the widget and here’s what the Venture Beat blog said about it

Glam’s entertainment editors decide which users are allowed to tweet in the stream and culls those who post what it feels are inappropriate comments. This way, Glam says, advertisers can get comfortable with the conversation. As a result, Glam has been able to sell sponsorship of the Oscars widget to Aveeno, a woman’s beauty brand (see its branding [below] on widget).

There was, and still is, a lot of activity around the Oscars on the Glam Entertainment page. If you couldn’t get a ticket to the Oscars, and didn’t want to sit home in front the the TV and Tweet, you could attend an advocacy event sponsored by Leeza Gibbons, Olivia Newton-John and others, promoted by a video on the Entertainment page. The purpose was to encourage philanthrophy, apparently not to support a specific cause. It seems to have been a great success; all the tickets were sold and it looks like a great party! In the promotional video on the Glam site Leeze Gibbons thanks Aveno for helping with the event, so they obviously got a sponsorship package with the widget being one part.

Glam is a fascinating site, highly engaging to young women. If you stop to think about it, they’ve essentially created multiple channels for reaching their target audience in the context of a multichannel site, their print publications, and offline events like the one on Oscar night.

But back to my original point. We have to create safe social media environments in which marketers can comfortably engage participants with their brands. Monitoring is a solution that seems to have worked in this case. I looked around a little, and I didn’t see any complaints about not being permitted to Tweet or having a Tweet not published. The registration is now disabled, but I’m willing to bet there were terms of use that set clear expectations when viewers attempted to register on the widget.

All in all, it looks like a successful experiment. I’m not sure whether it can be precisely replicated in other contexts, but it certainly provides social media food for thought!

A Cautionary Note About Widgets

I often tell my students that we could learn a lot from marketing programs that don’t work, but marketers—understandably—don’t want to talk about them. Quite by accident I ran across one that had unintended effects.

My intent was to write a post about widget distribution networks, since we are all looking for cost-effective customer acquisition tools. In the process, I ran across the Kimberly-Clark Room-a-Day Giveaway and the widget it used in the promotion. Ok, looked like a good example because the widget was successfully distributed across a network.

Kept on looking, and what I found was that the web is littered with broken links to the widget. That is as it should be, because the 2008 contest ended. But I thought there ought to be a working archive somewhere so I could see the dancing Huggies and other Kimberly-Clark brands. Static captures like this one were all I could find. That piqued my curiosity, especially when I realized that KC is running the sweeps again. The highly successful sweeps was launched again on The View on January 14 with, according to Ad Age, lots of promotional support but not a widget in sight.

According to the Ad Age article, they are using Twitter this year, but I don’t see any evidence of it on the sweeps home page or on the Connect with our Brands page, although I didn’t register for any of the brand messages. I kept looking, and there is Twitter listed on Very Recent. The Twitter messages I found link to the sweeps home page, but I couldn’t find where they come from.
The 2009 sweeps has a new spokesperson—Thom Filicia. He was the designer on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy if that places him for you. The Ad Age article describes him as the blogger for the campaign. I searched his name and found all sorts of blog activity (try it; it is an exercise in creating visibility). I finally found his blog for the sweeps under Kimberly-Clark Brands. It’s interesting, but I still haven’t found the source of the Twitter for the campaign. Mommy blogs, perhaps.

But I digress. Why no widget this year? I found the complaint about the autoplay (wish we’d just delete that command from the programming lexicon) on several blogs. Here’s what Donna DeClemente said about the pros and cons of the widget on her promotions blog (links removed):

. . .they're really engaging audiences with an interactive promotional component that features a dynamic new website along with cutting edge digital technology that's enabled the first sweepstakes enabled widget.

(Please Note: I originally had the widget embedded right here in this post, but moved it to this new page instead. The reason being is that the widget automatically plays and the audio would come on immediately each time you visit my blog.)

Anyhow, I think this widget is amazing. Not only does it offers the user the interactive fun of being able to choose both a specific dance along with where the packages dance (I like the Abby Road location), but it also represents the very first time a widget has built-in functionality allowing viewers to directly enter a sweepstakes. This is truly innovative and a application that should help take sweepstakes to the next level (Sweeps 3.0?)

Now once the user is registered it remembers their name and lets them know how much time is left till they can enter the sweepstakes again with a digital clock countdown . . .

There’s more, and her evaluation is interesting. But her problem was that of other bloggers I found—the autoplay that really annoys people who are trying to read other blog entries. I have to admit that I also wonder about dancing Huggies, etc. Was it cute, or was it silly? And does it matter? A lot of promotional material is silly but if it attracts attention and is reasonably entertaining it works.

My guess is that this widget was more annoying than entertaining and that Kimberly-Clark was smart enough to recognize that and come up with another promotional tool. They haven’t given up on social media, they are just learning from a lot of what has worked very well for them and one thing that didn’t. I just hope they don't disregard what looks like great interactivity in the widget in the annoyance factor.

Learning from what does and doesn't work is what social media in 2009 should be all about!

Mark Your Calendars for the Social Media Summit!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about webcasting firm BrightTalk and their new, free webcasting service. They got in touch with me and asked if I'd participate in their Social Media Summit next week. Obviously it's a subject near and dear to my heart, and it's an interesting exercise in use of the technology also.

The summit is a series of live webcasts. Here's the program as it stands at the moment. I'll embed the player as Tuesday's post and hope you'll drop in for some of the sessions. The topics all sound interesting.

Hope you'll be able to join us--both for the content and the technology!

A Facebook Experience

I may be the ultimate multitasker. I always have TV, usually live news, on in the background while I’m working. I often just turn a video up loud so I can listen without bothering to mute the TV. It works for me. . .

Yesterday, I read on a blog or heard on TV something I considered unusually nonsensical about alternative energy and the (non) positions of our political candidates. What strikes me is that none of them are willing to state the basic truth; it took us a long time to get into this mess, and it’s going to take years to get out, even if we have broadly-based commitment, which we clearly don’t have at the moment.

I’ve heard the TV ads of T. Boone Pickens. They make sense, and I had looked at the Pickens Plan website, which I thought was impressive. But yesterday, something made me mad enough to go there and sign up, right in the middle of writing my blog post. I didn’t want to spend much time, but I did decide to register and add their icon to my Facebook page, frankly not knowing exactly what was going to happen. With very little effort it went onto my profile page; if I could have gotten it onto my home page there, I don’t know how. Doesn’t much matter anyway.

When I noticed a picture of one of my former students and her beautiful children, I decided to say hello, so I sent her a quick Facebook email. The Pickens Plan icon had been added to my email template—fascinating, but I needed to finish the post.

Today, I wanted to explore further. I checked my profile page and see that there’s a feed with one piece of current news from the Pickens site. I discovered that the link that shows on Facebook, www.pushpickensplan.com, is the personal page of the site, not the home page. I was there, so I filled out a profile; just what they intended, I think. They ask more questions and allow for more detail than most profile pages. That level of detail will help other members who want to organize something, which seems to be the main objective. Maybe some human attention will be paid at “Pickens Central.” That remains to be seen. I was member number 157330, so they can’t spend much time on each one! He’s already maxed out his Facebook friends at 4921!! (If you have a Facebook account, you can log in and see it. If you don't--why not?). But you can still invite your friends to his own community, and there are multiple opportunities to do so. You can also see other members by zip code. “Cape Cod” also worked for me, which suggests a robust search engine, since it’s not a zip, town or state.

So the community building efforts look good. It also has a MySpace app. It has email, RSS and supports Twitter. It also supports a blog that is apparently open to all registered members—not that common in my experience. Like Facebook (it looks as if it may use the same wall application) I can upload photos and videos to my personal page.

I successfully added a “member” badge to this site; see the right bar. It has a link to my personal page on the Pickens site—cool! They have other widgets that have news feeds.

At this point, I’m a bit tired, and I don’t think I’ve fully explored the capabilities of this site. It occurs to me that if I was spending a lot of my own money on this campaign, I’d want the best, and that’s what he has, although I can’t find out his agency of record or site developers. But they are good!

It also occurs to me that what I initially considered the quick addition of an app to my Facebook page—mostly to see how it worked—led me on quite an odyssey. It inspired me to set up my own personal page and to see who else in my area was involved. It also offered me opportunities to spread the word—some of which I took; others of which I want to think about.

My personal opinion—a smashing use of Web 2.0 techniques in the service of a critically important public issue!

Are Widgets So Yesterday?

This article about widgets—and the wonderful quote from Charlene Li—in CNET news caught my attention. I use widgets on my various blogs and I think they’re great. As a user, I see a lot of potential applications for them, so when CNET suggested they are losing favor, I read with interest.

The gist of the argument is that widgets haven’t been the silver bullet for reaching target audiences on social networks. Some makers are adopting the term “social applications” in an effort to suggest a broader, more profitable scope for development activity.

I’m always interested in what Google finds on these subjects, so I searched both terms. Both on the web search and the news search, there’s lots of current activity under both terms. Interestingly enough, Google’s Open Social is a major feature on the social applications searches. I did find a post on O’Reilly’s Radar blog that talks about domain-specific social applications that is thought provoking, especially to those interested in branded content. The results on widgets are much more diverse in terms of companies mentioned and types of subject matter. Here are the definitions offered by CNET:

Technically, industry executives differentiate between widgets as a piece of self-contained code that can be embedded to a page and contain content, for example, photo slideshows. Applications are also embeddable software but they're inherently social and interactive, e.g., embedded videos forwarded from friends, executives say.

Does that help tell them apart? It doesn’t do much for me.

Without the search, I wouldn’t have quickly seen today’s announcement on Yahoo’s TV “widget channel.” They are partnering with Intel to distribute widgets through Intel’s set-top boxes. According to the Yahoo page they are going to “bring your favorite Yahoo! Services to TV.” This includes sports, news, weather and finance channels as well as the ability to display your Flickr® photos, as shown on the graphic. I’ve superimposed a section from their Connected TV page that defines the concept.
That’s an interesting development, but I’ve strayed from my original question: is it widgets or is it social applications?

Let me give a cynical take on this semantic issue. If there’s a clear way to monetize it—and there’s an obvious opportunity for Yahoo to sell advertising on these new channels—then it’s fine to call it a widget. If it’s a cool app in search of a revenue stream, maybe it needs a more impressive appellation.

It’s not the name that makes a difference. It’s what the application can accomplish; take Facebook’s Super Wall (developed by RockYou but being taken over by Facebook) or Circle of Friends (Bantr) apps, for example. They are great apps with millions of users. But monetization is an issue for the developers (as spam was apparently a major issue with RockYou’s version of Super Wall) and marketers don’t have an obvious way to take advantage of all these users.

Don’t let the semantics issues obscure the strategic ones!

Google Gadgets and White-Label Widgets

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of widgits. They offer useful content and functions. Even more important, they are completely controlled by the user and improve the web experience instead of interrupting and degrading it.

So last week when this video floated into my inbox, I took the time to watch it. It was filmed at the Google Developers conference and the quality reflects that. The content is well worth the 4.5 minutes it takes; it ranges from the new Gmail widget (available only for iGoogle pages at the moment), to a Google Maps applications that lets you follow a soapbox derby down city streets, to an app that lets you control the way you embed videos into blogs and web pages.

Most of these are entirely DIY; the YouTube video embed may require some knowledge of JavaScript. That means, for most of us marketers, that it may require a developer to install. That’s doable; the question we should ask is will we be able to maintain it without undue difficulty once the developer is finished? The answer is “probably yes,” but it’s a question that needs asking. If the freebies don’t work, you can get rid of them as easily as you acquired them; most of us want to exercise care when we actually spend money on these things. Do you have an iGoogle page—or any other personalized page (if you have Gmail, I think you automatically have an iGoogle page; you just may never have used it)? I’m surprised how many people don’t. It’s a useful experience to see how some of their widget collection works. Some is useful content—notice that weather is the first listed. Others provide an often-used function—I saw both a calendar and a calculator. Some are just plain fun—I loved the Yoda-speak gadget. Note the comments and that the developer is responding to his users. Don’t find one you like? Create your own from easy-to-use templates! The downside is that these are only for iGoogle pages, at least at this point.

There are alternatives—the so-called white label widget (or, more generally, marketing services) providers. TechCrunch defines the concept in terms of a social network; it applies equally to the creation and deployment of widgets. “The idea of white labeling a network is to make the platform provider as invisible as possible to the social network’s users and to brand the network with the builder’s identity or intent.” According to today’s Media Post one of the white-label widget makers, KickApps, is partnering with Clearspring Technologies to allow marketers to distribute their widgets through its network and track their use.

Whether you want a Google Gadget or you want to create your own branded widget from scratch (note the National Geographic widget in the Google list), there are platforms and services to meet your needs. Become an avid user of widgets and use your experience to think about how you can use them to provide branded content to your target audience. It’s content they have chosen and are likely to pay attention to. Can we say that about most advertising?

First, Widget Ads Then a Widget Ad Calculator

Metrics for social media are one of the vexing issues in the space. Marketing services firms of all kinds continue to develop solutions, though they can hardly be described as “integrated” at this point. DoubleClick, acquired by Google in March, describes itself as not just an ad serving network but as a provider of digital marketing technology and services. It has just added a Widget Calculator to its product line. That’s nice, but first you have to understand Widget Ads.

According to DoubleClick the widget ad format allows advertisers to convert “Rich Media creative into a widget that can be shared virally across social networks and blogs.” They tout the benefits as:
•Integrates a viral component into any campaign
•Gives you reporting and control over viral campaigns
•Makes the creative implementation as easy as building a rich media ad.
If you go to their gallery page and play the 10,000 BC ad, you’ll see it behaving just like any rich media ad. Looking at this screen shot you can see the Downloads bar; click on that and you’ll be able to download the image as wallpaper or 1 or all of a set of “buddy icons” as gifs—to do with as you please, presumably. There’s a set of photos you can view. When you decide to “Grab This” you get the code that allows you to embed the 10,000 BC ad widget on any one of a number of your pages. Cool, huh? More importantly, that’s what makes it viral. Functionality has been added to a basic ad, violá a widget!

So, how is your widget performing? That’s where the widget calculator comes in. Shown here in action, it allows users to view the performance of a specific widget. Note that the calculator is also viral, “Share This Widget.” My guess is that if a marketer has several widgets, the first sharing will be with herself.
And that brings us back to “integrated.” If you have a bunch of widgets active, you’re going to have to have a bunch of widget calculators. That’s the state of the art at the moment. But I’m sure technology will catch up with usage. Is the next step a widget dashboard?
Sphere: Related Content

Social Networks and Political News

Last week I noticed an interesting article on the front page of the New York Times plus some interesting commentary from Steve Rosenbaum in the OnMedia blog. The Pew Internet and American Life Project also has interesting recent data on political information sources. Put together, they provide an interesting perspective.

We know that young people get a lot of their news from the Internet instead of from traditional media. According to Pew 42 % of people 18 to 29 say they regularly get news about the campaign from the Internet. That’s up from 20% in 2004. Now we are getting insights into how they use it.

Here’s a summary of what’s emerging:

•Young people post on MySpace and Facebook pages. When I searched for widgets for the two democratic candidates, I got over 500,000 hits, some of which are discussion, some of which are actual widgets. There are not quite as many for John McCain, but there are plenty. CBS News seems to be especially aggressive in creating news widgets that connect people with their content. The McCain widget is from CBS news. I found the Clinton widget on Yahoo!; it is from a suite of political widgets from NBC Universal. I found the Obama widget on an Apple site; it appears to be from a private developer. News organizations are catching on and networks and platforms want to be sure they’re not left out•As the NYT article points out, they also pass it on to their friends by email and IM. Perhaps even more important, they tend to go direct to the source—a video of a speech, for example. Is it worrisome that they are missing the context and interpretation that journalists provide?
•Finally, the Medill News Service at Northwestern University points out that political activity or extreme sentiments on the Internet can affect future job prospects. Students already know that potential employeers are searching Facebook and MySpace pages. Will this put a damper on political expression?

The political consequences of this activity and the political involvement it signifies are enormous. What are the take-aways for business?

One is not very new. If we haven’t already, we have to change the way we are reaching our audiences, especially if they are Gen X, Y or Z. A widely-repeated quote captures that well: “We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,” said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post. “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.”

An even more provocative view is that they want the original, unedited information. Then they will share it or transform it using their own tools. That provides support for the multitude of video contests we find all over the web, but may be a superficial manifestation. How can we really work with customers to develop compelling messages?

There’s probably no single best answer to that question. However, it may be the question that we need to keep in the forefront of our marketing and communications strategy development.
Sphere: Related Content

An Ad Network With a Widget Twist

CBS television has launched a local advertising network that will connect local television affiliates with local bloggers. That itself is a first, and in this struggling “old media” world the local stations are likely to be happy for the support. The current participants are listed on a page from Syndigo, a company that supports vertical advertising networks.

The way it works is that a local blogger signs up and downloads the headline widget. The widget includes a banner ad for the station. It displays real time headlines and images and has links to the station’s website. The station shares ad revenue with the participating bloggers (or community sites, networks, whatever; the requirement just seems to be that it’s local). Presumably the participating sites are paid on an impression basis. It looks as if the ads are served by DoubleClick.

WBZ in Boston is one of the original participants and the widget is supposed to have been deployed to the Red Sox Nation.net site. That’s down at the moment, so no impressions there. I also looked on their advertising page and see no mention of this program. Wonder how they are going to attract local bloggers. Some local sites already link to local blogs, so they’ll have a ready-made market.

I checked a San Francisco blog, SF Bay Style, and sure enough, there’s the widget. The links take you right through to the site for KPIX, the San Francisco CBS television affiliate.
Ad week says that advertisers including At&T, North Texas Honda Dealers and Liberty Mutual Insurance have signed up for the ad network. It seems to be a great way of achieving local reach and the context of popular local sites couldn’t hurt.

All in all, it seems to be another win-win for social media!
Sphere: Related Content

RIAs Connect Marketers and Customers

Yesterday Adobe sent me a white paper about a product called Adobe Air. It looked like widgets, and I like widgets, so I opened it and read it.

No, it isn’t widgets, it’s a development platform for rich internet applications (RIAs). As I understand the difference in simple layperson’s terms, widgets provide a single piece of functionality—check the weather from your desktop, subscribe to this blog by email or RSS (see the right column), or get NFL schedules and team results on your iPhone. The thousands of widgets available connect you to a single type of functionality at your desktop or on the go, and they’ve become very popular.

RIAs seems to be a next step in Web 2.0 functionality. First an example. I downloaded the Google Analytics application, and it’s now sitting there on my desktop. By clicking on it I can get direct access to my Google Analytics account, select any of the blogs and websites I have on the account, and look at the current stats for that site. It’s just like being on Google Analytics except that I don’t have to go to the site and sign in. Because it’s easier, I check more often. That’s the same experience I’ve had with widgets and RSS feeds. Adobe has over 40 RIAs for download at present. This shows one that connects the user directly to content from NASDAC.
Cool! So I started reading a bit more. A post on ZDNet from last year, by enterprise applications expert Dion Hinchcliffe not only does a pretty good job of explaining but also puts another spin on it. There are many potential applications of RIAs inside the enterprise. The examples in the second paragraph above are all of connecting customers with your content and functions.

There are many platforms for developing RIAs. Some appear to be special-purpose, dealing with specific platforms like the popular AJAX used by so many retailers. Microsoft’s SilverLight is another developer platform that has gotten a lot of attention in recent months. They have an excellent overview of what RIAs can do for marketers and enterprises on the SilverLight site.

The good news is that RIAs are clearly an up-and-coming way of dealing directly with your customers—and making it easy for them to deal directly with you. Think about the fact that this puts your application right in front of the customer. They don’t have to go to the net and search for the information—thereby undoubtedly encountering search results and ads from your competitors. You’ve created an environment in which it’s easier to deal with you than to include your competitors in a consideration set.

The bad news is that this is not DIY in the sense of marketers doing it themselves. This involves JAVA, AJAX and all sorts of all other languages that only developers speak. So it takes some skilled work by developers to create the apps. Once that is done, it becomes easy for the marketer to deploy and the customer to use.

That may be an emerging definition of Web 2.0.
Sphere: Related Content

Being Expressive on Social Networks

Digital content site Kiwee has been getting a lot of attention lately. That’s partly because this property of American Greetings is managing to reach and engage the Gen Y demographic. It does it with greeting-card-like applications and something called Emoticons. Check out their home page, but be careful. If you have your sound up high the Toolbar Emoticon may shriek at you. Scared me out of my wits, but it certainly did get my attention! And it shrieked at me only once and then shut up—pretty good manners. Kiwee says this toolbar helps in its acquisition of some 14,000 new customers each day. At the end of January it reported 500 million downloads since coming out of beta six months earlier. Something is going on here!

So I explored. First I tried to just set up a personalized postcard. Not difficult; just like sending a personalized e-card. Just wish the vacation part was true! I sent it to myself and it worked fine. No big news there.

Since Facebook is the only application I have in common with this site (which, of course, I had to join to use), I decided to explore a bit more on Facebook. I’ve written about their huge selection of widgets and I wanted to try one and to see if and how they were different. So I searched for a widget that I would actually like and use—not easy, since as I’ve frequently pointed out, I’m not really part of the Facebook demographic. However, I found that National Geographic, one of my favorite sites, had widgets available and I downloaded their Green Guide. It went onto my profile page; somehow I had expected it on my home page, but the download was clear that’s where the icon was going. The link shows up on my home page. Now I can get a new green tip each week—cool! The link takes you to the National Geographic widget page; they have several. The content is all controlled by National Geographic.

At that point I decided to put the Kiwee postcard application on my Facebook page. Since I’m a member of both, it was a one-click effort. And there it is. Now I can send personalized postcards to my Facebook friends. Or I could add the application to my email. When I downloaded the postcard application, it contained a video from Microsoft (a Kiwee partner) promoting Office.

If I wanted to go a step further, there are applications that would let me download my Facebook address book to Outlook; I can’t find any that allow direct transfers from Outlook to any of the social networks. There are, however, applications that let you synchronize your various address books. There is also the Google Social Graph API, which works off public contacts.

So the opportunities for building communications networks are great—and some are even a bit scary. But for marketers, the question is how we can take advantage of the social and personal communications networks that are ubiquitous today. National Geographic is doing a good job of making its content widely available. Microsoft is using the Kiwee download as an advertising opportunity. Kiwee is inherently viral.

Each is a different kind of marketing opportunity. What best fits your needs, especially when it comes to the hard-to-reach Gen Y market?
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Widgets Go Mainstream

Widgets are all over our desktops and the websites we visit. You may have downloaded a local weather service for your home page, an icon that offers news about your favorite sports team, or you may have reached this blog by an RSS feed. These are all icons of one sort or another that provide access to content or other Internet functionality with a single click.

A well-known one is the Southwest Airlines Ding widget that provides reduced-fare alerts. It is credited with over $150 million in ticket revenue in about 2 years of operation. Their widget program is ongoing. If you look at Southwest’s Travel Tools, they have a new Wireless Alert for your mobile phone using the standard RSS icon.
With all this going on it’s no surprise that Widget platform Clearspring has just announced an advertising network for widgets. Here’s some background on the subject:
•In June comScore announced a metrics service for widgets. In April 2007 they said that widgets reached almost 178 million people worldwide.
•For a good, quick video explaining how ad networks work, see “The Evolution of Ad Networks.”
•Clearspring helps users develop widgets. Widgetbox is one of the many free platforms for DIY widgets. All the large portals have them also. I pointed out earlier that even I could develop one using Google’s freestyle widget template.

Widgets offer exciting possibilities but before you dash off in all directions, this is a good time to study Google’s Open Social platform. It’s stated purpose is to make it easier to share what they call “social gadgets” between social applications. Some of the larger ones like MySpace and LinkedIn are already part of the network.

Do you need to deploy anything from content to marketing offers to people who are willing to hear from you? Think widgets!
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Adding Widgets to the Advertising Mix

In your list of the tools that make marketing diy these days a useful entry is the widget. You see them all the time; the “Subscribe by email” box beside this post is a widget supplied by services firm FeedBurner.

There are two types of widgets. There are widgets like “Subscribe” that can be embedded in any web page, including this blog. There are desktop widgets. You might have downloaded the weather widget from weather.com. It also gives you traffic reports, and while you’re there you can also download a widget linking you to your favorite major league baseball team. What a deal! Bringing all these visitors to Weather.com does great things for their advertising rate card. Having their downloadable widget works for Weather.com because it has a high awareness level, and everyone needs a weather service on their desktop, don’t they? They also need affordable air fares. Southwest Airlines booked over $100 million in fares in the first year of its Ding widget, which is customizable for the cities you favor.

Most marketers are especially interested in widgets that can be embedded in other sites and drive traffic back to the sponsoring site. These widgets can build awareness for newer businesses and generate sales, especially for well-known trusted sites.

Staying with weather for a minute a company called Nimbus has a cute weather cloud that publishers can embed on their site as a small bar, shown below expanded. It provides a lot of location-specific weather information and a link back to Nimbus to find out more. The publisher can also sell advertising on the weather widget. Enough to pay for this commercial widget, I wonder?

Sites like eBay can offer a toolbar made up of widgets. eBay also offers tools to help programmers write widgets that link to eBay. There are a number of sites that offer diy tools for widget development. One of those is MuseStorm. Personally, I’m a bit skeptical of their claim that it’s as easy as creating a PowerPoint presentation, but the tools do look easy to use.

I created one in Google Gadgets for another blog, and it was as easy as Google said it would be. It turns out, though, that you can only put Google Gadgets on Google pages, and I wanted it for a blog with another provider, so that effort didn’t work. But creating the widget was easy, and in the right situation I wouldn’t hesitate to try it again.

I added one to this blog yesterday; see Sphere below. It turned out as a link, not an icon, because I can’t figure out how to include their sphere symbol. But it works. I got the idea from the Wall Street Journal Online. Look at the bottom of their articles, for “Related Articles and Blogs.” They have a staff of expensive IT people to customize the look; I have only me—not very skilled and free. And I have the same functionality as the WSJ on my blog. Think about that!

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