Marketing with Widgets

It’s raining widgets! But we knew that already. They have taken over Facebook, are being adopted by Facebook’s competitors, and now media companies are catching on and starting to use them as ads known as Google Gadgets. A few months ago I posted some ideas and examples and even in just a few months the widgets have advanced and are being used in even more creative ways so I'd like to add to that original list with by expanding on the idea of a microsite widget.

Like the Google Gadget examples this type of implementation can go a long way beyond just advertising. I see this particularly useful for large websites where you can cross promote sections of your website. For example you can create a microsite of your products area and place it on the solutions area of your site. A product widget may include product shots, product datasheets, customer testimonial videos and news or reviews about the product. Mash it! You can also mashup the idea of a widget with an online game and include a game in the widget. This enhances the experience of your user who will not have to toggle back and forth between different sections of your site while at the same time making your site more interactive. Partner or office locators are other examples where this would be valuable.

Assuming you include an embed code in your creation, you can then leverage this same widget in your Social Media Release. Publishers and bloggers are then equipped with an easy way to enhance their story with an interactive widget. Partners and resellers who also promote your products can easily use the embed code to include the widget on your site.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Can you track it? Yes, it is hosted on your site so you can track impressions, interactions and embeds.
• Can you update it? Again since it's hosted on your site when you update the content it is broadcasted to all of the sites that have picked up the widget.
• Is it proven? No, it's new - there is little data to say the people prefer widget over traditional approaches but there's certainly a lot of buzz around widgets and there are always bigger returns for first movers. Go out on a limb in 2008 and see what happens!

Advertising 2.0: It’s Raining Widgets!

Google launched widget ads – this mashup of a widget with a traditional banner ad creates exciting possibilities. There are a few examples here – I particularly like the movie ad – ‘A Mighty Heart’ and the Honda ad.

I like these two for a few reasons:

• It’s basically a shrunken micro site – it serves as a great source of information. But also (probably because of the size limitations) is meant to present only the most important/relevant information, which is really all most of us want anyways.
• If created properly the content provided may serve as a source of information that may be of interest to special interest groups, partners and hopefully customers. If the right information is put into the ad people will want to post it to their sites and why not let them? Google even thought of that and included an ‘embed this ad’ script (as shown here).
• It’s interactive –they even have video components! Unlike a “pass through” ad, these ads combine the best elements of full web-apps with the portability and size of the traditional Google ad. Videos, forms, games, all possibilities creating an interactive experience for the user.

What would you put in your ad? I think it would be cool to show a 3D model or interactive diagram in there. Or if I were promoting an event it would be nice to embed the registration page in the widget itself.

Needless to say, this opens the door for a new use of the traditional Google Ad budget. The early question is whether this will be part of our existing Google Ad campaign or require a new strategy with a totally new campaign. Either way, I’m sure it means more marketing.

Quick Hits

Social Media is Not a Save All

Despite efforts to revive Business 2.0 with a Facebook petition, the publication will print it's last issue in October. Not too surprising since it was declining ads and not lack of readers that led them down this path. But could social media could have helped them if brought in sooner? I guess we'll never know...

Don't Let Good marketing bring you down

What happens if you build a widget that becomes so popular it starts slowing down your servers? Yes, this is a happiness problem but a problem none the less. Nirvanix offers B2B online storage to take the load off. I can't say I've got this problem yet but it's good to know there's a solution out there if and when I need it.

Intermission

It's been about 3-months since my first blog post and so far, these are the posts people have found most interesting:

> Web Widgets in Action - Examples and Ideas
> To Mobile or Not to Mobile
> Are you Voting for Ray Hopewood?
> Value of Social Bookmarking for Marketers
> B2B Marketing 2.0 - Conversation Enablers

Over the next few months I plan to dive deeper into widgets and a couple major initiatives such as gaming and second life. I know I’ve gained a lot from chronicling my experiences with Web2.0 here and have been able to use some of the connections I’ve made to springboard into some heavy projects that wouldn’t have been as successful otherwise. As I said earlier in this blog, I’ve already taken the red pill and will continue to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Apple gets the Value of Widgets - Do You?

Apple 'opens up' according to Red Herring with it's new iTunes widget that lets "users list their recent purchases, display their music reviews, or show their favorite artists."

There are a couple interesting things about this announcement. First, the functionality of this widget already existed but Apple still took the opportunity to create their own widget as a branding opportunity. The point is that if your company/brand should be associated with the delivery of a certain type of content then own up to it, create a widget and get your brand out there.

Second, I think the functionality of this widget can be altered to meet the needs of just about any business. Granted few things are as cool as sharing your music favs but the great thing about social networks is there's a network out there for everyone. A network engineer for example may want to use a widget to promote their participation in forum discussions, display their product reviews and show off their personal authority levels. With a little bit of widget magic this can be done and posted on blogs everywhere.

There's a widget out there for every business. What's yours?

Web 2.0 Widgets in Action - Examples & Ideas

Richard Bach says, "If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were” – I think the same can we said for messaging with a few tweaks "If you want to get your message out, set it free. If your readers come back they're yours; if they don't, revisit your content and make it better."

Widgets are mini-applications that allow marketers to set their content free beyond their own domain. Partners, bloggers, mobile users and other online publishers can easily re-use whatever content you have widgetized by copying and pasting a string of code and putting it on their site.

So what kind of content should be widgetized? The possibilities are endless, here are a few examples (or ideas) that I've come across:

• Live Discussions - Cisco created a widget to show live discussions (right column of page) that are happening in the Networking Professionals forum.


• Social Bookmarking - HP, IBM and Sun created widget to remind visitors to bookmark certain pages on their website.


• Blog Widget - If you have a corporate blog, promote it on your website. Use a widget to show titles of your most recent blog posts to engage visitors in a discussion with fresh content. Although I see these on blogs to promote their recent posts I haven't come across a corporate website that uses it to promote their own blog. Although I wouldn't be surprised if it's out there.


• Security Updates - Infex has a widget that shows the number of infected PCs -- what other security updates can be widgetized? Or maybe the question is better asked as: what security updates can't be widgetized?


• Widgetize your Webcasts - I haven't seen this done yet but why not create a widget for your webcasts for partners, bloggers or even publishers to embed your content on their sites.


• Google Earth -Google breaks through the innovation doors again with it's newest version of Google Earth. Dell is using this Web 2.0 application as a way of analyzing customer data to see who and where customers are -- additional layers of business analytics can be layered on top.


• Video - Whether it's a commercial, an interview, or a video data sheet, Cisco is leveraging the YouTube platform to take full advantage of video and allowing any other interested party to repurpose their content.
  

Creating a widget is easy with help from Clearspring, Widgetbox or MuseStorm – but of course most B2B companies will likely create custom widgets. What's not so easy is widget analytics. Your best bet according to an interview with Lawrence Coburn, author of the Sexy Widget blog is to, "get a rough idea of how many times your widget has gotten picked up by doing backline searches on Google, Yahoo, or Technorati using the “site:” qualifier to isolate the big widget aggregators like MySpace. Inbound traffic from widgets can be measured by checking your log files."

It's time to jump on the Widget Wagon!

Has Marketing 2.0 Crossed the Chasm?

Taking the Red Pill – Not for everybody

Part of what I love about the opportunity of Web 2.0 is that it’s forcing me and my team to think about marketing in non-traditional ways. We’re literally breaking down the paradigm of pushing content in favor of Web 2.0-enabled interactive tools built to facilitate mutual conversation. At the risk of sounding too dramatic, that’s a significant change in how big marketing organizations do business. It affects everything from the topline of campaigns and events down to the skill sets you look for in new hires. For all its upside, change is still a disruptive, violent process that is embraced much more easily by some than others. I’m assuming that anybody reading this post has searched for this content and by definition is comfortable with taking the red pill without the comfort of knowing how far down this rabbit hole actually goes.

But that’s not going to be true of everybody. At the end of the day, this shift might still be a zero sum game. For every person who takes full advantage of this new technology and creates value for their company and their customers there are going to be people who have a vested interest in maintaining status quo. On the one hand, these are the people who maintained that automobiles were devil’s work and stocked up on buggy whip stock. On the other hand, they’re probably the same people that argued against investing in a B2C company whose stock was trading at 200 times earnings in early 2000. As with everything, wisdom probably lies somewhere in the middle.

And that may be, but I’ve already taken the red pill, fallen down the rabbit hole and am now running taxi service with a Widget Wagon. To paraphrase The Godfather of Soul, “(Mama’s) got a brand new bag”.
As such, part of my focus is on taking the rest of the marketing world with me. No easy task to be sure, but thankfully there is a gentleman named Geoffrey Moore (maybe you’ve heard of him?) who gave us a framework for understanding the challenge that lies ahead.

In Geoffrey A. Moore's book, Crossing the Chasm, he identified five categories of customers based on where they are during a product lifecycle. I think these same categories can be applied to identify the cycle of Marketing Professionals’ adoption of Marketing 2.0. These groups can be defined as follows:

Innovators - The Steve Jobs

Remember when you read your first blog? The person who wrote it might have been an innovator. How did all that stuff get onto Wiki? Who were the first 20 people to get onto LinkedIn? For these folks, the Widgets I’m using are soooo '2006'. They aren't talking to their customers; they’ve already been blogging with them for two plus years and are now collaborating on customizable micro-apps to facilitate real time conversation about supporting the new virtual sales office in Timbuktu.

Early Adopters - The Opportunists

This is where I sit. Blog? Check. Wiki entry? Check. iPhone on order? Check. Figuring out how to capitalize on the brilliant work of the people behind the nuts and bolts is classic Silicon Valley style. You need three things to be a good Opportunist: a willingness to start putting it together before you see the instruction manual; you have to be OK with rolling the dice and losing, sometimes consistently before getting snake eyes; and have the technical wherewithal and imagination to take someone’s lemons and make lemonade.

Early Majority - The Pragmatists

If Opportunists are about taking someone’s lemons and making lemonade, these people are about copying your lemonade stand and franchising it. To win these people over, I’m going to work on eliminating risk by building out systems that use consistent results. By the time that happens, we’ll be way past the point of coolness and heading into the realm of cold hard commercial profitability.

Late Majority - Walmart

By the time these people start getting into Marketing 2.0 the innovators will be on to something new. These people wait until it's a time tested and proven standard before they start jumping into the mix. One day you’re going to be able to buy a box of widgets at Walmart. Using the web as an accelerator, widgets might get main-streamed faster than firefox.

Laggards - The CEO of the Last Buggy Whip Company

These people don't know the difference between RSS and RFP and Wiki and Bliki. They still believe in print advertising and direct mail and that's where all their marketing budget goes. They spend their time trying to 'convince' people to buy their product rather than trying to talk to them about it. The day will come when they realize that the job they thought they had looks so different now that they no longer know what they are doing. Unfortunately, this is where new, cool, and not yet proven meets old, boring, and exceedingly profitable. The reason people hold on to stuff that works is because, well, it works. The problem with that is that nothing works forever. Some of these people will get it and move, but the others are going to miss the boat entirely.

Moore identified "the chasm" as the point where things shift from Early Adopters to Early Majority. I think we are at the cusp of that point right now. One of the early steps I’ve taken where I work is to use PageFlake to create a My Company Flake for my co-workers. This does two things: first it demonstrates the value of RSS and how it's a quicker way to get information; and second because I created a page on Marketing 2.0 it serves as a educational boost to help people learn and understand what it means to Market in a Web 2.0 World. I think a lot of my activity around Web 2.0 in the near term is going to be in the area of encouraging adoption. As I come across new and non-disruptive ways to do this, I’ll be sure to post them here.

NBC Jumped on the Widget Wagon

I recently submitted a post about CBS, and as predicted NBC has jumped on the Widget Wagon with this annoucement that will allow bloggers to post television shows on their site.

Now think B2B marketing. We deliver rich content in a similar medium with webcasts and video-on-demand's. How hard would it be to create a widget to do the same thing? I don't know the answer to that but I'm going to start working on a pitch to my marketing team now...

One Step Deeper

In my efforts to exploit Web 2.0 technology to add to my Marketing 2.0 toolkit, I’ve spent some time looking beyond widgets to actual web-enabled applications.

It’s my belief that the widgets of tomorrow are going to come from the webapps of today and the webapps of today just became a lot more interesting with this announcement: Google Gears churns toward Microsoft.

Here’s why this is interesting to me:

I recently read Scott Rosenberg’s book Dreaming In Code – typically a little beyond my geek level but it caught my attention and turned out to be a good read. It focuses on a development project code named 'Chandler' which due to the complexity is still a work in progress after 4 grueling years.

The vision behind 'Chandler' was to enable peer-to-peer access to calendaring, email and notes applications that could exist offline or online. One key decision made during this project is that they built it as a client side app as oppose to a pure webapp – with the thinking that web application technology was too far out to consider.

Unfortunately they're kicking themselves in the ass for that one because little did they know companies like Google, and 37signals, also highlighted in Rosenberg’s book would soon be rolling out webapps well before they could have imagined.

The downfall of these apps is that unlike their client side counterparts, consistent connectivity is needed to get stuff done. When I think about my computer use, I’d say no more than 10% of my time is spent offline. My challenge is that I can't use a semi-critical app if it’s limited to the web – I need to know that I can access what I create if I want to open it up in my safari tent in the Serengeti or the Piazza Navona in Rome. And that is what prevents me from transitioning from these heavy client side apps.

Well, that just changed with Google’s announcement. Okay, it didn't change yet – most of the apps I'm using today weren't built for the web but it's coming and I'm already excited by this vision. Just imagine being able to use all these great productivity apps that are Web 2.0 enabled (SharePoint, Wiki's, and Blogs to name a few), making for lightning fast download and seamless integration with web-based content delivery systems - but still available offline when I want them.

One of the most significant achievements of Web 2.0 is correcting the discrepancy that my content is still mostly created in applications that work best offline but my customers really only want to connect with me online. Sure, there has been lots of progress with the advent of Flash, WebEx, canned PPT presentations and PDF in the browser – but those applications weren’t made to take advantage of the interactive power of the web.

Marketing 2.0 (aka Social Media Marketing) isn’t about me talking to my customers, it’s about creating a conversation with my customers - and hopefully building a relationship. But I still have to create and package knowledge to begin that conversation – and those apps need to have offline as well as online capability. Before my customer and I can really connect the way we should be able to, we need apps that can be used to create and package that knowledge as well as facilitate and encourage interactivity. That means interactive online apps that can be taken offline - not offline apps that can be uploaded. Google just took an important step in that direction. I’m not junking all my client side apps for hyper-functional widgets just yet but I can see now - probably much like the Chandler team eventually did – that its much closer than I thought.

Hey! If CBS can do it . . .

Right now there’s a marketing professional standing in front of her CMO holding a print out of this blogpost and saying “Hey! If CBS can do it, how hard could it be?”

CBS is the “Traditional” in “Traditional Media” and there’s some credence to the thinking that if they’ve jumped onto the Widget Wagon the other media behemoths are sure to follow suit. For some time CBS has been fortunate to be very popular with the more “mature” audience at the cost of attracting TV’s most coveted viewers: the 18-34 set. You’d have to think that their willingness to cannonball into the deep end of the Web 2.0 pool is a sign that the “old guard” is more committed to trying to attract a new audience with how they position and deliver the content, not just the content itself. Also, this morning’s news regarding their acquisition of last.fm and their recent acquisition of wallstrip.com and investment in Joost among others indicate that CBS Interactive is leading the charge and providing a good example for us all.

I’m already working on my “If CBS can do it . . .” slide!