Contagious Magazine, based in London, has published a absolutely fantastic (and extremely thorough) "Most Contagious" list for 2007. There's tons of fantastic campaigns highlighted, including our own STA Travel Tools project. If there's one "Best Of.." guide to read, this is the one. Click here to read.
Because new technologies often intimidate people, I'm always on the hunt for a good analogy to make people feel more comfortable.
I particularly liked this very simple analogy comparing widgets to Lego blocks made by David Weiden, a partner at Khosla Ventures in a recent AP article.
He says:
"You don't have to do a deal with Yahoo, Weiden says. "You just encapsulate the content and attach a thing like a Lego block to it so it will attach to anything that takes Lego blocks."
(photo by Huladancer)
Wendy Melillo has a terrific profile of our STA Travel Tools project in the latest IQInteractive for ADWEEK. Here's an excerpt:
"When the digital shop Electric Artists sat down with STA to come up with ideas for the campaign, the key question STA posed centered around how banner advertising has become a less appropriate marketing technique for the social Web. The key question became, how should STA engage their audience in this space? Electric Artists CEO and founder Marc Schiller remembered the campaign State Farm Insurance ran during the NCAA tournament in March where it offered users an office hoops game and a widget where they could download a buddy to help them keep up with the tournament action among other things.
"To market their brand, State Farm gave people tournament tools and for us, that was an innovative way to look at sponsorship," Schiller says. "We are going to make your experience better instead of just sponsoring a program or putting our logo in an ad. We are talking about a whole different way of thinking about online marketing."
Schiller says young people are no longer surfing the Web but instead are "clicking" the Web and pulling content to their personal pages to help better organize themselves. "We see ourselves as cultural anthropologists and there has been a cultural shift from how people use and interact with content on the Web," he says. "Ten years ago, viral marketing was about seeing something on a Web page and emailing it to your friends. But today, people are using their Facebook pages and photo sites and no longer rely on emailing a list. Brands have to rethink how they engage their consumers. So when STA Travel looked at widgets with us, we didn't look at it as the hot new thing and say let's create a widget. We looked at the entire shift in the culture that makes widgets extremely important as the Web starts to change."
Great brands are those that embrace change and encourage innovation.
STA Travel is one of those great brands.
A few months back we sat down with the leadership team at STA Travel to discuss how the web was rapidly shifting from a pull to a push model. We discussed how today success comes less from what you build on the web, but more importantly, how it all connects with everything else that's out there.
During the conversation we talked about the importance branded utilities and lightweight applications that can be integrated into personal pages like MySpace, Facebook, and blogs, as well as into dashboards like PageFlakes and Netvibes.
For STA Travel's customer base (the college market) today it's less about "browsing" the web and more about "clipping" the web.
The marketing team at STA Travel not only "got" the importance of branded utilities but they also knew that they needed to embrace change quickly.
I'm pleased and excited to announce that earlier today, eight weeks after our initial meeting, my colleagues at electricArtists and at STA Travel have launched an initial suite of four customizable travel tools that can be used to assist in everyday travel planning. The four widgets are:
To check out the widgets head over to the STA Travel Tools page at:
http://www.statravel.com/traveltools
Congratulations to our History Channel account team for being recognized today by iMedia Connection for their terrific online marketing campaign to support the Memorial Day premier of Star Wars The Legacy Returns.
The article is a fantastic snapshot of the how a widget became a centerpiece of a massive online blitz.
I particularly liked Bradley Werner's critique:.
"On the one hand, embedding this very cool widget on your MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Blog, vlog and personal homepage tells the world that despite the freedom granted by the memorial holiday, you were sitting on your couch, perched atop a Bantha made of pillows, dressed as one of the Sand People.
On the other hand, it tells the world you're a huge "Star Wars" dork.
Either way… it shows that the History Channel and ElectricArtists knew their target market pretty darn well. You don't need to be a protocol druid, fluent in over 6 million forms of communication to recognize how cool the evolution of many of the "Star Wars" iconography is, and the countdown is a useful reminder of when to tune in. Typically I'd pan the auto sound, but since this is a widget, meant to be placed by a user with an understanding of what his or her (but most likely his) audience, on their own site, I have no qualms over the Vader intro.
As the old adage suggests, "Any widget that opens with the sound of a lightsaber is deserving of praise," so to the creators, well done on this unit…and may the something-something be with something.
With more and more people establishing their own "personal space" on the web (whether it be a MySpace or Facebook profile; or a blog using Typepad or Wordpress; or a personal "dashboard" using Pageflakes or Netvibes) establishing a clear and comprehensive strategy around content distribution and syndication is fast becoming just as important for brands and content owners as building websites or buying banner ads.
All of this is leading to an explosion of development in widgets - and most significantly - embedded video widgets.
If you're tracking this space, then be sure to check out a video widget that NBC is using to promote Saturday Night Live. NBC is calling it "Your Own Personal SNL Viewer" because it does something that most video widgets (including those from YouTube and Vimeo) don't:
The NBC widget automatically updates itself with new content each week.
Because content is refreshed by NBC remotely, it only needs to be placed on a blog, MySpace page, or personal dashboard once to open up an ongoing syndication channel between NBC and the viewer.
NBC's "SNL Backstage" widget takes embedded video to the next level.
Lately, a large amount of my focus has been devoted to developing content distribution strategies for our clients that utilize widgets.
With the social web, the importance of creating effective distribution systems for branded content has never been stronger.
We're living in a world where, quite simply, there's far too much information for us to absorb. Because most of us have a desire to stay informed, it's become almost impossible for us to keep track of everything that we want to keep up with in our daily lives.
Most of us now have a need for one single place where we can collect and pull
in all the information that we want to consume into one space. This
space, often referred to as a "personal dashboard", aggregates reminders
and top of mind information and thoughts that are purposeful and
meaningful to us. Personal dashboard sites like
Pageflakes and Netvibes have become extremely popular, as more people
look for that one place to store and collect all of the information
they need.
Widgets allow brands and media companies to distribute dynamic content onto a person's dashboard or personal space.
Widgets are small useful graphical applications that automatically provide users with small bites of up-to-date information.
By creating widgets, brands and media companies can stay connected to their customers and prospects. At their best, widgets make consuming and interpreting content and information a lot more easier - and a lot more fun.
For widgets to be compelling enough for users to want to download them to their desktop or put them up on their personal pages, they should have the following qualities:
useful, fun, inspiring, dynamic, relevant, up-to-date, personable, fresh, and not overly branded.
The best widgets are the ones that help make your life easier, and at the same time are fun to use.
More and more, success online comes when brands offer both prospects and current customers utilities that provide real value to them. (It makes sense then that one of our key focus areas for 2007 is on developing "branded utilities" for our clients)
So stay tuned on this subject, as I'll soon be writing about widgets that we have been developing for a bunch of our clients including Westin and STA Travel.
In the meantime, check out Pageflakes, Netvibes, Widgetbox (and here if you have a Mac), and start downloading some widgets for yourself.
