Widget Marketing

Fergus Burns has opened an interesting meme thread with a post on Widget Marketing.

A new space is beginning to develop - widget marketing.

[...]

All these startups [he mentions are going to make "widget" placements in social media services easy - rather than the current "html/javascript" hacking - watch out for tons of innovation.

Widgets are primarily driven by RSS feeds, which creates tons of opportunities for marketers to develop lead generation programs @ RSS and Widgets, and more opportunities for publishers to monetize their content.

Richard MacManus points to both the Burns' post and Paul Kedrosky's review of PostApp, which fills out a list of services -- including Snipperoo, TagWorld and Nokia's Widsets -- that are moving into this territory. Richard writes:

[from Widget services ramping up

I too have been tracking the growing importance of widgets, especially as it relates to the Personalized Start Pages space - Microsoft Live gadgets, Google's modules, Netvibes and Pageflakes, and of course Yahoo's konfabulator (although not yet integrated in a big way into MyYahoo). As Fergus notes, widgets are spreading into many areas now - into blogging platforms like Typepad and Wordpress, social networking systems like MySpace and AIMPages, etc. And now there's a whole new segment growing - which Fergus nicely labels "widget marketing".

This is all being driven by the increasing use of microcontent and web services in all kinds of web-based services - such as Windows Live, MySpace and Wordpress.

This is an area of great innovative potential, since widgets are a way for non-programmers to adorn their social world with complex, sophisticated applets that integrate information, act as mashups, or publish elements of their social personae without programming. And, while javascript is not too difficult, the current crop of javascript-based plugins are very limited, and too easy to screwup.

tags: widget+marketing, mypsace, windows+live, wordpress, fergus+burns, richard+macmanus, paul+kedrosky, tagspace, snipperoo, postapp

Comments

[jeneane]

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Widget Marketing, if you like, is another way of taking functionality to places where the we users live online.

Using MySpace as an example, MySpacers don't want to have to leave MySpace and go to a product site and go through an entirely separate user experience "over there." They want to incorporate personalized widgets -- increasingly available from ordinary people and product/service providers -- who are smart enough to make a home in MySpace too (not a pretend home, a real one with a real person representin'), where they use the Languagality native to MySpace (the way we communicate through community-specific activities like friending, bulletins, events, comments, and MySpace mail) to offer widgets from that MySpace home.

I think it's like the cutie on roller skates who brings the burger and coke to your car window.

Widget marketing is something like that.

Good post. Thanks Stowe.

[jcorbett]

I have a theory that the blog, the MySpace, the Start Page are all converging towards a sort of MyMe, a digital representation of ourselves. Think of it as a 2D avatar and in the same way that we 'dress up' our 3D avatars in virtual worlds we'll want to dress up our 2D avatars with widgets.

Not only that but more sophisticated widgets will be like the tools and weapons we find in Second Lives, enhancing the ability of our digital representations to interact with other avatars on a agent-like basis.

[Jack Yan]

James, we certainly seem to be moving that way. Stefan Engeseth theorized on his blog recently that a pop star could even distribute her DNA code with music CDs.