Graphing Social Patterns: Notes from Widget Panel

Photo by Jeremiah Owyang

Widgets Panel
Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research)
Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.)
Walker Fenton (NewsGator)
Pam Webber (Widgetbox)
Ben Pashman (Gigya)

Jeremiah Owyang moderated a panel on widgets but started off with an observation about the geek commitment at this conference.   At mid-day, there is this lively swimming pool and a perfect sunny San Diego day - and the room is packed.

Jeremiah Owyang made the panelists think.  Rather than doing a 2 minute elevator pitch to introduce themselves, he asked to offer a metaphor that describes what their company does.   This is a really useful technique if you need to explain a technology company and how it works to management that may not be technical.   

Clearspring Technologies: 
A channel to connect - connector

NewsGater: 
Kitchen - looks at the feeds as a raw materials and bring into their kitchen to make exotic dishes and feed them to the audience.

WidgetBox: 
Color Me Pottery.   Widgetbox helps you create your pottery and share it with others.

Gigya:
Spine within a growing body.   We become a base for the social media space.

Jeremiah gave an overview of Widget space and the challenges with three slides.   The most important one was some research about what people do on social media sites.  Notice that "look for advertising" isn't on the list.   There were some demographic slides.   I'll track down the slides later.

Then her asked questions of the panelists about ROI, branding, distribution strategy, making money, and misconceptions.

ROI

From a technical perspective, you can report on where the widget lives, click throughs, and embeds.  However, there is an educational gap across the table about how to tie metric into something you can build an ROI.   "Widgets are competing against flyers and newspapers."

Brand Control

Companies are brand central and think they own their brand.  That's wrong.  Consumers own it.  How do you get companies to understand that?

Many companies don't want their brand associated with x-rated content or undesirable images.  Many come to the widget makers saying, "I don't my brand associated with xyz site."  There is an education process to get companies to understand that evangelists are the best thing for a company's marketing strategy.  The more tools you can offer them, the better the marketing.

Distribution

If the brand has consumer loyalty, getting it distributed is easy.  For the other 99% advertisers, they need to
go fish where the fish are.  Get as close to those users as possible.  Widget galleries.  When are consumers in the mindset of embedding content?  (The panelist didn't answer this question specifically, but alluded some research. I imagine there are some potential qualitative insights about this that are relevant to deploying and distributing fundraising widgets.)

Making Revenue

Everything that is new, is not so new.  There are distinct markets:  Social application market as a result of Facebook.    "Bastardization" -  VC's paying VC's.   Panelists said it is like going back to 1997 because everything is still trying to figure it out.

Campaign

There are three phases:

• Concept
• Distribution
• Analytics

You need to have a clear idea of how you're going to approach the phases of your campaign before you implement.  If you build a great widget and it gets distributed and you don't know how you're defining success, you won't succeed.  All the three need to be well defined.

Panelist gave two example of possible outcomes linked to strategy:

• Awareness - Strategy: getting linked to big sites
• Research -    Strategy:  getting to know the people who added the widgets to their pages to better understand them.

I would love to see a generic table, with first column objective and second column strategy.

Strategy Points

• Take the top one or two things that people come to your site for, then you let them take it away
• Identify your audience and who you are.
• A widget is a window into your brand or web site. 

What are the biggest misconceptions about widgets? (outside this room?)

-Don't assume virality.  You can't predict.  Benchmark expectations. 
-Following the crowd and not being true as a company.  Gave an example of ebay Facebook widget and widgetbox example.  Who is using the widget and for what reason.
-Build it and they will come perception. 
-Mixing desktop utility widgets and social media widgets.  Does your widget up to the "make my day" metric put a smile on your face and want to send it out to your friends.
-It's not about page views, it's about engagement.

Digital Podcast has a great summary here.
 

Tag: GSP West