Team USA has been promoting their athletes and the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver with a couple of widgets. With the games just 8 days away, we thought we should take a closer look at the widgets.
The widgets themselves are pretty straight forward. The 2 widgets are essentially the same widget in 2 sizes. Both widgets are 300 pixels wide with one being a standard IAB 300×250 pixels. In each widget you get video and athlete content along side a twitter feed. The twitter feed is a nice touch as it gives the widget fresh content more quickly and engages the visitors in the conversation.
As standard practice, you can share this widget and this is where the widget gets interesting for us. Now that Clearspring has announce the end of their Launchpad platform in favor of the AddThis product, a few key items have surfaced as a result of the transition to the AddThis sharing platform.
Built-in gadget, app and embed sharing are now gone as they are not currently supported by AddThis. Google gadgets has been replaced with Google Bookmarks, apps were replaced with stream/feed posts and embeds are now up to the widget coders to support on their own. These changes are not necessarily bad, but they were nice features within Launchpad (not to mention a slew of other features but we’ll save that for another post).
So far so good, even with the loss of the Google Gadgets and Facebook/MySpace Apps.
Read more…
Down in the dumps, bored, laid off, need a break or just want to dream?
Here are some widgets from Tripbase.com to get you started.
Each of the widgets does something different.
- Travel Weather and Season Predictor: Enter a destination, month and get the weather prediction with information about the travel season.
- Travel Cost Calculator: Enter a destination and it spits out the “estimated” daily cost. You can specify Budget, Mid range or Luxury and your choice of 3 currencies.
- Travel Picture of the Day: Auto updates daily with a new vacation picture to distract you from what you’re suppose to be doing.
Overall, the 3 widgets are nice and simple. We can see how they would be interesting and add value to a site or blog. One thing we really liked is the input suggestions and auto complete on the destination input fields. It definitely makes it easier to input and get the right destinations.
Read more…
Not to be out done by the recent press release of RockYou’s $35M round of funding, KickApps and Clearspring announces a partnership to “ACCELERATE
WIDGET CREATION, DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING.”
We’ve not seen any of the KickApps Widget Studio beta or features that spawn out of this partnership, so this is a very interesting development and we’ll keep an eye on it.
KICKAPPS AND CLEARSPRING PARTNER TO
ACCELERATE WIDGET CREATION, DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING
Companies Collaborate on Advancing KickApps’ WidgeAD™ Format and Clearspring’s Widget Ad Network
New York and Mc Lean, VA, June 10, 2008 — KickApps, the leading on demand social media platform, and Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world’s largest widget syndication and tracking service, today announced a strategic partnership to further accelerate widget usage and monetization. Under the agreement, Clearspring will promote KickApps’ new WYSIWYG Widget Studio (currently in beta), a self-service widget-authoring environment to the Clearspring user base. This will enable Clearspring customers to easily build their own rich-media and interactive widgets with tremendous ease. KickApps will use Clearspring’s powerful distribution and tracking services to provide one-click distribution and in-depth analytics to anyone using the KickApps Platform.
more…
February 24th, 2008
Admin
iMedia Connection has a post up, “4 widget best practices” by Nikole Brake, containing good information on launching widget campaigns. The best practices are specific to widget campaigns and are a good addition to the attributes of a successful social network marketing campaigns post by Jeremiah Owyang from a few days ago.
4 widget best practices
If you’re launching a widget campaign, consider these strategic and technical factors to maximize your campaign’s impact.
The intense popularity of widgets, gadgets, Facebook applications and their kin has advertisers and publishers eager to get on board. But before you invest in a widgetized advertising campaign, there are a number of strategic and technical factors to consider. There are also important guidelines to follow to ensure you get the most from your investment.
Are you ready to let go?
That’s the first question to ask yourself, because consumers interact with widgets (and thus your content) outside the confines of your website…
Serve a purpose, and serve it fresh
Widgets shouldn’t simply be advertisements for your content or service…
Stick with standards and partners you know
On the development side, adhering to IAB standards maximizes the number of potential placements for your widget…
The distribution question
Once you’ve created your widget, how do you get it to fly?…
Head over to iMedia Connection for the full post.
[via Snipperoo Blog]
February 21st, 2008
Admin
Jeremiah Owyang has a great list of attributes that characterize successful campaigns targeting social networks. While not all widgets are part of a marketing campaign, the list is still very applicable to all widgets. It’s definitely a must read. Here are the first three items from the list, head on over to Jeremiah’s blog for the complete list. Don’t forget to check out the comments for some good feedback and conversations.
Marketing Campaigns on Social Networks share the following attributes:
- Meets a business objective: First and foremost, any marketing campaign or activity should match with a business objective, regardless of the tools being used.
- Encourage Member Interaction: The most successful social networking campaigns and efforts involve the audience.
- Quickly scale: Social networks are designed for information to quickly move from member to member, so campaigns that lean on these capabilities perform the best. These attributes known as Velocity, Viralness, and Spread are key.
“What makes a Successful Marketing Campaign on Social Networks?” – Web Strategy by Jeremiah
