Get {insert widget title} on your website
Posted on 22. Nov, 2008 by Dean Whitney in Advertising, Web 2.0 Technology and has 0 Comments
I’ve discussed widget often with clients and speaking at events. Eventually everything will be a widget. Just like you have appliances in your house. You don’t go somwhere to ask them to toast your bread – you have a toaster. Today you wouldn’t build a mapping system, you’d use one that is available.
The key to creating an effective widget is making sure it is 1. useful and 2. frictionless.
Yahoo! Buzz has a good example. I may want to add Buzz content to my sidebar here on the blog. This blog is new but I hope it will occupy some lively chatter soon so the current Yahoo! Buzz top articles could be of use. We have satisfied the first objective.
The second is frictionless. Friction in the realm of digital marketing is an attribute that causing an
Yahoo! Buzz widget wizard
increase incomplete user task completed. We could be talking about conversion form or registration attrition, loss of focus, time etc.
For Yahoo! Buzz there’s a simple preferences page where you can adjust the display attributes. No one seems to realize how important this is. Folks are so excited to see the embed tag. Lets make it easy and fun to customize widgets, and not just attributes by great design ideas. Also check out the Buzz buttons - so easy.
Think of the fundamental difference between this and an ad unit. They take up the same space. With Yahoo! it creates a value exchange. I get a media feed that is insightful for my readers while Yahoo! gets prominent visibility on a site that may have a deeper level of trust with their clients. Best of all its a free exchange.
Social media is all about the longtail and that friction isn’t just about forms but also about economic models. Investments that yeild social value may have an entirely different financial model.
By offering valuable services free you earn the right to stay in touch with the consumers and they help your product to evolve. This results in a co-creation experience that will allow for specific features highly tailored to you exact needs.
You can see I’ve added the Yahoo! Buzz widget to the sidebar. It took maybe 3 minutes to generate the code and publish to the site.
Featured
Social Bookmarks