Categories: Articles

The Wonderful World Of Widgets

Yesterday I attended the IAB Canada – Interactive Advertising Bureau – annual Interactive To The Max full-day event. In fact, because IAB Canada is celebrating their tenth year anniversary, this is the special "Genius Edition" of Interactive To The Max. First snow storm of the year notwithstanding, there we close to two hundred Marketing professionals who braved the Montreal white stuff to hang out. I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel called, Widgets And Mashups – Tools For Branding And Beyond. There were three panelists (Carrie Lysenko from The Weather Network, Chantal Rossi from Google Canada and Jerome Carron from Sympatico / MSN) who each presented for ten minutes, and then we had a great question and answer period for about twenty minutes.

Widgets are very hot right now.

In fact, I’ll be moderating the exact same panel in Toronto tomorrow for Interactive To The Max.

One of the big questions I had for the panel was about the "fear of the download." Between cookies, spam, viruses, spyware, phishing and people’s general distrust of downloading anything, I was quite surprised to see how many people in the audience (and on the panel) did not see the download issue as an issue at all. In looking at some of the global Widget stats, I’m guessing my fear that people don’t download anything and prefer web-based Widgets is wrong.

I also engaged the panel in discussing the low hanging fruit of creating widgets. Is there an easy angle to Widget success for Marketers?

While the answers were all about keeping it simple, providing value and making it easy for the consumers to grab and use, I actually found an article from MediaPost called, How Widgets Turn Distributed Content Into Distributed Marketing, that arrived in my In Box this morning (it must be the law of attraction at work).

The article (written by Chris Cunningham) includes his Seven Rules For Widget Publishing Success. Here they are :

Rule 1: Simple is the new Clever.

Rule 2: Bring the Bling.

Rule 3: Speak Dog.

Rule 4: Do What You Do Best.

Rule 5: Color Outside the Lines.

Rule 6: Be Contagious.

Rule 7: Be Useful.

Some of these are a little cryptic and require you to check out the full article here: Media Post – How Widgets Turn Distributed Content Into Distributed Marketing.

UPDATE: The crazy winter storm kept me from coming to Toronto. I’ll be (sadly) missing IAB Canada’s Interactive To The Max – Toronto.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.