Dan York passed on an interesting rumor.
Category: Productivity Booster
Categories
Widgetmania
Covering the dry technical stuff first. From everything I’ve seen over the past couple of days I’m boiling widgets down into three types:
Type 1: These are additions to web pages, most often tools over in the sidebar that provide some additional functionality, most often for a blog or (shudder) a MySpace page. A classic example would be a flickr widget, it grabs some photos from your account and makes a little slide show type thingy (technical definition, I know). See it in action, and grab your own if you want from here. Most of these are trying to enable a viral spread of the application.
Type 2: Freestanding tiny little applications. Folks over on the Mac side are very familiar with these, you activate the widget page and all these crappy little clocks and temperature gadges pop up. Like most cool features on the mac, they’ve showed up in the next edition of Windows (Vista). I’ve found these things to be of not much use since you can do most of the same stuff on web pages, but that’s probably the cranky geek in me shining through. If you have a personalized Google desktop you can run Google Gadgets, which are similar and supposedly if you have Google desktop installed you can run them in pre-Vista Windows. This is all heresay, I don’t have Google desktop installed.
Dr. Penn made a good recommedation in this week’s Marketing Over Coffee, there’s an app called Amnesty that allows you to transform widgets from one form to another, or promote them up to a Type 3.
I didn’t take good notes yesterday so I can’t find the name of the presenter that described Type 3, but it’s the most interesting category. He referred to them as BDAs – Branded Desktop Applications. These are full fledged apps that often reside in the tray on Windows and are running all the time allowing content to be pushed out to them. Some great examples are Southwest’s Ding, and a Disneyland’s Thing that I can’t find a link to. Both of these are full fledged apps, and in Ding’s case provide unique pricing that is available only through the app.
This category has a ton of potential as it elbows even the browser out of the picture. Thinking about it now, I realize that the best example of this is iTunes. I’ve had a mental block because I’ve always considered widgets to be small items, not apps capable of going full screen, but these are the most powerful. It’s also interesting to note that apps of this type have tried to get on to the desktop before, but were hammered down by the fear (and actual use) of spyware.
So, why would you build a widget? We can see from Ding and iTunes that if you have some exclusive content this can cement your relationship with your customer, and eliminate the allure of other web pages which is always a risk from within the browser. Another reason would be to encourage the viral spread of your application. You’ll also have to consider the impact widgets on your analytics and bandwidth. These aren’t going to be page views but will start requiring serious bandwidth (especially if you do go viral). Again, as cranky geek I don’t want to add more to my tray, but I think Joe Sixpack is looking for simple apps since he has some trouble with “the tubez on tha intranets”
Another interesting application would be using a flash widget as an alternative user interface – think of the mini player for itunes. There’s a lot of potential there to make things easier to use, and opening them up for content to be pushed to them (get a pop-up when your favorite artist has released a new tune, etc.).
All of this is pretty cool but not earth shattering, until you consider widgets for cellphones. This is an area that could explode. The fedex package tracker, or drop off box locater is not worth more as a widget vs. web page on my PC, but when I’m driving around looking for it a phone widget could be a killer app. As I think more about it – how about GPS enabled widgets? Your phone pings you when you are within 100yds of a Starbucks. Better yet, in your car the widget on your GPS starts telling you to drive there.
Ok, that’s it. Brain exploding…
Thanks again to David Beisel over at Venrock for hosting the event, and Christopher Penn for dropping some Widget Wisdom on me so I had some ammo at the session.
Addendum: My new Arch Enemy Mike Champion took much better notes than I did. *shaking fist*
Seriously though, if you are into live music check out his Tourb.us project.
For the past couple of weeks it’s been all about the lists. List management is ultimately the blood supply of all your marketing efforts. Anyone doing direct marketing knows that the company usually kneels to the ultimate power of “the house list”. The best part of an organization that grows quickly is being able to farm the list management out to a database specialist. I don’t know too many people that get all juiced up on dumping spreadsheets into database tables, and the arcane arts of ETL (Extracting data, Transforming it to the right format, and Loading it in). I’ve picked up a bunch of ghetto tricks to simplify a lot of this, and thankfully SalesForce.com does a better job of it than anything that’s come before.
If you are going further ghettostyle and don’t have the Salesforce API, there’s a great tool called RingLead that can make your life much easier and your data much cleaner.
Recently I’ve been hunting for names that are very focused and I’ve been able to get lists from individual publications, but another tactic is to use a list broker, someone who rents lists and has a broad range of knowledge about publications. I had favorite vendor here, but some of these folks have been having some trouble making the transition from the world of Magazines to the Web. For example, I couldn’t find a web page for my vendor of choice. Something for me to dig into further this week.
I’ll spare you the rest of the details of these mystic arts… unless you want to hear more?
Categories
Product Marketing
Ok, I said I was going to stop complaining about being sick and I am. But I still need more sleep than usual even though I’m feeling 100%.
I notice that many marketing blogs focus on the communications and PR side but this week I was thinking more about Product Marketing. This is the art of making sure that people want to buy your stuff BEFORE you design, build and advertise it. This is the most strategic element of marketing because it can make your job much simpler later on in the cycle, and more importantly – make life easier for the sales guys. And everyone knows life always seems better at a company with happy sales people.
Rather than reinvent the wheel though, I can just point you to Pragmatic Marketing if you want to learn more. Every product manager I know has a copy of their diagram printed up somewhere. I’ve never even been to one of there sessions but the diagram is so good that I’ve used it in presentations – just fill in the blanks with your own campaigns and you at least have some kind of plan.
Good news – Marketing Over Coffee is rolling another episode tomorrow!
addendum -Â sorry this is late, I wrote this last night and in my half sleep state forgot to post it.
but I like hot butter on my breakfast toast. A $5 Starbucks card to anybody that can place that lyric.
The latest Marketing Over Coffee podcast is up, and I am psyched about our first rave review from Mitch Joel. Mitch’s Six Pixels of Separation podcast is one of my favorites because it gives you tactical advice as opposed to just strategic ramble. If a guy on the management team of an agency says it’s worthwhile then I know we are doing something right.
Looks like drinks will be on me at PodCamp Boston 2!
Seth Godin had a great post last week about performing a show as part of business. It reminded me of the profound advice up on the wall at my local Jordan’s Furniture – “There’s no business that’s not show business”
Normally this would be my normal Sunday plug for the latest M Show (go listen to it, or better yet – subscribe!), but while tagging the file I found something cool in the newest version of iTunes.
You can now create separate tags such as Artist and Album for sorting in iTunes. You need to be a bit of a compulsive freak or have a huge music library to have seen the need for this (I’ll leave the judgement on me to your discretion). Let’s say you have your favorite artist’s new album and you rip it to iTunes. Then you’re searching by artist and you pull up the album and, Lo and behold, 3 tracks are missing. This often happens if the missing tracks are duets or have a famous backup singer, while you are searching under “Lawrence Welk” the track is actually buried under “The Lemon Sisters and Lawrence Welk”.
I used to just dump the second artist (in many cases I had no idea who the hell they were anyway), but now for those tracks with two famous artists you can choose which one you want to file the track under. Or, for the compulsive, have it in the library twice, once under each artist and still have it show as “The Lemon Sisters and Lawrence Welk”.
Happy Sorting!
Greg had kicked this over to me when I did a video on using smart playlists in iTunes. I was hoping to wait until my blog template was updated so I could show it in Revver, but that won’t be for another couple of weeks and I’m tired of waiting.
If you are going to sync podcasts across multiple machines or need to do some other funky stuff, check out: using Juice, Podnova and SmartPlaylists.
Too tired… Just posted M Show.
Video of sessions on Getting your company to Podacast Panel
Categories
Unconference!
Podcamp Toronto is right around the corner and I’m very excited to check out another un-conference. The schedule can be a bit frustrating since it’s always in flux (it stinks when somebody you want to see schedules themselves at the same time as one of your own slots CHRIS BROGAN).
I have to say though that I think I’m starting to lose patience with normal conferences. I seem to learn 3x the material at an unconference and don’t have to deal with as much vendor shilling. More to report as it happens!