David Smith and Elizabeth Heldenbrand of San Francisco's Mediasmith have written an excellent article that is up on iMediaConnection titled "Don't Spoil Your Widget Campaign."  The article is a must read if widgets are integral to your company's marketing strategy.  

I want to point some of the best points I think they make in the article.  First, they suggest that "consumers are taking control of their media consumption, and in the process becoming increasingly savvy and more advertising adverse."  They insightfully add, "the primary [media consumption] change is that consumers are much more involved with their media consumption -- to the point that they are not so much consuming their experience, but rather programming it."  I couldn't agree more with that last point, which I italicized.

In addition, they say that "unlike other marketing tactics, widgets represent pull vs. push. By downloading or embedding your widgets, the user has chosen to engage with your widget or brand on their own terms."  Again, I've italicized what I think is the key point here -- people consuming content on their own terms.  This is why engagement and interaction analytics are much more meaningful than simple page view statistics.

David and Elizabeth make another important point when they stress that the first step in widget deployment is to carefully assess your overall marketing strategy to see if widgets can further those goals; only "once you have figured out what the end result will be" should you partner with someone, like NewsGator, who can build widgets for you.  No surprise that one of the mantras NewsGator shares with our perspective clients: do not develop a "widget strategy"; instead, determine if widgets help you achieve the objectives of your existing marketing plan.  If they do, then use them. 

At the very end of the article they, rightly, declare that the "if you build it, they will come" mentality towards widgets is a non-starter.  Instead, they offer some simple, almost gut-check, practices one should keep in mind with widgets (which I'll paraphrase here):

• Is your widget easy to use and straightforward?
• Is it useful? Does it provide value to the user?
• A dedicated user will view your widget frequently; make sure content is fresh to keep them engaged! (How often does the content refresh?)
• Consider monetization options.

Keeping these issues in your head when deciding whether and how to deploy widgets will go a long way towards assuring you widget success! Thanks, David and Elizabeth, for a truly useful and articulate article on widget usage and the widget space in general.

In addition to reading this blog, there are several other ways to stay up to date with NewsGator widgets and the widget space in general.  You can:

1. Follow us on twitter -- "newsgatorwidget"
2. Follow our del.icio.us feed -- "newsgatorwidgets"
3. Join our Ning community -- newsgatorwidgets.ning.com
4. Become a fan of Newsgator on Facebook

Some exciting news coming out of NewsGator's Widget and Data Services division this morning: we are partnering with Japan's Digitial Advertising Consortium (DAC) to exclusively provide NewsGator Widget Services to Japanese media companies and brands.  This partnership will allow DAC to market NewsGator Widgets for content syndication.

Jeff Nolan, VP of NewsGator's SaaS division, says that this is an excellent market opportunity because Japan has the second largest advertising market in the world.  So, our partnership with DAC will allow us to work together to develop widget strategies for Japanese marketers and advertisers.  "We are honored and privileged to work with DAC, a highly respected and premier company, as we enter in the market in Japan," he adds.

Akihiko Tokuhisa -- the CTO of DAC -- is excited because, as he says, the partnership "will allow us to offer powerful, viral and trackable widgets to our large customer base of media companies and brands."

I'll add that I expect that in the coming months you may very well see NewsGator Widgets increasingly on non-English websites.

Here's part two of Jeff Nolan's response to Fred Wilson's talk at last week's Widget Web Expo based on a blog post that Fred published, "Why Widgets is The Wrong Word for What We're Doing." 

Josh: Fred mentioned the importance of engagement in widgets.  He added that people need to design widgets that drive more engagement.  What kind of strategies is NewsGator using to drive engagement?  How does engagement of a widget relate to its monetization potential and its success?

Jeff: Yeah, engagement is key. Start by putting compelling content out that is matched to the audience you are driving. Our data suggests that people don't click on tabs or corner peels, so keep the presentation simple and don't let the creative get in the way of the experience. Email and send to mobile is a popular engagement tool but rating content isn't. The analytics tools are pretty good, which means at any given moment you can drill into the performance of a widget and from that make adjustments that either improve or degrade the results. Engagement means a lot of things to different people, what I am focused on is presenting the most compelling content and presentation in order to drive clickthroughs on the content and content sharing, as well as present the most relevant content to begin with.

Josh: Fred said that, in his view, no more than 10-15% of people will ever consume blog content via RSS readers.  Do you agree with this view?

Jeff: No, but I don't think RSS readers as they exist today with a list of feeds and chronological display of post level items is the be-all-end-all for RSS. The trick here is to get people away from thinking RSS when we really just mean syndicated content. The only thing that gets in the way of RSS adoption is the letters R S and S. If you look at some of the cutting edge stuff like Feedly and Feedhub you see a super compelling presentation of content in a personalized publishing metaphor and never realize that it's all powered by RSS.

Josh: How do you envision widgets changing in the coming few years?  Will NewsGator's strategy evolve?  Where do you see us in 18 months as opposed to today?

Jeff: Of course we'll evolve, we're not dogmatic about widgets for the sake of widgets. We are providing a hosted service to our clients so we'll continue to enhance the tools we give them and present updated and existing strategies that build on what we learn so that they can improve their operations. I suspect that in 18 months we'll probably see better ad manager integrations, enhanced social network features that present a more complete view of a widget audience, and better viral loops that drive increased engagement. We actually deal with a lot of knowns on any given day so it's really a challenge about prioritizing the work rather than inventing some new gizmo.

Fraser from Adaptive Blue has a great post up on their blog that further expounds upon a topic from last week's Widget Web Expo.  The post debunks the largely incorrect, outdated notion regarding widgets that "if you build it they will come."

He says, for instance, that "Widgets have been sold as a way to achieve broad distribution easily. The sale has been that slapping a “copy me” button onto the widget = viral distribution. Unfortunately this simplistic equation neglects important other factors that influence the ability of a widget to promote itself, encouraging replication and duplication across the web." 

The solution he suggests is making sure that viral widgets have solid value for the publisher, value for the site visitor (encouraging engagement and interaction) and ease of replication.

Click here to read the excellent, full post.

Last week, Jeff Nolan -- VP of NewsGator's SaaS divison -- attended the WidgetWebExpo in NYC.  There, Fred Wilson gave a talk based on a blog post he published that morning called "Why Widgets is The Wrong Word for What We're Doing."  That blog post and the discussion that took place at the conference provided a fair bit of fodder for discussion on the blogosphere as well as in the tech/widget space.  I decided to ask Jeff if he'd like to provide another perspective in response to Fred's comments.  Enjoy!

Josh: There's been a fair bit of chatter on the blogosphere about Fred Wilson's talk at Widget Web Expo -- specifically that widgets, they way the exist now, are on there way out.  What was your initial reaction to this?

Jeff: This was misrepresented by a lot of people as "widgets are dead" when in fact Fred was saying that absent of providing some utility it is unlikely a widget strategy will be successful. I think you also have to recognize that Fred hasn't been entirely deliberate about his use of widgets, he throws them up on his site with a randomness that causes people to complain, and because he puts up a lot of Flash widgets he ends up slowing down his page load time. Put all that together and what I think Fred was saying is that the way he is using widgets doesn't work.

Josh: Fred's main point, I think, was that widgets need to move from living on pages to living, collectively, in a stream or flow.  Do you agree?  Is this the direction you see widgets moving in?

Jeff: That's a neat way of putting it but I don't agree with it as stated, meaning abandoning what we are doing now to go do something new. Widgets are useful as a mechanism for aggregating many feeds and even presenting an experience that is like life streaming, but that's just one thing they can do. There is also the aspect of who you are targeting. We serve primarily media clients even though over 25,000 widgets in total have been built with our service. For individuals, like Fred, the needs are different and it's less about syndicating content and more about broadcasting a "being Fred" experience. Fred has done as much as anyone to promote widgets but he's on a very forward edge and really not representative of the broader market right now.

Josh: Fred said in the talk that widgets are not necessarily monetizeable but that the services that are behind them are. What's your take on this?    

Jeff: People won't pay for widgets, they pay for the content and services that are being delivered, either through consumption of advertising or as an extension of a service they are subscribing to. The way we are monetizing widgets with display ads leaves a lot to be desired as well, the CPMs are low and it's remnant city, so in order to move that up we'll have to put instrumentation into the widget container that collects and presents more data about the individuals and their behaviors in order to drive better ad targeting.

Leah Messinger at iMediaConnection has a worthwhile article debunking 9 popular widget "myths."  Some of here more important points, in my view:

• US companies will spend $40 million in 2008 (up from $15 million in 2007) to deploy widgets
• media companies and brands are becoming increasingly comfortable with user-mediated content so the industry is likely to see the widget business expand far beyond social networking
• contrary to the popular notion that there's no room for ads on widgets, widgets, in effect, are ads   
• typically, if a widget isn't viral than the publisher hasn't done a good job

There are many other good nuggets in the article, so check it out.

We've added a new feature to Editor's Desk 2.1 which we think those of you creating more than one widget, or modifying an existing one, will find very useful.  We're calling it Clone.  The clone tool allows you to make an exact copy of a widget in your account.  This tool is useful if you want to create other widgets that have the same look and feel as your current widget but have different content; it is also useful when you want to create a copy of a widget to test any potential changes you want to make to a widget without impacting your live widget.

How do you access Clone? From the Tools and Live Preview page in Editor's Desk, click on the Clone icon under the tools menu.  A pop-up box will n otify you that the widget has been cloned; click "OK."  Note that a cloned widget will have the same name as the original widget, with a version number after it -- (i.e. V2, V3, etc.).

I'm very excited to let you know that the much anticipated, brand spankin' new version of Editor's Desk -- which we're calling version 2.1 -- just went live! 

To put this in perspective, the previous version of Editor's Desk launched about a year ago, and during that time we have solicited and listened to copious client and customer feedback in order to make this new version as powerful, streamlined, easy-to-use and intuitive as possible.  Our software engineers have been hard at work since March developing the new version of Editor's Desk that you see today.

Creating NewsGator-powered widgets to enhance brand recognition and content engagement, drive site traffic and improve monetization of your site has never been easer!  Let's take a look at some of the cool new features in Editor's Desk 2.1.

• A new user interface: Dramatically redesigned and easier to use.
• 30% faster: get more done in less time.
• New, great-looking templates to choose from: the new templates are much better looking, and they do a better job resizing around your content.  We've also integrated an ad payload -- so you can now monetize your widgets on your own or use ours!
• New smart search functionality: A once hidden feature is now seeing the light. You can now set up a persistent search around keywords, and constrain the universe from which to search. This will allow you to guarantee search results from known content providers.
• Feed monitoring: Instantly know if any of the feeds that provide content to your widget are not operating correctly; fix any feeds that are "stuck" with a handy refresh button
• Duplicate ("clone") button: create similar widgets quickly and easily.
• Easier to use and more streamlined: We've changed the widget creation process so it's easier to get started. Just pick the template best suited to present your content and go!

If you already have a NewsGator Widgets account, you don't have to sign-up again; all of your existing login credentials will still work here.  If, on the other hand, you haven't yet used Editor's Desk, follow the simple signup information and you'll be making widgets in minutes!  Enjoy.

And, if you'd like to see the full press release, you can view it here.