I stumbled across a helpful food-for-thought type blog post by Kailee Brown of Ignite Social Media titled, "8 Questions to Ask When Developing Widgets for Social Media Marketing."  As Kailee rightly explains, "widget development can be costly and time consuming. It is important to ask the right questions before developing widgets. Here is somewhat of a checklist that needs to be answered if you are considering developing a widget as part of your social media marketing campaign."

Here are 8 specific things she suggests you have in mind before launching a widget (campaign):

• Why would people want to use the widget?
• How will people find the widget?
• How will you or your organization track the widget? 
• What is an appropriate size for the widget?
• Who is the target demographic?
• Is it appropriately branded?  (Note: I think this one is huge)
• How long is the campaign?
• Does creating a widget match your overall business objectives?

She goes into detail regarding each question in her blog post, and most of what she says is spot on.  I suggest you give it a full read.

NewsGator tracks a veritable ton of data every day.  That data, among many other applications, helps us to track how individual clients are doing in terms of their widget strategy and performance.  Every month several of us sit down and go through the past month's "numbers." 

Earlier in the month we reviewed our December numbers.  We put particular focus on widgets that experienced noteworthy upward movement in some of the metrics we track -- such as views, interaction, click throughs, etc.  Then we complied a list of best practices that reflect the basis for the positive changes we noticed in these particular widgets. 

Below, the list:

• put your widgets on article pages and areas to which they are related
• keep it simple; don't make widgets that try to do 'everything'
• plan ahead when launching time sensitive or seasonal widgets
• don't hide your widgets -- or content -- in your widget
• if the widget has tabs for different areas of content, consider an auto-rotate
• use animation conservatively and thumbnails liberally
• give your inheritors more than they expect
• if you have a network, use it

Today I stumbled upon a great commentary piece, written by Donna Barrett and Randy Siegel, that appears in Editor & Publisher.  Since newspapers represent a substantial base of clients for NewsGator's Media & Consumer products, and since nearly every day recently we hear of another newspaper either on its death bed, or being shuttered all together -- along with some seemingly sounding the death knell of the entire industry -- I think what the authors have to say here is hugely relevant in the current climate.  The premise of their article is this,

"Sure, newspaper companies face serious challenges. But we also have serious opportunities to re-engineer ourselves as quality content creators for local print and online audiences that advertisers still desire."

The authors go on to say that,

"well-run newspaper companies will succeed by fighting hard, experimenting and evolving while tuning out those armchair critics who revel in the thought of a society without newspapers or news."

But what most caught my eye is one of their most important suggestions for how they believe newspapers can survive, and even thrive, in the future:

"Newspapers can increase their revenues and reach by investing in more content creation for different audiences, not less. The more compelling articles and information a newspaper and its website can offer, the longer readers and online users will be engaged. The longer consumers are engaged, the more exposure they will have to ads in print and online. The more attention the ads receive, the better the advertisers’ responses typically will be and the more those ads will be worth."

This description, almost uncannily, describes precisely what we're doing for media companies here at NewsGator!

First, by widgetizing content you are, indeed "investing in more content creation" and making this content highly portable across the entire social web.  Also, since widgets have been shown to enhance engagement rates, time on site, brand equity, etc. this fits right into the authors' point that the longer the consumers are engaged, then the more exposure they will have to ads -- which in turn helps newspapers' bottom lines.  And every single NewsGator widget is "advertisable."  In fact, we just announced our highly sophisticated Ad Burner optimization program that can seamlessly do just that.

Finally, two other product offerings from NewsGator also enhance content creation as well as reader engagement: our related content widgets, as well as our branded iPhone applications based off NewsGator's highly successful NetNewsWire application.

I encourage you to read their entire article here, but my take-away message here is that majority of the pertinent recommendations the authors make here in terms of newspapers enhancing & increasing content, enhancing readers' engagement with that content (which leads to higher ad revenue) are exactly what all of our offerings -- whether it be regular widgets, related content widgets, branded iPhone applications, our AdBurner program, or our data service offerings -- are designed to do.  There may be a down economy, and newspapers and media companies are no doubt struggling, but that just makes NewsGator products all the more important.      

As always, our technical support engineers -- Jenny & Dan -- have a helpful post up on the NewsGator Technical Blog about the recent Facebook Application changes and how they may affect your NewsGator widgets. 

As they point out, "in the past couple months Facebook has changed their application architecture a number of times, and we have steadily attempted to keep up with them (for the most part, successfully)."  But, the most recent changes were drastic enough to actually affect some of our widgets.   

So, in this post, they've laid out all sorts of tips for you to avoid any potential issues courtesy a brand spakin' new Facebook Wizard that was loaded into our Editor's Desk platform yesterday.  This should guide you through any wrinkles that may come up as a result of Facebook changing their application architecture!  You can read the whole post here. 

As always, happy widgeting!

Andy Guess over at Inside Higher Ed has written an intriguing article about the future of widgets and their potential applications in the field of education.  His finding is that widgets are "real enough within the digital ether that some educators want to turn them into teaching tools." 

It's interesting to think about his contention that widgets may turn out to be ideal "for creating interactive, individualized instructional materials that can live on a course Web site, a personal blog or even a mobile phone" -- in other words, highly portable teaching or instruction platforms.  Sounds logical to me.  He adds another important point that might presage (or, really, lay the ground work for) widgets having a bright future in education space: "as the latest versions of course management packages adopt module-based interfaces and as colleges’ Web portals cull together widget-like boxes for the latest news and e-mail, the objects are becoming more familiar to students — even if they don’t realize it yet." 

So if many students are already using widget-like applications for school, it seems that "true" widgets that can be ported to multiple places and platforms would be the natural next step up from the widget-like interface of a lot of new course management tools that he mentions.  I'd say the future looks bright for widgets (in the education arena).

Good food for thought...

You should read the entire post here; it's a good read.

I'm excited to announce a new feature set that we're offering here at NewsGator: Related Content.  As Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator's Media & Data Services, asks quite simply, "why leave readers wanting more when you can actually give them more, automatically, and keep them on your site and clicking through?"  Of course, you wouldn't in an ideal world, and here is where our related content offerings come into play.

We are offering two different types of related content features:

• A related stories widget that offers readers headlines for stories they may be interested in.  It works quite simply: when they click on a headline, a fly-out window appears with the opening paragraphs of each story; another click reveals the full article, and ads can be embedded at every turn.
• A related topics page which automatically presents contextually related topics to readers as key words.  Readers click on the key word of interest and are redirected to a page of stories relevant to the key word.

Both of these related content services have multiple benefits:

• they get readers more engaged with your site's content
• they generate additional ad revenue for you
• they enhance SEO by expanding content, providing another channel to gain readership and increase page views
• the services also eliminate publishers' reliance on traditional paid news sources

But the related content widgets are only as good as the content behind them, right?  Well, bet you didn't know this: every day we add 8.5 million new articles to our database, indexing and aggregating 3.6 million different feeds and archiving 4 years of content!  This huge database of content -- in fact, the industry's largest such repository of free content -- a result of our pioneering RSS reading/delivery services, is offered to publishers who wish to supplement their own content with related stories from 3rd parties. We even track more than 44 million "relevance events" in this activity, ensuring related content is truly relevant!  It's quite simple: the more content to draw from, and the better indexed that is, the better the related content supplied by our widget offerings.

What's more, publishers have control over their widgets' look and feel, search action, and content sources through our existing Editor's Desk platform; this makes it quick and effortless to build, manage, and track these new related content widgets. And we also offer flexibility in pricing for our related content services: hosted (transaction based) and free (ad supported with revenue-sharing).

You can read more about our related content offering here.  Or, read the official press release here.

Even better, you can sign up for our upcoming, FREE WEBINAR on this exciting new offering here.

Over at iMediaConnection, Mitchel Ahern has written an article that talks about some of the keys to, and pitfalls of, widget success.  It's a good read and it has some important pointers regarding using widgets as marketing tools as well as the overall state of the widget-o-sphere at the moment.  I'd like to highlight a few of his comments, specifically in regards to what we're doing at NewsGator Media & Consumer Products; feel free to read the whole piece here. 

Robert Murdoch, in comments from part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation, portrays the current environment for newspapers and media companies, not unsurprisingly, as difficult.  In particular, he calls out "some of the [obsolete] editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers."  However, Murdoch points to a potentially bright future for the space if newspapers and media companies can learn to adapt.

In short, Murdoch says that newspapers must embrace technology advances -- RSS content in particular -- to be successful in the changing media landscape.  He believes that the key challenge for success in the future will be to "use a newspaper's brand while allowing readers to personalize the news for themselves-and then deliver it in the ways that they want."      

These comments lend significant credence to the work we're doing here at NewsGator Media & Consumer Products with newspapers and media companies through RSS, widgets, and related content. In a general sense, the solutions that we offer at NewsGator help newspapers and media companies extend their brand's reach, improve traffic and monetization, and -- here's the key -- also enhance the end user's  experience through dynamic (and often customizable) content delivery platforms.

Indeed, If you read between the lines of his comments, Murdoch makes a powerful case for precisely the type of viral widgets that NewsGator provides, by referring to the importance of tools that allow, "a newspaper's brand...[to] deliver [content] in the ways that [readers] want" by "allowing readers to personalize the news for themselves."

You can read more about his comments in this article on CNET, but the main point I want to convey is that Murdoch's take away message strongly validates the type of solutions -- widgets, related content, etc. -- that NewsGator currently offers.  If you believe Murdoch, then widgets in the newspaper and media space have a very bright future. 

There's a post by Melinda Gipson up on The Newspaper Association of America's Opportunopoly blog that explores NewsGator's new and growing relationship with mSpoke, which has been profiled before on this blog. You should definitely read the whole post, but here's a quote within the article from NewsGator's own Walker Fenton, about the power of related content widgets, which are made possible through our relationship with mSpoke:

"The more relevant the content, the more relevant can be the adjacent advertising.  When you compare related content ads with banner ads, we see significantly better engagement -- 3 percent to double-digit click-throughs, depending on where the ads are in relationship with the content recommendations"

If you're in the content syndication, related content, or contextual advertising arena, this article is a must-read.  Check out the full post here.