Mobile Widget Info & Companies to Watch

Why are Mobile Widgets Important?

MySpace and Facebook are the leading social network sites in the US with 53M and 25M unique users each month respectively*.

There are currently 35M mobile web users in the US*, and this market has grown at more than 50% per year for the last three years.***

There are 206M mobile phone subs in the US (17% use their data plans and 25% have data plans)

The Clearspring mobile syndication platform will be able to publish widgets to all carriers except Verizon when mobile launches and will offer the Verizon system before the end of 2007.

Globally, more people have mobile phones than PCs

There are 2.7 Billion mobile phone users around the world while there are 850M PCs: 800M cars; 1.3B fixed landline phones; 1.4B credit cards; 1.5B TV Sets**

*Source: Web data from Alexa and Quantcast; Mobile user data from Telephia and Comscore.
**Source: Communities Dominate Brands, book by Toni Ahonen and Alan Moore
***Source: Chetan Sharma Consulting


Companies to Watch:

Zyb.com

Mosh - Nokia's video sharing play

Facebook mobile

Netvibes is upgrading their mobile service

YouTube mobile

Yahoo! mobile

Hooqs.com - Application that allows users to easily create a video channel and post that video to a mobile device.

Marketers Start to Use Social Networks for CRM Instead of Ads

http://adage.com/digital/article.php?article_id=119918

Ad Age Article about Widgets

Three Strategies for Thriving on the Decentralized Web

As Long-form Content Becomes Bite-Size, Make Everything on Your Site Eembeddable

By Steve Rubel

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=119926

Social Network Ads must be interactive and "make people's lives easier, better and richer.

Traditional marketing failing on social networks

Get interactive or get out, says analyst

Ian Williams, vnunet.com 17 Aug 2007

Traditional marketing campaigns are proving unsuccessful on social networking sites, according to a recently published report.

The Forrester Research study suggests that most marketers still use traditional tactics like run-of-site advertising and static microsites to push messages into these networks.

However, the return on investment in these campaigns is very low, and marketers should be prepared to engage in a personal relationship with users by providing something of value.

Promotions are good in this context, according to Forrester, but information or brand elements that users can pass on to their friends are even better.

"It is clear that successful social networking site campaigns do not follow traditional marketing rules," said Charlene Li, a principal analyst at Forrester and co-author of the report.

"Social networking sites cannot be treated as channels because their members are not passive web pages."

The report suggests that marketers should mimic how music acts promote themselves on sites like MySpace by engaging their fans with frequent backstage gossip and answering their questions.

"During the past 10 years, the evolution of the internet has dramatically changed how organisations interact with customers," said Gurval Caer, president and chief executive at marketing agency Blast Radius.

"Companies are recognising that traditional marketing approaches like advertising are less effective today, and marketers are struggling to deliver value.

"People no longer want 'interruptive' brand communications; they want interactions with their peers and true value from companies through Facebook applications or communities for sharing ideas and experiences."

Caer added that marketing needs to "turn itself on its head" with a much greater focus on building relationships that will make people's lives "easier, better and richer".

The report concluded that companies that want to advertise on social networks should embrace the interactive aspect of the sites in order to gain the full benefit of these campaigns.

Forrester Report: Marketing on Social Networking Sites

Independent Confirmation of Clearspring's platform

Posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 at http://mmogwidgets.blogspot.com/2007/08/widget-platforms.html

Clearspring

When I started this project I settled on using Clearspring as my widget platform. It has a number of attractive features that influenced my decision.

• It offers turnkey syndication to many popular "start page" or personal page sites like iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.
• It offers turnkey syndication to blogs and other services like Blogger, Digg, Stumble, etc.
• It was based on standard and well known technologies like Javascript and Flash.
• It has amazing analytics including:
  
• Number of widget views.
  
• Number of unique viewers.
• Domains that views are coming from.
  
• Viral hubs that are spreading the widget.
  
• Where people are viewing the widget from geographically.
  
• 3D graphs and charts with modifiable date ranges and data sets for custom reporting.
• The "get & share" button that makes it easy for viewers who like the widget to simply grab it, customize it's settings, and automatically add it to their favorite pages via their turnkey syndication or by embedding.

All in all Clearspring has turned out to be a decent choice