In the last ad:tech New York, ‘widget marketing’ has been nominated as the next big thing in the coming year. According to Wikipedia, Widget is being termed as something similar to a plugin or an extension on the internet browser in your personal space.

Previously, people spend their time on certain websites, now with widgets; they are able to bring the content of the website to wherever they go: Facebook, blog, desktop, mobile phones.

Mac users in particular should be very familiar with a widget app called Konfabulator – which pulls weather, stock quotes, headlines, etc. from across the Web and places them on the desktop – as it come freely with every Mac computer.

Companies such as YouTube, Slide, Wikipedia, and Google are catching up with this phrase and launching widgets so that consumers can use their products at the comfort of their personal space. One familiar application which uses widgets would be Facebook where you add applications of companies to send a video, a photo or a flower to your friend.

Marketers should also be very excited with this upcoming marketing tool because by using widgets, they are firstly able to do direct marketing to consumers and cross sell their products since consumers are the one who chose their company and installed their widgets. Secondly, when consumers put the company’s widgets on their personal space, they provide free publicity of the company and products. Lastly and most importantly, installation of these widgets is trackable and measurable, which is the crux of every marketing campaign.

Essentially, widgets are extremely effective and low cost in driving quality traffic, as well as creating brand exposure. However, one thing to note is that the method of promoting these widgets and also the content of the widget greatly influence how impactful these widgets are on ROMI.

One very successful case study of widget marketing is the Levi’s limited edition 23/501 jeans and shoes viral campaign.

To increase the sharing of the widget, Levis filled the widget with unreleased hip hop tracks by popular artists. They then used banner ads to drive traffic to a website which contained the widget together with Wildfire, the creator’s widget distribution network, to increase the web presence of Levis’ widget.

The result: The23/501 Collection sold out in less than 50 seconds and more than 10,000 people uploaded the widget on to their personal space. Each widget delivered an average of 10 product views and interactions per impression were 20.8% which was far much higher than the 3% average which rich media banner ads deliver.

Obtaining up-to-date information instantly with every automatic refresh is definitely a luring point to download widgets of your favorite websites. If you find it troublesome to pull out the calculator from your accessories, open the internet browser to Google, I am sure you will be rushing to download the widgets on your desktop.

Linking public security with technology is the current trend.

In the eyes of the British public, CCTV has become the police’s first port of call and a high-tech crime-fighting tool. In London, the average person can expect to be caught on surveillance video hundreds of times daily, and Britons are accustomed to seeing CCTV footage of suspects and victims in high-profile crimes.

Likewise, Singapore Police Force has a ongoing collaborations with 14 Town Councils will see the deployment of 241 mobile CCTV systems at common public areas of HDB blocks plagued with safety an security concerns. An online mobile phone screening facility utilising the mobile phone’s IMEI number will be made available to the public so that they can perform a “due diligence” check before purchasing used mobile phones.

However, how effective these systems really are?
Do we really think that all of the 13 million CCTV cameras in UK are being watched by forces, that are just waiting for people to inadvertently drop a paper hankie on the street? Or are we worried that we might just get caught after we’ve mugged some poor unfortunate?

For a more direct approach, the South Koreans got it all.

Government agencies introduced “report and reward” schemes that encouraged people to catch their citizens transgressing the law.  This opportunity for extra cash enticed people to sign for courses at the paparazzi schools to learn how to get their ‘preys’ on video.

From tracking a person smoking in prohibited areas, throwing the stub away and locate his car license number to ‘ratting on’ shopping malls that give out plastic bags for free (they are supposed to charge for, under a law aimed at preventing waste), plenty of opportunities are around. There are even ‘Specialists” such as ‘ssu-parazzi” — for those who specialize in catching people illegally throwing away their rubbish.  These ‘trackers’ will then send the evidence to the appropriate state agency, along with the witnesses’ bank details for the rewards.

The effectiveness of this system may be apparent but whether it will last long has yet to seen.  There have been concerns from the agencies however that this bounty-hunter approach might create a new form of business rather than improving the society and rewards have been reduced to prevent that.

Moon Sung-ok (R), president and teacher at a paparazzi school, shows a student how to use a hidden camera during training in a car in Seoul November 15, 2008. 2008.
REUTERS/Jo Yong-Hak

Moon Sung-ok (R), president and teacher at a paparazzi school, explains how to obtain rewards to his students during a class in his office in Seoul November 15, 2008. REUTERS/Jo Yong-Hak

Moon Sung-ok, president and teacher at a paparazzi school, shows how to use a hidden camera during a class in his office in Seoul November 15, 2008.
REUTERS/Jo Yong-Hak

According to a research by JupiterResearch, they found that Social Networking, Test Messaging and Cell Phone Use are Beginning to Impact the Effectiveness of E-mail Marketing.

From the research, they found that in 2007, 51% of e-mail users said e-mail inspired at least one online purchase, and 47% said the same for off-line purchases. However, in 2008, the share of e-mail users fell to 44% for online purchases and 41% for off-line purchases.

I believe that the decrease can be explained by the increasing number of emails coming into our mailbox daily, thanks to spam; the usage of emails for communication is decreasing.

Personally, when i check my emails and I see a massive amount of new mails, I will select all and delete them at one go, leaving only emails from people I know, emails from companies I subscribed to and emails with interesting headers. 

I know that this definitely does filter out advertisements from companies which offer me fabulous products, but, it is a pity that they came together with spam.

A few months later, Exacttarget did another research and found that Youth are More Receptive to Email, vs. SocNet, Marketing.

In their research, they segmented their consumers into 6 categories. Among their segments, what was interesting was that almost half the population of young homemakers uses social networks and SMS during the day; however, they prefer direct mail and email marketing as their marketing channel.

Other interesting segments would be the college students and the teens who uses social network more than the other segments, however, they believe that social networks are meant for private communication and would rather marketers use direct mail/ email marketing to market their products.

Personally, some issues that I faced from marketing efforts through social network were that companies which I did not subscribe to, kept sending me irrelevant messages right after they obtained my phone number from who knows where.

Looking at advertisements on Facebook is also very troublesome because whenever I click on the advertisement, they require me to join a particular club before I can look at the advertisement. Going through all the trouble just to take a look at the advertisements was a total turn off and the fact that joining the club not only exposes my information to the advertiser, it also crowds my Facebook profile. These reasons do not justify me joining the club for one advertisement.

In my own opinion, even though there are such contrasting results from the research, a conclusion we can draw would be that consumers only want relevant marketing and getting information from the marketing effort must be easy. Consumers want their privacy yet they are open to receiving marketing information through means they can filter through.

Email or not, if the advertisement is relevant, easy to obtain and understand, it will gain consumer’s attention.

Altitude with Auditude

Who says you can’t teach an old dog new trick?! Here, we are referring to the old media of television networks & Hollywood studios. Media corporations have been fighting a hopeless battle to regain control of their content, sending out endless waves of DMCA (The Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices in a vain attempt to take down countless clips scattered across the web.
Many ways and means have been devised to prevent people from uploading copyrighted content on the Internet, ever since YouTube heralded the era of user-uploaded videos. Automated techniques for identifying pirated material have been used in filters to get rid of offending user-posted video clips before copyright holders file “take-down notices,” or worse, sue. But now, these traditional media are looking to profit from the practice.

Just last year sites like Hulu have made progress – it’s finally possible to legally embed a clip of The Office in your blog. YouTube also launched a system, VideoID, that identifies video clips and then offers copyright holders a choice between removing the material or letting YouTube place ads on it in exchange for a piece of the revenue. However, insofar, publishers continue to lose out on millions of video clips that were uploaded without permission.

In an attempt aimed at boosting revenues and capitalizing missed opportunities, MySpace has partnered with Viacom’s MTV Networks and content “fingerprinting” company Auditude to deliver ads to copyrighted MTV Networks’ videos that users upload to its site. Fingerprinting software tested or implemented at video-sharing websites to date requires copyright owners to provide films or shows so key identification points can be pinpointed and logged by computers. MySpace will be implementing the system with initial support for content from MTV Networks, aims to take advantage of the viral nature of music videos and clips from The Colbert Report, Punk’d, and Sarah Silverman.

According to founder Nicholas Seet, Auditude leverages a new and novel technology they developed, that enables them to track media content–including ads, programs, music, and all forms of media, online and offline. This means they can track ads on TV and radio, and copyrighted content on web sites such as YouTube. They present content owners with a central and comprehensive source of information on how their media is being distributed and used worldwide.

Even more impressive: Auditude can fingerprint a portion of a video that is only a few seconds long and identify which show it was originally taken from. Once the clip is identified, Auditude will overlay an ad within the video, allowing publishers to monetize their content even when it was uploaded by someone without permission and without any legible tagging information.
After years of being told not to upload these videos, users will probably take a while to warm up to the idea. Instead of pulling down those illegal videos and getting audiences to view at the ‘right’ place, Hollywood studios go right out and park themselves at where people are viewing the programs.    While media companies monetize this digital pirated booty, pirates who think they are pulling a fast one by taking programming into their own hands become unwitting accomplices to the content owners.
The phenomenon of turning users as delivery channels will probably catches on.  Content owners flocking to form partnerships with MySpace will be expected as there isn’t currently another video platform out there that is able to identify and monetize content this effectively. The Auditude advertisement platform might be implemented elsewhere as other sites try to catch up.
Exemplifying the saying, “If you can’t beat them, join them!” Auditude and its partners are empowering consumers and building a better business model

Growing at a YOY growth of 343%, Twitter bagged the top position of the top 10 fastest growing social networking sites for September 2008. Twitter started off as an internal office communicator, but it was officially launched to the public in Jul 2006.  

Moving away from the traditional blogs which requires a long time to write and conceptualize the content, Twitter is a cross breed between blogs and Instant Messaging (IM) termed as micro-blogging. Limited to a word count of 140, tweets are straight to the point, easier to read and invite more comments.

Users are able to update their Twitter feed using the twitter website, SMS, emails and even through applications such as Twitterrific and Facebook. On the other end, the Twitter feed can be received through similar methods and RSS feed.

Interestingly, even though its interface has been entirely in English, Twitter has been very popular among the Japanese. Recently in April 2008, Twitter decided to launch the program in Japanese to cater and attract more Japanese users.

Twitter is also gaining the attention of large corporations such as Cisco who has been using it to provide products and services updates. BBC also uses twitter to send breaking news or sporting updates. During the California wildfire in 2007, the fire department used Twitter to update the Californian community.

Twitter also organizes campaigns on the most popular topics recently and they track what are being mentioned about the topic. Acting as a forum, twitter updates the campaign site every minute to gather the public opinion. One example would be the election 2008 where they tracked the key phrase being mentioned in the tweets and it was found that tax, that one, nuclear, and health care were among the top mentioned.

For marketers, trends with the online community can be easily measured using Twittermeter. Twittermeter uses the Twitter API to scrape the site’s public feed and creates a database of every word sent over Twitter, and then it creates buzz graphs comparing words to find the trend for the day or week.

For individuals, to measure your popularity, you can use the twInfluence that uses the Twitter API to gauge the reach of your Tweets and the people who read them. On this site, it will reveal who is the most influential in Twitter, your personal velocity (how quickly you’ve gained quality followers) and also your social capital (how many high-influence people follow you).

Another application of Twitter would be the Tweet Scan, which you can search for information on all the tweets being sent out before. It acts as a real-time search engine for Twitter, identi.ca and eight other Laconica based sites.

With such rapid expansion of Twitter, I believe that it will become the next generation of Google. We should continue to watch out for it!