Snipperoo

A widget business model

I just wrote a comment to an excellent post by David Beisel, Genuine VC, where he asks the question 'What are the business models for the services that enable and create these badges? Or are they just another marketing tactic for services as opposed to something to develop a business around? Are they a means to an end or an end in and of themselves?' David's post is part of a developing conversation around widgets and the widgetsphere, with commentary such as ' badges are a unique combination of marketing and technology, like interactive stickers for the web. They are becoming another method for self-expression in and of themselves.  Bumper stickers for the internet generation to communicate to others in “traffic.”'  I liked my contribution, so I thought I'd post it here for the record.

A widget can be anything. There won't be any centralised production method or certification system, that would miss the point. Any bit of code that can be inserted into a site and which does something is a widget.
In the widgetsphere, there are three issues and they apply to all widgets. Value and Distribution.
Value is the value of the widget to the person who has to make a decision to insert that widget into their (limited) site real estate. The value can be direct (AdSense), indirect (gets traffic, subscribers) or emotional (esteem, kudos)or a mixture of these. Without value a widget will not get installed anywhere.
Distribution is how it actually gets installed, i.e. cut and paste, auto-insertion, walled-garden drag and drop.
So you can be in the Value business or you can be in the Distribution business (or both).
The value business is really the realm of marketing and/or advertising folk and I expect to see marketing companies jump on this big time. How do you create a widget that carries value, that will get big time adoption and that gives a ROI. This already is a specialist field without any specialists in it, but it looks very interesting.
Distribution is something different, how do you reach everyone who may want to insert your widget? How do you make it easy for them - not only to insert it, but to remove it again. Can you automate this process. How about widgets that auto delete. How about widgets that only show in response to certain conditions, or to certain visitors. This is a distribution issue. This is wehere Snipperoo is operating.
There is another issue, where several companies are operating, but its a red herring. That's the area around 'how do you make a widget'. As I said, a widget can be anything that will run in a web site. There are millions of people in the world who can build them using whatever technologies the like. Anthing that cramps this resource will not fly. That's why Snipperoo are technology agnostic. We are the universal widget.

Marketing Widget - Woo!

This is interesting. Cameron Olthius is blogging at Postbubble about a marketing widget called CreamAid (terrible name).

CREAMaid is a conversation management tool that helps companies extend and manage their customer relationships.  The easy-to-create widget is meant to help carry on conversations with bloggers. Once a conversation starts any blogger can join in to give his/her opinions. All the blogs that participate in the conversation will become connected through the widget and all contributions are viewable anywhere the widget is used. There’s a catch, posts must be selected by the conversation starter in order to be brought into the conversation. This is to prevent spam and of course anything bad that is said about the company.

A strange beast it is too. It's confusing to use because Cream Aid have put up a pretend 'Cream Aid drink' site and inserted the widget into it, so you get a sort of loop of self-reference, making it hard to understand what is going on. The widget does seem to be prepared to pay cash for contributing to the conversation and for carrying the widget - although in this version the cash available is set at $0.

But the widget itself is fascinating on another level - it's the first pure marketing widget I've seen that attempts to step outside the simple advert or content widgets that we've seen up to now. Cameron concludes:

There is a clear need for tools that will help companies manage conversations about their brand but I don’t see this one being very effective. I do not see anything here other then a widget that companies can use to control the message.

This iteration may or may not be perceived as an attempt to slip a widget into the mainstream that allows the company to control the message. But this will be the first of many approaches to widgetised message distribution - or widgetised marketing. Cameron says, 'This sounds a lot like regular blogging doesn’t it?'. Well, it does look like the first stirrings of a blog platform in a widget. Rudimentary, but it's there. We will see a lot more of this over the next few years.