Cameron Olthuis

Widget marketing is really starting to heatup. Today, TechCrunch announced that Hugh Macleaod of Gapingvoid fame has launched blog widgets, you can now show his daily cartoons on your website.

Fergus Burns says… A new space is beginning to develop - widget marketing.

Led initially be desktop widget services such as konfabulator, we are now seeing tons of services supporting widgets/gadgets - especially in social media applications (typepad, wordpress, myspace, aimpages, netvibes, etc).

Widgets are great marketing tools. They give you free exposure and improve the user experience (or sometimes not). They can also be used for SEO, they’re great for building inbound links.

Many companies are missing out on the potential of widget marketing, but there is a right and wrong way to use them.

Del.icio.us is one of my favorite search engines. It’s basically the only one that I use other than Google and Technorati. Delicious is a social bookmarking site and I’m not even sure it can be classified as a search engine, but I use it as one anyways.

For at least half the searches I perform now Delicious serves up far better results than Google. They’re better because they’re community driven. Other people just like myself have bookmarked and tagged these sites as their favorites. I know that if 2500 other people have bookmarked a site chances are it’s pretty good. Of course there will always be the need for long tail searches and I’m not sure Delicious can ever replace Google in that area, but we’ll see.

I’m convinced this is the future of search. The only problem is that as Delicious gets more popular, spam will start creeping into the results. I can only hope they come up with some way to prevent spam from happening. I can’t imagine it would be hard for someone to figure out a way to game Delicious if the rewards were good enough.

Last night I posted on page views as a business model and why I think it will work this time around. This morning I stumbled across a new twist on page views.

The Huckin’ Chicken is a viral marketing site setup by Burger King. The site features the Burger King chicken mascot performing stunts on a dirt bike. Here’s the twist, the videos are locked for viewing and as the site gets more visitors then videos are unlocked, and the stunts keep getting better and better.

This is a very clever take on marketing 2.0 to encourage page views. However, the Huckin’ Chicken is missing a few key elements. For example, they should have an RSS feed to notify us when new videos are viewable. This would encourage more return visits that they will otherwise be missing out on.

Will we continue see more stuff like this? Absolutely, I think it’s a fantastic idea and we will definitely continue to see more viral videos like this. It’s an extremely inexpensive form of branding. However, these marketing techniques won’t work if they’re directly tied to ad revenue, you can’t just slap something like this up with some ads and expect it to work. Those that try will fail miserably.

There’s been some discussion lately on how a lot of the new Web 2.0 sites are relying on page views as a business model. Richard Macmanus says…

the fundamental reason why ‘Web 2.0′ is (dare I say it) in bubble phase right now. It’s the exact same reason the Dot Com bubble occured - Page Views

Only this time around it’s much easier to effectively track ROI. Most companies won’t waste ad dollars if they aren’t producing results, so the bubble (which I’d argue there isn’t one) is going to be harder to pop this time around. We learned our lessons.

As long as the ads continue to work there’s going to be a place for this business model. I say bring on the page views. My only concern is that some of these new companies are banking on a unrealistic CPM range.

When I think of building pre-launch hype for products, it’s hard for me to think of a better example than 37Signals. 37Signals has built a huge following of loyal evangelists through their blog, Signal vs. Noise. The large audience gives them the perfect stage to build hype for their products before they launch, an art they’ve seemed to master.

Today they’ve offered us a teaser video of a new calendar they’re adding to Backpack, their most popular product. When you dig a little deeper you can see that just about every product or book they release is seriously hyped before it’s launched.

I’m not saying all the hype is generated by them, it’s not. They announce the products and/or give sneak peaks, which in turn gets the ball rolling. The audience then creates the snowball effect. The guys at 37 aren’t stupid though, they know anytime the announce a new product or feature that it will create buzz. They know exactly how to leverage their loyal customer base through guerrilla marketing techniques.

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There was a meme going around last week that suggests new web companies are only targeting an audience of 53, 651 people, which is actually the number of RSS subscribers TechCrunch had at the time.

A good review in Techcrunch can get a company their first 5-25K beta users very quickly.

I have to admit from what I’ve seen this tends to be true. A lot of these new 2.0 startups think all the need to do is launch, get TechCrunch to write about them, and they’ll spend the rest of their days sipping mai tai’s on the beach in Hawaii somewhere. Wrong!

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… using Marketing 2.0 as a powerful tool in your SEO bag of tricks.

Wendy’s recently created a profile on MySpace for that square hamburger character from their television commercials. This character ended up with 90,000 friends shortly after joining the MySpace community and got the eyes of thousands, if not millions of people. Wendy’s was able to get this many eyes for absolutely no charge and also got coverage from bloggers and journalists for this.

Can you imagine what this did for their search engine optimization? I bet they’ll get at least 25,000 - 50,000 backlinks from doing this. Good links too. Links from authorative blogs, news sites, and other places that they’ll show up in natural content.

Just the amount of eyeballs you get to your site from buzz marketing is awesome. Millions of eyes without even taking into the account the search engine rankings that will follow. I bet this is more than what most average SEO companies can do period.

Combined with SEO there’s no doubt these marketing techniques are a very powerful force, easily the most effective marketing you can do online today. Can you imagine the SEO damage you can do when you leverage social media, web 2.0, and other viral marketing techniques together. If you’re not doing this as part of your whole search engine optimization then you’re missing the bus.

This is why Internet marketing for web 2.0 type sites is so fun and effective right now.

SEO, Linkbait, Link Building, Viral Marketing