Page 116 - Social Media Marketing

c h a p t e r 4 : ╇ T he S ocial B usiness E cosystem╇ ■ Purpose-Built Applications

Purpose-built applications—including so-called “widgets”—can provide a very easy
way to quickly implement social behavior. Like communities and social applications in
general, these small, purpose-built applications are designed to facilitate specific inter-
actions between community or stakeholders. In contrast to communities and larger
social applications—which often have more than modest building costs and longer
development cycles—purpose-built applications can be created that literally “snap in”
and can be fitted and ready for use in days or even hours.

So, what’s a widget? Widgets are small pieces of ready-to-use software designed
to do very specific things: Contests, gifting, and content-sharing applications are exam-
ples of the kinds of things that you can add to your overall social presence to increase
visitor participation. Further examples include advertising modules or “Share This
with Friends” blocks of code that you drop into a page template on your site to enable
some external sharing or publishing service. The advantage of widgets is that you
94 can quickly implement them, without a lot worry over scale and other issues. The big
assumption here—so do check it—is that the widget provider has worried about these
things for you. Drop a chunk of clever-looking but alpha code onto your high traffic
application and you may well be surprised—as in “Oops!”—with the results.

Table€4.2 lists a set of leading, proven, purpose-built social tools that can be
implemented quickly on Facebook and Twitter. The tools range from the simple—photo
or video sharing—to the complex. Providers such as Friend2Friend and BuddyMedia
offer a range of full-featured marketing tools that support contests, gifting, sharing, and
more. Disclosure: I am a board advisor with Friend2Friend.

P Table€4.2╇â•E‰ asy Social Solutions on Facebook and Twitter

Provider Core Strength Examples
Budweiser and Samsung Facebook tabs
BuddyMedia Ready-to-Use Facebook
Context Optional Applications Microsoft’s “Bing-Thon”; Target’s “Bullseye Gives”
Step Change Group corporate social responsibility feature
Friend2Friend Custom Social Southwest Airlines’ Facebook sweepstakes╇â•;‰
Applications Gold’s Gym - Facebook presence
New Belgium’s “What’s your Folly”; Atari’s “Tweet
Facebook applications in Klingon”
and widgets

Social Amplification

One of the more popular Friend2Friend-based solutions was Tweet in Klingon.
Start Trek fans used this application to generate tweets—Twitter posts—in the Klingon
language. Certainly a lot of fun, the application was also serious business. Built for
Atari by SocialTyze to support the release of Cryptic Studio’s Star Trek video game,
the social application generated awareness and participation as it connected an existing