Riding the Storm
Widget Web Expo recap
I had a blast at the recent Widget Web Expo in New York. The show was smaller than some I’ve been to lately, most likely because corporations are cutting travel budgets in response to a tighter economy. Still the people who came to the show were there to learn more about widgets and social applications and those that I talked to felt like they walked away from the show with actionable knowledge they could use. Sessions that were particularly popular were Josh Bernoff’s from Forrester Research and Linda Abraham’s from Comscore, both of which were very data rich.
- Josh Bernoff of Forrester underscored that the people who post widgets and social applications are different than the average person on the internet, they tend to be younger and are much higher up on what Forrester calls the engagement ladder. (I’ll post an update when Josh’s fact-filled presentation becomes available.)
- Linda Boland Abraham of comScore pointed out that widgets have wide reach not just in the US but internationally. Two of our competitors that focus on the consumer space are working with comScore to standardize widget measurement and comScore is standardizing on a methodology and starting to report on widgets as a routinized part of the reports it provides to advertisers and marketers. This shows that widgets are moving into the mainstream.
I’ll provide links to these presentations when they become available ...
To view this widget live on your iPhone just point your iPhone to http://iphone.musestorm.com/wwe and bookmark the site
If you don’t have an iPhone handy - you can preview this at http://iphonetester.com/
MuseStorm participated at the show in three ways
- We were a show sponsor, providing the official widgets including the iPhone widget (see above) that provided the show agenda.
- I spoke on the Widget Platform panel on Day 1 that was chaired by Richard J. Krueger of AboutFaceDigital. Rich did an excellent job chairing this panel, trying to make the differences between the 5 of us crystal clear. (If anyone still doesn’t understand how MuseStorm is different, feel free to drop me a line.)
- On Tuesday afternoon, I also spoke in what I thought would be the “dead zone” ... the very last time slot on Tuesday, the last day of the conference. About 15-20 people showed up for my presentation on the Top 10 Widget and Social Application Mistakes - which was gratifying. There isn’t a lot written about widget best practices and many people are looking for the kind of hands-on advice we find ourselves providing to our clients day in and day out - as a free - but important (!) part of the MuseStorm service. If you missed my talk, you can download the slides over on slideshare.net.
One advantage of an intimate show is that you get to interact with everyone multiple times, so that by the time you leave, you feel like you really walk away knowing what companies and the people are all about and that was the case here. Highly recommended if you want to truly understand the dynamics in what is emerging as one of the hottest spaces in emerging media: widgets and social applications. Note that this was not a show about technology. Instead, speakers focused on thoughtful discussions of what the future holds for social networks, what is a widget versus a social application, how to select a widget platform, the business case for widgets, how to measure success, and presentation of case studies that highlighted both success and failure.
Linda Abrahams, VP of Product Marketing, comScore’s presentation can be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/musestorm
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