Social Media Marketing

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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

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 Easy Social Solutions on Facebook and Twitter

Provider Core Strength Examples

BuddyMedia Ready-to-Use Facebook

Applications

Budweiser and Samsung Facebook tabs

Context Optional Custom Social

Applications

Microsoft’s “Bing-Thon”; Target’s “Bullseye Gives”

corporate social responsibility feature

Step Change Group Facebook applications

and widgets

Southwest Airlines’ Facebook sweepstakes ;

Gold’s Gym - Facebook presence

Friend2Friend Social Amplification New Belgium’s “What’s your Folly”; Atari’s “Tweet

in Klingon”

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