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Perhaps the largest and most significant digital trend today is the phenomenon of modular personal content. It is absolutely the critical underpinning of the biggest news in the digital space. Consider:
- The key 2.0 platforms are built on the appeal of modular personal content (blogging, user generated video (UGC video), social networking, microblogging, and photo sharing.)
- Personal homepages like My Yahoo! and iGoogle are fast becoming the preferred starting point for users to access the web. Said Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Product and User Experience at Google, “The Google personal homepage is the fastest growing Google product. This market is going to be very large.”
- 7 of the top 10 largest sites are either totally reliant on modular personal content for their success (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube) or have modular personal content as a lynchpin of their future business strategies (Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and MSN.)
- All of the leading Internet players (Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, Google) are committed to developing new and more powerful uses of modular personal content.
All of these initiatives have resulted in an explosion of new “lean forward” web real estate. Consumers are demonstrating a deep preference for this type of content, as is evidenced by the tremendous amount of time they spend in places like personal pages and social networks. The challenge for marketers, however, is that the consumer is truly in control of what he sees in these environments. Getting a place at this personal content table requires a brand to truly add value to consumer experience.
About six months ago, the widget really grew to be touted as a ready solution for marketers to capitalize on this phenomenon. By giving consumers a way to make some types of web content portable, it was believed that widgets had the power to transform consumer behavior, and with it consumer marketing. No one disputes that widgets have had enormous impact. With household penetration of widgets over 50%, it is clear that consumers are integrating these units into their daily lives.
But it is also clear that widgets are only a part of the modular content opportunity. The category of widgets includes many “content light” offerings that can make the genre seem toy-like. Toys are great for some things, but for many purposes consumers demand high quality experiences that can’t be delivered by admittedly popular items like the Fun Wall Facebook widget-application.
RSS feeds and readers are another form of modular personal content. As is Real Time Matrix’s Vortex™, a modular communications platform that brands and publishers can use to deliver real time content to consumers that helps build brands through deep engagement. What widgets and RSS and Vortexes do is different, but they each help to deliver on what consumers want and expect: high quality content on their terms.
In this new era, consumers have ultimate control over the modules of content they select, so brands need to create modular experience that they will welcome. And brand marketers need to ensure that the modular content brand experiences they develop deliver the sort of high quality impression needed to further their objectives. The user interface of their modular units, coupled with the overall experience provided needs to be rich, satisfying, and inviting. Far too often, options in the widget space have been more like flash-in-the-pan gadgets than deep brand experiences.
So widgets, RSS, and Vortexes offer different “flavors” of modular content and have different purposes and strengths. If you’ve decided that modular content is a priority for your brand (as it clearly should be) you also need to pick the right platform from among these three. This white paper is intended to help you do just that.
Strategic Considerations
The first thing to consider when creating a strategy for the modular media space is to determine what sort of “home grown” content your brand can leverage in its effort to connect with consumers.
· Does your brand have content that consumers will find interesting and compelling enough to want to receive on a regular basis?
· Will a significant percentage of your target care enough about the content to want it ported to them constantly?
If yours is a lifestyle brand with significant multimedia content, high profile/high appeal sponsorships, or is chosen with a high involvement decision-making process, there are many options to providing modular media to your consumers.
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