Socializing Your Brand

With peer-to-peer marketing and advertising now ubiquitous online, new platforms designed to create sociable widgets and embeddable media rich content are propagating across the web. Widgetbox, SpringWidgets, and Sprout are among countless new applications empowering users to create personalized widgets, social networking badges, RSS feed readers and living content. With even the smallest modicum of tech know-how, these types of platforms allow brands of any size to create free, portable content for their website, blog, and social media profiles.

As brand managers and online marketers, a quick way to proliferate brand awareness is to create a way for people to socialize with and for your business. I like to think of these embeddable widgets like takeout food or a way for people to grab your valuable content and share it with their friends and online communities. The portable content that you create, be it a collection of your latest blog posts, a daily tip or an aggregation of news clips, literally gives people a portable piece of your brand that they can then socialize with.

Creating these widgets is the easy part. With an RSS feed address and a few graphics culled from my new WordPress blog, GroceryLove.com, I recently produced a “Daily Food Tip” sprout. Visitors to the site can grab this widget and embed it on their own blog or post it to their own social networking profile. The “Daily Food Tip” widget shares daily food news and daily food tips for grocery store connoisseurs. As a new site owner on a tight budget, this was a quick and easy way to build value-rich portable content for my budding online community.

Sprout is the quick and easy way for individuals and businesses to create, publish, and manage interactive rich media widgets. Below is an example of Sprout as used in the GroceryLove blog.

Sprout provides but one way to build, publish, and manage widgets and other rich media web content. I fell in love with Sprout’s platform but they are by no means the only game in town. Even doing a quick search on Google with the search term “creating widgets” will yield hundreds of results. The trick is to generate a widget that gets people socializing with a piece of your brand and the portability of sociable widgets is an inexpensive and time-saving solution.

So what are you doing? Get out there and start making some takeout food!