A Wider Net

Hooray for Widgets! You just have to love these cute tinkertoys of usefulness.

Yahoo has released Yahoo Widgets 4.0 (you may recall when Yahoo bought the widget system called Konfabulator). New improvements include superior performance and a Vista-like docking system that works on XP computers.

Widgets, a staple of the Macintosh OS and the new Windows Vista, are little applications that can users can select and sprinkle around their desktop or join together into a little tool conglomerate. They perform all kinds of functions ranging from the silly (cartoons-of-the-day, vote for best buns) to the useful (news feeds, alerts, information displays, calculators, sharing tools). Why am I getting this feeling of Deja Vu?
Recently we’ve seen a surge in branded widgets made to promote a service, like Priceline, or a product, like an upcoming movie or album. They provide useful functionality in return for a consistent place on your desktop. These are the electronic equivalents of a stapler branded “Remember to drink Coke at lunch” sitting your real world desk.

Some branded applications go beyond the mere “widget” and are called BDA’s or Branded Desktop Applications - but that’s another post for another day.

Yahoo Widgets - who says OS X and Vista should have all the fun?

Thanks again to Techcrunch for highlighting this release for us.

Michael Stelzner, a prominent white paper author and consultant, wrote about a new RainToday study into the state of lead generation. From his post:

A new study by RainToday revealed that 74 percent of professional services companies ranked white papers as an excellent source of lead generation.

In addition, white papers are one of the top two marketing strategies businesses plan on implementing in the next two years.

White papers make a lot of sense for B2B marketing because they position your company as a thought leader and they foster deep conversations that can lead to new business. One thing that isn’t clear to me is whether these papers are getting read. I’m sure Mr. Stelzner has plenty to say on that topic on his blog. It comes to mind that Forrester Research discovered several years ago that their study briefs, which were only a dozen pages or so, were considered too long. Their solution was to boil the study down into a 3-5 minute video summary.

That, to me, is a more compelling way to leverage all the work that went into the white paper. Record a 3-5 minute video and post it on your website and maybe in one or more aggregation sites. The video player should be embeddable on other people’s blogs, so they can better reference your example. B2B customers will appreciate the short-form because it shows sensitivity to their time, and it makes your company look more tech savvy.

Having just written that, I expect a call from my marketing department any minute now about a couple of my white papers…

I’m not usually one to offer tips on Teleconferencing, but this list from Web Worker Daily is a pretty good reference. I’m troubled by the fact that people need to be reminded to mute their bluetooth headset if they have to go to the bathroom in the middle of a call, and to use a quiet keyboard so as to not audibly “type-dis” while you multitask. These tips on teleconferencing are good for conference calls, but they remind me why I try so hard to move customers from web conferencing to webcasting. Web conferencing is so dull, it needs lists of survival tips. ’nuff said.

Found via Face2Face.

NewTeeVee has a nice list of 10 great video mashup sites. Don’t forget to check out the ones in the top paragraph, too.

Each one has different functionality - some are designed to track popularity of videos across multiple sites like youtube and google, while others provide make-your-own-thing-and-share-it tools.

It will make your head spin a little, but if you’re attempting to follow the social/web/viral/video/mashup thing, then consider NeeTeeVee’s list a “to-do” list for ya.

According to iMedia Connection, a recent eMarketer study indicates that 46% of users would not watch a video ad longer than 20 seconds. I think that’s too long - especially for Gen Y.

On a related note, when you’re planning your webcasts, consider the success of video shorts found on You Tube, Google video, and recently, Brightcove (Get Smart clips - woot!) People LOVE short-and-to-the-point.  Like this post.