We’ve been creating Social Media Apps for quite a while here at StepChange, and have built all kinds of widgets for agencies and clients.
While we’ve done some basic Flash/Feed widgets, most of our design and development work has been on Social Media Apps that function more like true "applications" – with our clients requiring a relatively high degree of administration, content management, targeting reporting and integration.
I think these kind of ’super-widgets-turned-applications’ need a better name, so I’m going to start calling them Distributed Marketing Applications.
For companies that have existing Websites or Online Applications (which is most of our clients), extending their current business into Social Media often requires a Hub and Spoke strategy (kudos to SexyWidget for nailing this one) and this type of Distributed Marketing Application.
A Platform for Distributed Marketing Applications
The system-level requirements coming from an agency or client who wants to extend their current site/service into Facebook/MySpace/Blogs/etc. are getting more and more consistent:
- An engaging User Front-end – which packages up some subset of their existing value and capabilities and presents in a way that’s most useful/engaging and (hopefully) viral – based on the Social Media environment(s) they’re targeting.
- A set of APIs to the "Mothership" – there has to be way to get data in and out of existing site… typically at least content & customer data, and often targeting/campaign information as well. If the application is focused on new customer acquisition, it has to be very good getting that new info into the system of record.
- A set of Administration Tools – that allow the client or agency to manage content, users and campaigns – as well as see reports about activity and engagement.
…there are other pieces, but those are the main ones, and form the basis of the StepChange Platform for Distributed Marketing Applications – which we now use with nearly all of our clients:
Most of this is code we’ve created over the past year, plus some hooks into Widget distribution measurement partners.
The net result is that by leveraging this platform (starting with all the stuff in green, instead of from scratch) is that we can often put together relatively complex Distributed Marketing Apps in only a few weeks.
I’m also willing to bet that, as more and more companies look to extend their existing sites and services into Social Media, we’re going to see a significant market need for these types of platforms.
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