Go check out SproutBuilder.com right now.  Don’t even bother reading this post — go and start playing.  Sprout Builder let’s you very easily and quickly make some very cool widgets for iGoogle, MySpace, Facebook, or anywhere you’d expect a Widget.

This is an extremely cool application for a couple reasons:

• Widgets can be very powerful marketing tools and this ap lets you play around with the possibilities without paying a dev shop to make a custom ap for you.  Figure on paying $25m to $100+m for a custom widget.
• More important than the service that Spout Builder provides is the ability for the site to provide this type of interaction in a web page.  The entire notion that web pages are static information can be thrown out the window — web pages are APPLICATIONS.  This is a great example of that.
• As marketers we need to keep pushing the technology to provide the fullest potential to the business.  We can do that by stop thinking of our web sites as just marketing communications tools, which they are and always will be, but to also start to think of our web sites as extensions of the products and services we offer.

So do this now — go build your own custom Widget.  After that site back and take a long look at Sprout Builder and think about how far web pages have come in the last 5 years.

MeetMoi location based mobile dating

Back in 2001 I was working for some folks experimenting with WAP user generated content.  At the time we were running WAPdrive.com — a service that allowed users to create their own web pages for cell phones.  During a meeting one of the managers presented this idea of being able to set your cell phone to find a date.  The user would create a profile of themselves and what kind of match they would be interested in.  The service then would use the cell network to find the user a match in a given radius.  Very cool but way ahead of it’s time — I’m happy to see that this much needed service is now available.  Check out MeetMoi.com.

Here are some links to lists of other cell social applications:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_mobile_social_networks_redux.php

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/11/the-holy-grail-for-mobile-social-networks/

Thoughts:

• Social Networks are very hot right now.  Application publishers, media buyers, and big brands are all looking to find ways to tap into the audience.  Problem is the Social Networks aren’t profitable and the users aren’t receptive to ads.  Check out this post predicting trouble for Facebook by Tameka Kee. (link). Expect the mobile social network space to have the same difficulties.
• That said,  there is something fundamentally different between a PC based social network and a mobile one.  Specifically the fact that you are mobile — and now that the devices are aware of location there is a lot of cool this to be had.
• If you’re looking for the next big thing keep an eye on Mobile Social Networks.
• When a colleague has a wacky idea that seems 5 years too early — make a note of it and set a reminder to ping you in 5 years.

Frito-Lay Facebook Campaign

This example comes to us from ClickZ (link here).  Frito-Lay is using Facebook as the hub for a contest that supports their Fiesta Bowl.  The contest consists of two teams, one from OSU and one from UT — the teams in this years Fiesta Bowl, competing for $100,000 in scholarships for their school.

How they used Facebook

The goal appears to be to extend Frits-lays investment in the Fiesta Bowl to give fans a new way to interact with the brand.  Frito-Lay purchased ads targeted to potential schools that might be in the Blow prior to the final teams being determined.  Facebook has an extremely powerful ad targeting capability that allows for ads to only be displayed to students at schools that might be in the bowl.  Once OSU and UT where selected the ad buys focused on those schools.  The ads prompted students to become “Fans” of groups set up on Facebook.  Once a visitor was a fan they had the opportunity to enter to become members of the finalist teams.

The Results

As of today, the main Facebook fan site for “Tostitos Race to the Bowl” has 13,394 fans and 405 wall posts.  The ClickZ article says that the received over 1000 submissions into the contest.  I don’t know the amount they spent on Facebook ads to drive the traffic to the fan page.

Thoughts

• The big take away for me is the use of Facebook to connect to an existing social note.  When looking to do use Facebook or any other Social Media it is very valuable to connect to an existing meme.  In this case College Football.
• Also of note in this article is the use display ads.  As I have stated before it is not enough just to throw something up there and hope for the best.  You need to seed the program with an ad buy either directly on Facebook or through Facebook applications.

Macy

This comes to us from DMNew’s Chantal Tode.  For their “Believe” campaign Macy’s deployed a microsite at www.macysbelieve.com that included a feature that allowed visitors to create a custom e-card that could be sent to Facebook, MySpace, and cell phones.  According to the article,  250,000 visitors have completed the “BeClaus” process since early December.

The article also included some data points about Macy’s ecommerce activities:

- They have spent over $300MM in the last 3 years on their direct to consumer initiatives.  (Macy’s did $25B in revenue last year with 3B ebitda)

- Consumers that shop both online and at the stores spend twice as much as a consumer that only shops one of the channels.

- Online sales, mail, and phone orders are to add up to $950MM in 2008

Quantcast puts Macys.com at around 6MM visits per month with a holiday spike up to 8MM.

The process to create your e-card took 6 steps and was pretty robust.  The first image I selected to upload into the Santa maker was rejected for size.  The camera I took that picture with is a 3.1 mega pixel.  Which is about 5 years old — so that may be the experience of a lot of folks.  After I found a smaller image to use I completed the 6 steps it got stuck at 82% complete — I didn’t try again.

The 250,000 number is impressive — if Quantcast is correct (and in my experience it is close) that comes to 3% of their traffic sending an e-card.  The article did not mention it, but I presume there was an ad buy that also drove traffic to the microsite.

Macy