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.

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.