Personalization enables you to tailor the Web experience to each of your Web Site visitors by creating a unique and personal flavor that matches a particular visitor’s interests and preferences. By providing this individualized view each time a visitor logs on, companies can ensure that their Websites deliver an optimal Web experience. As a result, visitors stay on a Website longer, return to it more often and are more inclined to use the site to conduct business with the company.
Of course, personalized or targeted content delivery has been possible for some time. Web gadget mashups are now providing a new spin on this concept by making it possible for users to add new features and functionality to a Web experience with nothing more than the drag of a mouse. A Web gadget mashup is a Web page or application that integrates complementary elements from multiple sources. Web gadget mashups are quickly gaining in popularity as powerful personalization tools. With gadget mashup functionality enabled on your Website, you can assign each site visitor their own personal space where they can quickly assemble Web pages simply by combining a few gadgets.
Typically, each gadget provides access to a separate source of information or to a different application. For instance, one gadget can be used to display financial news. Another gadget can be used to show the weather forecast at the visitor’s location. Yet another gadget can be used to display a mortgage calculator. Websites can provide some gadgets and allow visitors to combine them with gadgets from outside sources, so visitors can create truly personal pages with mashups of content and applications compiled from a variety of different sources.
There are many examples of this technology in action. Amongst the publicly available Websites, iGoogle.com and netvibes.com are some of the most visible examples.
Global broadcasting and media companies have also created their own gadget mashups. BBC offers one that allows you to mix and match gadgets with information from the numerous areas on BBC Websites. As a result, each BBC visitor can create a personal news page, a great example of personalization in action. Instead of buying a newspaper and reading only 10 percent of the content, you can create your own personalized news dashboard on BBC.com and read all of the news targeted to your own preferences with your morning coffee.
Mash-ups as a Business Tool
There are a few different ways organizations can begin participating in the Web gadget ecosystem. First, you can be a provider of Web gadgets. Second, you can be a provider of a Web gadget dashboard. Third, you can do both.
The first one is a no-brainer. Website owners typically want to drive traffic to their sites, a goal that can be achieved through paid advertising to increase interest and awareness or by word-of-mouth referrals. By delivering engaging Web content or making applications available as Web gadgets, you can create an excellent viral marketing mechanism. As the gadgets start appearing on the various gadget dashboards, they will start to draw traffic to your site.
UNIQLO, a Japanese casual clothes retailer, is a great example of driving Web traffic to their site through Web referrals. Like the many other clothing retailers online, UNIQLO’s Website features numerous photos of their latest styles. In order to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack, the company started an innovative Web project named UNIQLOCK that features a clock displayed in the Web browser. The unique twist on the display is that every few seconds, the clock is replaced by a full-window view of ballet dancers in action clothed in UNIQLO attire. The project was an instant hit, and word spread like wildfire across the Internet.
So, the company combined something as ordinary as a clock with something extraordinary (dancers in UNIQLO) and made it available to visitors as a Web gadget. This gadget is now sitting in numerous Web dashboards and the blog entries have resulted in increased traffic to the company Website. This is viral marketing at its best, and Web gadget mashups were a key enabling component.
Providing a gadget dashboard can be an equally powerful personalization and marketing tool. I often hear from naysayers who think that by offering a dashboard they might be competing with Google, Yahoo or BBC. These sentiments are often unwarranted. It is not a matter of competing with a popular content aggregator. Rather, it is a matter of delivering effective online personalization to each and every Website visitor.
If your Web site contains distinct areas with content in different categories, you can make this content available as Web gadgets, with one gadget per area. The home page of your Website can then become a gadget dashboard where registered users can create their own personalized combination of gadgets as they deem necessary or convenient.
The beauty of a gadget dashboard on your site is that you can reserve one of the gadget slots for displaying promotional material. Content on your dashboard can be driven by content from external gadgets. For instance, a retailer can feature a promotion on soccer balls which shows a soccer ball displayed next to a gadget that lists the current scores of favorite or local soccer teams. A promotion for a raincoat can be shown next to a gadget showing local weather with a rain forecast. Not only do you deliver improved Web experience to your Website visitors, you also achieve better clickthrough rates on your Web ads.
Infrastructure Requirements
Serving Gadgets
Let us consider what you need to do in order to deliver Web gadgets. There are several approaches. The simplest one is to make your Website content available as an RSS feed. RSS is an XML-based protocol for distributing Web content in opt-in feeds. Feeds allow the user to have new content delivered to a computer or mobile device as soon as it is published. An RSS aggregator or RSS reader allows the user to see summaries of all their feeds in one place. Instead of visiting multiple Web pages to check for new content, the user can look at the summaries and choose which sites to visit for the full versions.
