At the Intersection of Social Media and Events is... a Widget

I'm more than just a geek. I'm actually two geeks - an Events geek and a Social Media geek. So when Freewebs asked me to produce a conference for them on Widget Marketing, I happily accepted, and WidgetCon was born.

You've seen widgets - they're those little mini-applications that are all over the social media web: slide shows, games, music playlists, YouTube players, etc. All these are widgets. You probably have some on your own blog.

WidgetCon is about how advertisers can use widgets as a new type of media. Which is interesting and all, and I'm doing the programming for it. But what's more interesting (at least to this audience I trow) is the widget we created for the conference:

Introducing the world's first Conference Registration Widget:

Here's what it does:

• WidgetCon is by invitation only. If you’re invited, the WidgetCon widget will confirm your RSVP based on your email address. It's linked to a database on the backend with invitees' info, so it recognizes you.
• But that’s not all – you can also use the widget to custom design your conference badge for WidgetCon. You can even upload a picture which will display on the website (but not on the actual badge - we opted to keep it only online because of resolution quality concerns)
  
• “Attendees” on the widget displays a slide show of all the RSVP’ed attendees and their custom badges. It's a list of who you'll be able to network with, and a photo album of badges combined.
• And if you have colleagues who are not yet invited, they can request an invitation using the widget. Their info and badge design go into the database until their request is reviewed. Clicking a box on the database backend accepts their invite and adds their badge to the "Attendees" slide show.
• It also pushes out updated content. We chose to include tabs with the Agenda and Speaker list, but could easily have included one with a RSS feed to the show blog, so all updates were pushed in real-time to the widget. And yes, if we elect to stream live video from the conference, we can do that through the widget as well.
• Finally, like all widgets, you can easily post it to any blog, profile page or website.

We put the WidgetCon Widget into a WidgetCon website, but it's also distributed all over the web. And that's its magic, really - distributed content. Wherever it shows up online - on this blog, on speakers' blogs, on ad agencies' corporate intranets, whatever - the entire conference has a presence there, not just an ad banner and a link. It tells a pretty complete picture of what the event looks like, invites interactivity, and encourages participation. And because the event is on Widget Marketing, it's naturally an ideal proof-of-concept of the show topic.

But it's also something I can see show producers getting behind no matter what their focus is.

So try it - monkey around with it, turn it over in your head, even put it on your own sites if you want by simply clicking on the "Get This!" button. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Comments

[Daniela]

"And yes, if we elect to stream live video from the conference, we can do that through the widget as well."

Yes, please live stream! It would also be great if panels were available to download via a video/audio podcast feed.

[Jay Stevens]

very interesting post. I appreciate your insight on widgets. I need to do some more research on how useful widgets are becoming.

Thanks

jay
Cyber Monday