Widgets, Wizzbangs and Whoozits
Do They Support Your Business Model?

Today’s content management marketplace offers exciting opportunities to deliver interactive personalized experiences to consumers. Examples of these offerings include social networking tools, wikis, polls and other modules.

Interactive tools can be useful because, if implemented properly, they make the consumer stick to the site and return on a regular basis. All too frequently, however, companies implement bells and whistles functionality that distracts and detracts from the business strategy.

Business Strategy Above Technology
First and foremost, your goal should be to extend your business model to the Web, to explore new revenue opportunities that are not currently available to you, or both.

One of our customers, a home furnishings company, has extended personalized design consulting through its website. Now, designers can present ideas and options to customers immediately in a restricted area of the site. While the designer still visits the customer at home and the customer visits the showroom, this new module facilitates a more immediate and convenient interaction between the two.

Another customer is an advertising agency that serves the movie industry’s need to promote advance screenings of films to the general public. The agency’s site offers and manages free advanced screenings to potential moviegoers, in a direct extension of the current business model.

The site adds value for the movie studios with enhanced and more immediate analytics on attendee response to screenings. Further, the agency reserves blocks of tickets to promotional partners (newspapers, radio stations). And finally, the agency extended the site’s capabilities to data collection onsite through bar scanners in the theaters. The new website not only automated the costly process of planning and promoting movie screenings, but also created new revenue models and cross-selling opportunities.

On Selling Content
For companies that sell content, adding new revenue opportunities gets trickier, but all is not lost. For instance, several well-known automotive enthusiast websites have similar content types: articles, blogs, image galleries, video, a make-and-model finder database and community forums. These sites typically make money selling ads to auto manufacturers and dealers.

The issue is which impressions these advertisers want to pay for. All page views are not created equal: Advertisers find views of a slideshow from the latest convention less useful than views of a buyer’s guide, since automotive enthusiasts who love the images are not necessarily the in-market consumers that manufacturers want to reach. Yet a great deal of time and money is spent by media companies to keep the sites filled with the latest images.

Media companies strive to avoid mingling editorial with sales and marketing—however the line of demarcation is changing.

One of our customers is working with auto manufacturers and dealer networks to improve the experience of finding information when purchasing a car, which can be a stressful process. To that end, this customer has implemented technology that allows the consumer to configure the car’s features and compare that car to other makes and models. When done, the consumer can then essentially post the configuration preference to a local dealership for a quote. The transaction is free to the consumer, but the dealerships pay for participation. Additionally, the manufacturers love the concept and so they spend on website ads.

While the old-guard editor might say this is crossing the line between editorial and sales, we point out that the car configurations are created by the consumer without editorial comment. In essence, this company leverages its broad brand power as an affinity network to offer tools that consumers find useful for the purpose of purchasing a car. In so doing, they strengthen the business model of selling content in exchange for advertising dollars.

One Size Does Not Fit All
A particular function or capability that may work in one industry may be detrimental in another. No matter how innovative a tool or widget may be, if it does not fit your business model, implementing it is likely to do more harm than good.

For instance, making video content readily accessible throughout the Internet may be great for a movie studio presenting a trailer, but may be detrimental to a TV company that wants to sell the download or include advertising roll in the footage. Similarly, allowing commenting or community forums on a site may work if you have an enthusiast network of new parents talking about baby gear, but might be a bad idea on a cell phone provider website where customer turnover is very high and prospective customers could get turned off by negative content.

Chasing the latest technology without a comprehensive strategy can drain time and money. Often there is a temptation to utilize too much functionality, or, in some cases, to roll out too many features all at once instead of staged over time. Working with the right technology partner can help you through the planning and implementation process.

In sum, make sure that any new website functionality you contemplate passes the litmus test of your company’s business model. By doing so, you’ll improve your chances of being successful on the Web and you will minimize any wasted effort or resources in adding that new widget, wizzbang or whoozit (or WebPart, or portlet, and so on).