Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

If you're like me (bipedal, oxygenated, three-dimensional), you've probably spent most of your time on the Net blissfully unaware that widgets were even available on most popular websites. Or you've been invited to download a widget or an RSS feed and, being unsure of what such things are and why you'd ever want to sign up for them, you've passed them by.

But by doing so, you're potentially preventing yourself from accessing information in an even more precise when-you-want-it manner than you are now. A social media widget contains branded, embeddable content that users can place on their own blog, homepage, or social network profile like a bumper sticker on a car. Basically, a widget is a portable chunk of code that allows you to share content across the Internet, replacing the need to constantly visit websites for updates on that information.

And yes, 1to1 Media has one. Our widget showcases our other social media tools (the wiki, blog, etc.) and can be downloaded so that our readers can put it on their Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social network profile (or desktop reader), at which time it will automatically keep them updated on our content. Anytime we at 1to1 change anything about the widget, it automatically changes the widget everywhere it's been posted.

This would certainly have surprised playwright George S. Kaufman, who coined the term "widget" by conflating “window” and “gadget” in a 1924 play. (Then again, Kaufman would probably also be surprised by any number of things, not least of them being that he was considering Internet applets 46 years after he died.)

Next week, I'll be taking a closer look at wikis, which are hardly limited to Wikipedia. In the meantime, I encourage you to download our webinar and see if it helps you determine your own social media strategy.