Now that most social networks are supporting functionality on third party sites — via Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, Yahoo! Open Strategy, MySpaceID, and other similar technologies — entertainment companies are experimenting with a variety of approaches.While movie promotions on Facebook, top sports moments on YouTube, and MySpace music pages remain key fixtures, many entertainment companies are also now actively focused on how to apply social strategies to their own sites to deepen relationships with fans and become more relevant. Here are four ways on-site social features are benefiting both fans and the entertainment industry today.
When asked what technologies the company has implemented to help it maximize word of mouth traffic, he says, "The work we do with Gigya, is an example of applying technology to connect to Facebook and Bazaarvoice with our customer reviews. Live Community is an in-house technology that leverages community, where TurboTax users and experts ask and answer questions. It is free in all products, but also to anyone that has tax questions through our website. These are some of the ways that also lead to great SEO results."
To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down (note that these are relative numbers) :
Perhaps we were a bit premature in saying that Facebook was going to become your "one true login", as services like Gigya will make sure that you'll be able to continue using any number of social network identities to sign in and share. In the end, we find it more likely that the number of logins will continue to grow and Gigya's gamble will ultimately pay off.
Some experts say social media could become the Internet's next search engine.
"People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends' recommendations or their friends' activities," said Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc., a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services. "That's one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago."
For years, Web content creators had to worry whether they had the proper level of search-engine optimization to make sure search engines listed them among the top results. Now, they have to consider what companies like Gigya offer - social-media optimization.
Live chats managed by Gigya — the same company that did the MTV/Facebook/LG Avatar webcast with James Cameron — will accompany the MTV, VH1 and CBS webcasts.
Gigya told us that MTV Networks is working with them again to recreate the “lean forward” level of participation they achieved with the Avatar webcast. The live chat makes the donating experience public; folks in the chat will probably encourage one another to donate, and people will be more likely to donate if they know they can impress their friends. They’ve found that these webcast chats drive more traffic and more word of mouth promotion, which will in turn lead to a greater volume of donations.
Tuesday night, CNN raised more than $7 million for Haitian relief during an quickly planned telethon on Larry King Live. That was small compared to the massive effort led by George Clooney and MTV Networks (NYSE: VIA) will reach across the world. Star-studded telethon Help for Haiti Now will air live for two hours from LA, New York, London, and Haiti Friday night at 8 p.m. ET across more than a dozen sites, at least 30 U.S. networks (including all four major broadcasters), several Canadian networks, multiple mobile carriers and several international networks. [Update: Gigya will power live chat across the sites; Facebook and Twitter are official social media partners.]
Gigya provides a number of widgets, from tools to share Web pages on social networks, to logging in to third party sites with your social network identity. Their widgets can be seen on sites like the Disney Store, ABC, Turner and Audible, and reach more than 250 million people each month.
Gigya also shared with us the numbers when two major email and search providers, Yahoo and Google, are thrown into the login mix. Facebook still comes out with a majority, 53%, of the logins, while Twitter takes second place with 14%. Google and Yahoo! sneak in with 12% each and Myspace stumbles in with only 9% of the take.
In their note to us, they made sure to mention that when a site offers more options for logging in, more people do, providing a greater variety of data on its customer base.
NEW YORK, NY, January 09, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- PluggedIn NYC will take place on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at the Sy Syms School of Business (Yeshiva University) in Manhattan. PluggedIn NYC is a full day gathering, bringing together media, advertising, social media and mobile executives and gatekeepers. The event has been designed to facilitate knowledge sharing, relationship building and deal making and also to educate and seek answers to important questions that startups, executives and investors face in these industries.
Topics to be discussed include social media, social media marketing and analytics, mobile social media, mobile marketing and advertising and mobile apps with a keynote provided by Rooly Eliezerov, President & Co-Founder of Gigya.
CBS Sports allows online viewers to sign into its live chat for SEC college football games using their log-ins from Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter or MySpace.
Gigya, which helps CBS, provided us with a breakdown of how much each service is used.
No surprise: most chat participants opting to use a third-party authentication service go for the popular Facebook Connect. More of a surprise: signing in with a Yahoo account is the second most popular choice.
That's great news for Yahoo's plans to be the center of its users' Internet experience.
Many of the widgets scattered across the Web are made in Flash, but Adobe doesn’t participate in the widget economy. Today, it is taking a first tentative step towards changing that with the release of a new Distribution Manager for widgets created on the Flash Platform. In addition to making it easier for people to share the widgets across 70 Web and mobile destinations, it will track their usage, and serve as a widget ad network as well.
Adobe is obviously interested in getting into the advertising end of the business, which is why it recently announced it is acquiring Omniture
for $1.8 billion. Rather than just getting paid once for the tools to create Web apps and content, it wants to get a piece of those recurring advertising dollars too. The widget distribution play is along the same lines, except that for now Adobe is doing it through a partnership with Gigya.
Software publisher Adobe and Widget distribution network Gigya are collaborating to provide a solution for publishers and advertisers. Currently named Project Radiate, the initiative is on track to be released this summer and will allow for easy creation, distribution, scheduling, tracking, and analytics of widgets, said Gigya CEO Dave Yovanno.
CBS' latest foray in the social space is a campaign via Wieden + Kennedy on behalf of Electronic Arts. The push for the latest release of the Madden videogame series targets both CBS Sportsline and Gamespot audiences with a unit that invites fans to vote for which group is better at Madden: sports fans or gamers. Users vote from within the ad unit and then broadcast their preferences as updates on Facebook, Twitter or MySpace, thanks to Socialize technology from Gigya that integrates various personal feeds.
During last year's NBA Eastern Conference Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Orlando Magic, Turner Broadcasting managed to weave social-media feeds into its home page. Fans accessed the conversation by logging onto Twitter through TNT.com, and the tweets were also posted on Twitter with links back to TNT.com. Those forums mean more Web traffic--and thus more advertising revenue. "It's exciting to sell this to an advertiser," said Liza Hausman, vice president of marketing for Gigya Socialize, the brains behind the integration technology.
To Increase Engagement, Brands to Allow Users To Login With Facebook, MySpace, Twitter In a recent report titled the “Future of the Social Web” we found that we are entering the era of social colonization, every webpage and experience will be social–even if brands choose not to participate. I spent time with Palo Alto startup Gigya who now has a product that enables brands to quickly allow users to login using third party identities (like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook) quickly to a corporate web experience. Right now, brands are “Pollinating” the social web by letting their corporate created content spread to social networks. As a result, companies are going to start aggregating conversations –the natural reaction to centralize trusted discussions.
Pop quiz: What is the social network to which NASCAR fans flock?
If you guessed Facebook, you would be right -- at least according to data from Turner Networks, which recently made NASCAR and NBA viewing social by letting users sign in to the various online networks to chat about the basketball games and races. But MySpace users are the most vociferous and accounted for the largest percentage of chatter about live sporting events. Turner launched the social-viewing option using a service called Socialize from social-media technology provider Gigya.
More than ever, consumers are turning to the internet, their online social networks, and search engines to research before buying. So how do brands reach consumers in the new immediate, comprehensive, information age? One helpful way for brands and advertisers to consider the problem is to view search and social networks as two sides of the same coin.
Gigya has added a chatting mechanism that will link comments on RaceBuddy directly to social-media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
"We view this as a hero sponsorship," said Walker Jacobs, senior VP-sports and entertainment digital ad sales at Turner Sports. "The sponsors get to enhance the access we can offer to fans."
As marketers continue to grapple with how to best make use of social media, moves are afoot to change the way success and failure are measured. And as the point of advertising in these venues is to engage users, the current dominant forms of measurement, based on clicks and impressions, fall short. . . That's led to reluctance to introduce a more nuanced measurement method to the accepted standards, according to Dave Yovanno, CEO of Gigya, a widget maker that sells content distribution to advertisers based on a cost-per-install model. "There's a lot of desire by advertisers to figure out new measures."
Photobucket, the most popular photo sharing site in the U.S., just annouced a number of new features that will give its users easier ways to share their photos and videos across multiple web services like MySpace, Facebook, or Blogger. Photobucket also introduced a new version of its mobile site, which features a streamlined interface, as well as easier ways to access comments, ratings, and subscriptions.
The new sharing feature is powered by widget distribution network Gigya.
Widgets are evolving to better meet advertisers’ needs: CNET, for example, partnered with Gigya to launch widgets that give tech junkies the ability to embed product reviews and video clips, and even a software downloader into their social media profiles and blogs. The apps are continuously updated—and since they’re tied to products, they go beyond the glut of widgets that just look pretty or thrive on novelty (like throwing a sheep or a thong at your friend) that quickly wears thin. “Last year it was about the rush to just ‘do a widget’ that’s fun but didn’t have much use,” Williamson said. “Advertisers have decided that they need to be more than just fun—they need to serve a purpose. If you can provide real-time pricing info on a product right on a review site, that’s an interesting model.”
Brands that overlook the importance of an impactful widget presence may leave crucial influencers untapped. Follow these steps to gain a foothold in the widgetsphere.
eMarketer spoke with Ms. Hausman about how advertisers use widgets and the future of the applications on social networks.
Palo Alto — Gigya Inc. is capitalizing on the Internet’s social revolution.The company was founded in Israel two years ago by a group of trend-savvy engineers and is now based at Town & Country Village shopping center in Palo Alto. Gigya describes itself as a “widget distribution network” that allows computer users to take content from sites across the Web and share it with friends, business colleagues and acquaintances at their personal sites on such wildly popular Internet social destinations as Facebook and MySpace.
Some guy lives in Albuquerque, which is great, because it is sunny and really convenient to Vista Encantada and Hoffmantown. But he has relatives in Denver, a limited budget, a lot of outstanding family obligations and a seven-hour, 450-mile gulf between them. Then, one hot and dry Thursday, he's sitting at a computer, and it goes ... "DING!"
The ad:tech NY panel "The Next Frontier: Advertising in Applications" struck me as one of the most relevant to marketers this year. Topics included widgets, in-game advertising and in-cloud applications (server-hoster productivity supplements to Word and Excel). A representative from Facebook also discussed what ad models work well for the social network. Liza Hausman of Gigya introduced the talk on widgets.
Less than a month after securing an $11 million venture capital infusion, social networking widget and content sharing platform Gigya has snagged former ValueClick COO David Yovanno as its new CEO. The 37-year-old former U.S. Navy officer, who joined ValueClick in 2000 as one of that company's first employees, said he felt a "strong chemistry" with Gigya executives, including co-founder and former CEO Eyal Magen.
David Yovanno has become the chief executive of a leading widget company, Gigya, effective Tuesday. He was formerly chief operating officer of ValueClick. Yovanno spent nine years at Internet advertising network giant ValueClick, where he ended his tenure as chief operating officer of U.S. Media. He oversaw the company’s display advertising, lead generation, and comparsion shopping business units.
David Yovanno, who led the U.S. media business for ValueClick, has left the ad network to become chief executive of widget distributor Gigya. Yovanno will replace Gigya co-founder and CEO Eyal Magen, who will become chief strategy officer, and will continue as general manager of Israeli operations for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company.
Gigya Inc, whose software helps people and companies distribute widgets online, has hired a senior ValueClick Inc (VCLK.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) executive as its new chief executive officer, joining a growing pool of start-ups that are drawing people away from public companies. David Yovanno, the former chief operating officer of ValueClick's U.S. media division, said he will focus on expanding Gigya's business by reaching new users and strengthening its sales force.
AdReview earnestly tries to be timely, but this week it's hard. Our command-and-control center happens to be situated within seven miles of a battleground state, so for the past 10 days, we have seen commercials for only two advertisers: Barack Obama and the Hyundai Genesis. Absolute saturation is not all they have in common. Wall Street's implosion has made both basically irrelevant. Amid the economic crisis, ads or no ads, Obama can't lose. And ads or no ads, Genesis can't win -- not because it's a Hyundai but because it's a car.
Widget platform Clearspring turned some heads last month when it said that it would have reach equivalent to the “7th largest web property” following its acquisition of AddThis, a provider of widgets that enable easy social bookmarking from blogs and Web pages. Today, new data from comScore shows that while Clearspring’s reach is indeed huge, another player in the space – Gigya – is actually reaching a few million more eyeballs every month worldwide. According to data from August 2008, Gigya reached 174 million unique widget viewers worldwide for the month, compared to 160 million for Clearspring.
The Challenge - To promote its limited edition 23/501 jeans and shoes online, Levi Strauss wanted to go beyond the usual, often boring advertising banners. The Plan - Launch a widget campaign that capitalized on the target consumers' penchant for social networking. Avenue A/Razorfish, Chicago, and Gigya, Palo Alto, Calif., created a widget chock full of unreleased hip hop tracks by popular artists. This new music made the widget more likely to be shared with friends.
Widget and social technologies company Gigya has closed an $11 million round of venture financing led by DAG Ventures, with additional investment from existing investors Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital. The third-round funding bringing Gigya's total raised so far to $23.5 million since starting two years ago. The company has served more than 150 million widgets as of June, up from 120 million in March, according to comScore.
Gigya Inc. , whose software helps distribute widgets across social networks, said Wednesday that it raised an $11 million series C funding. The Palo Alto startup said the round was led by DAG Ventures, also of Palo Alto. Gigya’s software is used by publishers and advertisers to distribute their content across the Web to the places their target audiences are spending time. It is also used by people in that audience to share content with each other.
Widget distribution network Gigya raked in $11 million in third round funding to continue building out two existing products of its own called Wildfire and Socialize. They serve different but related purposes: Wildfire provides a platform for other widget developers to post and share their creations with a broader audience, while Socialize provides any website with the tools it needs to incorporate social networking features (things like a newsfeed that tracks friend activity, and a panel for sharing interesting content).
Gigya has raised $11 million in a Series C round led by DAG Ventures and joined by all existing investors, including Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital, and Mayfield Fund. The round brings the Israeli startup’s total funding to about $23.5M, an amount raised over the two plus years since its founding in summer 2006.
Even though the IPO market is kaput and mergers and acquisitions activity is drying up, startups with a good idea and some momentum continue to raise money. Case in point: Gigya, a Palo Alto-based startup that makes software allowing people and companies to distribute widgets across social networks, raised $11 million in a “C” round led by DAG Ventures, which ponied up most of the money. In March, just six months ago, Gigya raised $9.5 million in a “B” round led by Mayfield Fund, with additional investment from existing investors Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital.
The Weather Channel Interactive (TWCi), Inc. and Gigya, Inc. recently announced a partnership to create a weather-related widget. Billed as a “news/breaking weather widget,” the application’s strength lies in its accessibility, as it will be easily adaptable for profile pages on social networking sites, blogs and personal Web pages. Gigya, a widget distribution network, will design the widget to follow up-to-the-minute news and weather patterns, which could prove especially useful in terms of conditions like flooding, winter weather and tropical storms.
For marketers trying to reach teenagers, just sending a simple message out to the masses, or even to a targeted group, is no longer enough. Young, media-savvy and media-saturated consumers are demanding personal engagement from advertisers — on their own terms.
Widgets don't have to be prohibitively expensive. There are resources to help you build a widget with little or no design or development budget. Here's how. Take a deep breath and relax; building a widget isn't rocket science. But in this nascent world of distributed content, where standards are not yet established, understanding your options along with some generally accepted best practices will help you make smart design and development choices for your project.
Widgets are all the rage, but it's not a channel that marketers should enter into lightly. If you're not taking these points into consideration, your application will likely fail to meet its objectives. It's that time of year again. Back-to-school ads are coming rapid-fire from every channel, courtesy of retailers eager to help me and the other supermoms (and dads) of America sort out the must-have sneakers, school supplies and snacks for our fall checklists.
Adolfo Foronda from Nerd Stalker interviews Eyal Magen, CEO & Co-Founder of Gigya. Gigya is the #1 widget company that helps publishers and advertisers increase reach and engagement, distributing widgets to any platform and providing powerful social features to any website.
Expectant parents can log on to maternity clothing retailer Due Maternity's website and download a clock that will tick away the minutes until their bundle of joy is due. Mac users needing divine inspiration can head over to Logos Bible Software and install easy-access Bible verses. There are just two examples of the growing use of widgets -- small software programs that perform a specific function -- as marketing tools.
An interview with Ben Pashman, Vice President, Sales and Business Development at Gigya, a widget distribution technology company.
Because widgets have the ability to spread virally, they are often touted as an ad medium of the future, but there's a downside to that virality: exponentially increasing costs. Typically marketers pay a vendor for creating widgets, which are mini software applications with videos, games and other content that can be moved from site to site by Web users.
Widgets — small, downloadable applications that can interact with the Web to be updated dynamically, for sports scores, weather reports or news — have been around for over three years now. As this timeline illustrates, they surfaced when Apple released its “Tiger” edition of OS X, the Macintosh operating system, which included a suite of widgets called Dashboard.
Distributing friend connections across the web has been quite a hot topic in the Web 2.0 community as of late. MySpace, Facebook, and Google have all come out with their own initiatives for sharing social graph data with any number of websites. And there appears to be a struggle over who will ultimately control the aggregated data – if anyone.
DoubleClick is finally a part of the Google family, so now it's time to get to work. Widget ads have been all the rave in these past few months, and Google has been making a few strides towards incorporating widget ads into its regular advertising rotation, mostly with big brands and highly specialized advertising campaigns.
Ben Pashman, vice president of business development at widget distribution and tracking company Gigya Inc., said that companies seeking to use widgets for advertising must first create plans for an end-to-end marketing campaign. Just like any other advertising campaign, companies must have a clear understanding of widget-based marketing concepts, the process of distributing widgets and how to measure success, he added
The popularity of widgets as an advertising medium is growing with the help of companies like Gigya, which started as a distribution network and launched an ad network, so companies that distribute widgets can also use them to advertise to the people who view widgets and install them on their social network pages or blogs.
Gigya wants get people's attention while they are updating their social network profile. Its network offers advertisers the chance to serve up branded widgets while people wait for applications to install. It also offers advertisers tracking of widgets, such as the number of installations, impressions, and user engagement.
Since Gigya has provided Wildfire as a free service for both users and widget providers, it has had to come up with a separate service to generate revenue. Gigya has opted not to incorporate advertisements into widgets, but rather to push branded widgets (think: widgets as advertisements) through its WildFire service. When WildFire users install regular, non-branded widgets on their profile pages, they will sometimes be offered branded widgets as they wait for their selected widget to install. Advertisers pay a "cost per install" that ranges between $2-5 every time a user decides to install a branded widget in addition to their original selection. The CPI is justified by the number of impressions the widget receives once spread virally over the internet.
Having advertising widgets shared and spread like wildfire from user to user who want to show off fun applications on a Web page can be an advertiser's dream come true. Problem is, it can be difficult to get a widget into a consumers hands in the first place. Now Gigya has launched a widget advertising and distribution network to seed and get wider distribution of advertising widgets.
With so many options out there, a major deciding factor for brands and advertisers will be the expanse of the ad network and the level of analytics that the widget company can provide. Analytics is one area in particular that Gigya is hoping to excel, having developed and employed new tracking tools for its recent efforts in its past widget network upgrades.
Last year, Newsweek predicted that 2007 would be "the year of the widget." This July, developers gathered in New York for Widgetcon, a conference devoted exclusively to widgets. Whether or not Widgetcon fulfilled Newsweek's prediction, it signaled that widgets were more than a passing fad on the Web.
Mochila started out as a content distribution tool that could serve up premium content for web publishers from an aggregate source of content providers. Utilizing the Mochila widget, publishers get extra content to extend to users, and content providers has a new way to spread their content across the web. Since then, Mochila's added content providers like Citizen Image, and has begun to spread its value even further by teaming up with Gigya for widget distribution.
Publishers and advertisers at a recent Widget Summit discussed the opportunities for monetization of this tool.
NY-based Media marketplace Mochila has partnered with widget network Gigya; the companies say they deal will let Mochila's content providers place their offerings on a variety of widgets, which Gigya can help distribute to Facebook, MySpace, blogs etc. Press release excepts after the jump.
When agent Ari Gold on the HBO series "Entourage" switched from a Mercedes to a Lexus Hybrid and camera shots lingered on the hood ornament, Ben Pashman enjoyed a moment of insidious commercialism. "One of my hobbies," Pashman said, "is identifying product placement."
Four companies took top prize at today's start-up competition in Silicon Valley's Plug and Play incubator.They included Gigya and BlueGem Security, which we featured yesterday.
I've written extensively on this blog about the widget platforms. Musestorm, Clearspring, Snipperoo, and Widgetbox all exist to help you publish, distribute, and track your widgets, and each of them has a lot to offer. But I have yet to see as a widget distribution tool as simple and easy as Gigya's Wildfire service.
SILVER SPRING, Md., July 13 /PRNewswire/ -- WidgetCon 2007, the first conference designed specifically for engagement marketers, reached beyond capacity proportions as more than 170 CEOs, marketers and developers from leading companies, agencies and widget-savvy publishers convened at New York City's Tribeca Cinemas Wednesday to discuss engagement marketing and the widget evolution. Developed by Freewebs, the company that offers the Web's most open personal publishing platform that helps people unleash their creativity online(http://www.freewebs.com/), WidgetCon 2007 was the first conference geared to fostering collaboration between all businesses affected by engagement marketing
For developers designing for the other 99.9 percent of the web not running solely on Facebook, Gigya offers Wildfire, a simple interface for spreading, tracking, and monetizing your widget across 12 social sites. They've been chosen to handle distribution and tracking for 6 of the top 10 Widget properties (RockYou!, PictureTrail, BunnyHeroLabs, BlingyBlob.com, POQbum and Projectplaylist.com), as categorized by ComScore's Widget Metrix. Combined, the 6 partners have a total audience of 193 million unique visitors.
Gigya, the creators of social-sharing tools, will announce today that its Wildfire tool will be available for use on Facebook.
Getting a widget onto a website, whether its a blog or a MySpace page or anything else, is a bit of a pain. Users generally have to copy an embed code, log into their website, and paste it into the appropriate place. While that hasn't proven to be an insurmountable obstacle, widget startups that have found ways to make it easier for users to add widgets to their sites have seen significantly higher growth rates v. their competitors.