KickApps at OMMA East

KickApps will be exhibiting as well as participating on a panel at MediaPost’s Online Media, Marketing & Advertising Conference & Expo (OMMA) held in New York City today and tomorrow. If you’re attending this year’s show, drop by booth #226 to learn more about KickApps.

Alex will be on Dan Rayburn’s panel, “Access and Activism: Harnessing Video Distribution and the Clip/Mash-Up Revolution,” on Tuesday, September 25th from noon to 12:45PM. The session will discuss the implications for content owners and producers as digital distribution of top-tier video content expands and new services and tools evolve to allow viewers capture, clip and mash content.

VOTE NOW! SXSW Panel Voting Ends TODAY!

SXSW voting today ends today. We need your help to get our panel submissions selected. We have three that are up for consideration, moderated by VP of Products, Cameron Shaw.

Vote here please.

1) Monetizing Syndicated Content: Can Small Publishers Get a Fair Deal?

2) Beyond the Page View: Measuring Social Media Engagement

3) What Social Media Can Learn From Message Boards

Newspapers (and Even Your Mother) Embrace Widgets

Have you ever tried explaining what a widget is to a civilian (non-Web 2.0 person)? Have you ever gotten a response that’s more than just, “oh…OK…” Here’s some news for those civilians out there, you may not know it but odds are you’ve probably used a widget.

Yesterday, AP reporter, Seth Sutel, wrote an article about how mainstream newspapers like USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post are beginning to embrace the use of widgets. According to Sutel, using “widgets, newspapers are sending some of their content out into the world in piecemeal fashion and allowing users to share them with their friends – for free.”

Media fragmentation isn’t a new idea anymore, but it’s interesting to see ‘old media’ evolving. What are they evolving to? Hypersyndication. The distribution channels of information are being powered in ways that humankind has never experienced. Sharing content, ideas and stories is by no means a new idea (the cavemen did it…), but the way and scale in which it is happening is what’s new and exciting.

Why they’re doing this is also very interesting: “For newspapers, widgets represent a huge new opportunity to draw in new readers and to boost their brands throughout the Internet… Keenly mindful of steady declines in newspaper circulation and advertising, several newspapers are seeing widgets as a way to reach out to new, and especially younger, users online, those who might not otherwise come to the paper’s main Web site destination.”

There’s probably no more powerful tool in a publisher’s arsenal to drive engagement and audience growth than social media at the moment. Whether it’s using widgets alone to syndicate content or enabling a venue for citizen journalism right next to professional editorial, it’s good to see that the big boys like USA Today and WSJ as well as local news outlets like KSL in Utah [FULL DISCLOSURE: KSL is using KickApps] are seeing the value in all this.

With the audience growth and engagement piece of the equation being addressed now, what’s next? As of Monday, the New York Times finally agreed that the subscription model isn’t as effective as an ad supported online business and the WSJ seems likely to follow suit. Also, did anyone notice that Google announced Adsense for widgets today? Do you see where I’m going with this?

Sutel closes out his article by saying, the WSJ “says it’s building traffic to its main site by allowing users to embed WSJ.com video elsewhere, but the paper hasn’t yet signed up advertisers for its first widget.” Yet…

The industry has merely scratched the surface of the social media opportunity. A large and highly engaged audience + hypersyndication of content + targeted advertising opportunities = a completely new game for the media industry.

Email Verification Now Available

Late last night, we rolled out an update to the platform with a new feature: email verification. It’s really straightforward–this feature sends an email to each person who joins your KickApps-powered community asking them to confirm their registration with a click. When they do, their membership is activated.

If you don’t want this feature enabled in your KickApps community, that’s OK, because it’s optional. Email verification is turned off by default, but it’s easily enabled in the Affiliate Center. We added this feature as part of our continued efforts to deliver a platform that accomodates all kinds of communities and community management styles. We’re hard at work on more great features, so stay tuned.

For more info about email verification, including a mini-tutorial on how to enable it, check out this page in KickDeveloper. And as usual, please let us know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions.

Sports and Social Media Interview

It seems that last week was all sports, all the time at KickApps. Maybe it had something to do with the New Zealand All Blacks continuing their domination at the Rugby World Cup in France (this is the year for the boys in black)!!!

Jason Peck posted a two part interview with Matt Bijur, our VP of Business Development who is responsible for the sports vertical, and myself, about sports and social media.

Jason works at Wasserman Media Group, a leading sports management agency, and got to know Matt through the work we’re doing in the sports industry. He asked some great questions and was very thorough in thinking through how sports teams, leagues and brands can benefit from social media. Here are the links to the interview:

The Intersection of Sports and Social Media – KickApps Interview Part 1

What Brands Should Know About Social Networking – KickApps Interview Part 2