Saturday, March 17, 2007

Community service & viral marketing

How cool would it be to provide a nitty-gritty, community service in a way that also polished your brand, drove traffic to your website and made you feel good?

At a glance, it looks to me like the Morning Call's idea for making databases built by the newspaper available as embeddable widgets might do all that. There's a quick discussion of the notion – and a link to one Morning Call example – available at the Journalistopia blog. [I saw this first at howardowens.com; thanks.]

The example in the Journalistopia post is a searchable database of breeders and kennels. Why not? But I can see more traction for widgets built around your election guide, your restaurant reviews, your best columnist's archive.

Addendum: If you don't understand why this is close to a slam dunk way to get bloggers pointing to our content, that's another good reason for you to start blogging. You'll see.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:17 PM

    I just keep preaching the gospel of sharing. I don't always stop to explain why its important.

    I like your last graph.

    Speaking of sharing, when is McClatchy going to start using Creative Commons, like GateHouse? :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. You obviously need more lawyers at Gatehouse, Howard.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for posting about our database widget. I'm pretty proud of our idea.

    Chris Krewson, online editor
    The Morning Call

    ReplyDelete

 
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