If you are an industry leader in any sector, you likely have a large and varied web presence. Your gadget options have changed dramatically with the introduction of Open Social. Prior to Open Social, most brand gadget strategies would need to create several gadgets for the different facets of your business. With Open Social the new options are significant enough to rethink your current direction.

In the world of SEO I will use the example of Third Door Media.

They have SearchEngineLand, SMX, SMN, and Sphinn. Each of these brands have different types of user and user behavior, but they also share many similarities.

Lets look at characteristics of these brands which could be “gadgetized”.

Notice that each brand has some specific characteristics that would be ideal for gadgets. Let’s start with SearchEngineLand (SEL in the diagram).

It is a news site, so therefore the display of news via feed would be an obvious choice, and there is also a regular podcast. These are very easy gadgets to implement. One might think, well let’s make a gadget that displays news and plays the podcast, right? I would say yes last week, but this week Open Social is here. It changes things.

Examine what similarities exist within the different facets of your brand or brands.

Points to ponder:

• For Third door media, I would say that most of the users of Sphinn (a social SEO news voting site) are also users of SearchEngineLand, so there would be good reason to make sure that a Sphinn gadget included the functionality of SearchEngineLand.
• Virtually all of these brands share the characteristic of networking. It is likely that most users of these brands are using LinkedIn which is now part of the Open Social world.
• Gadgets offer an excellent opportunity to promote your lesser used brands.
• With Open Social, it is very possible to create a single gadget that users of each brand will find useful and enjoyable. This creates a natural cross promotion of brands.

Prior to Open Social, gadget creation was a very specified art. You looked at one specific functionality and said “We will make this a gadget”.

The most dramatic change I see with Open Social is that gadget planning must now begin by looking at the entirety of your business and examining the whole pie, prior to its pieces.