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3. TALKING: Monitor your online reputation — and respond

   When you join the conversation, now and then somebody says something about you. People interact with your Website, products, and company, have experiences good and bad — and write about them online. Good news travels fast and bad news travels faster. How does your company respond?

   Old-school “command and control” marketing relies on lawyers and PR agencies to let employees know what to say and when. The result can be unfortunate silence or happy-talk that hurts your company's reputation at the very moment you need to build it back up. (Google this: Kryptonite Bike Lock.)

   Instead, listen to what's being said about your company, and don't be shy about speaking up. While there are paid services to help you monitor your online reputation, a DIY approach can be effective: set up Google alerts to receive e-mails when your company or products are mentioned by name. On a weekly basis, perform these searches on Technorati, Google News Search and Blog Search, too.

   When someone says something about your company, respond in a voice that humans will recognize as one of their own. If something went wrong, let people know what you're doing to fix it. If you're receiving praise, say thanks — but resist the temptation to devolve the dialog into a sales pitch.

4. BUILDING: Use widgets to let your functionality travel

   Widgets are small applications, little AJAX Web experiences. To your developers, they're lines of code. Because social networking sites are releasing APIs that help your programmers place this code within new environments, functionality you develop for your Website now has “legs.” It can find your customer where she hangs out.

While RSS lets your customer read your content on sites other than your own, widgets let your customer use features from your Website on her Facebook page, or within one of the half dozen sites that have adopted the OpenSocial platform, Google's answer (or challenge) to Facebook. The potential? Your online marketing no longer lives and dies solely by driving traffic to your site. Your customer can now experience your brand online — beyond the walls of your site.

So should your Web developers move widgets to the top of their to-do list? In the first quarter of 2008, for most retailers the answer is still no. The new APIs may be open, but there's likely to be some debugging and you may want to learn on your competitor's nickel.

And just because you build it doesn't mean anyone will use it. So while the technology is being fine-tuned and privacy concerns are sorted out, take inventory: Beyond your shopping cart, what are the applications most important to your site today? What are the features current Web visitors deem most compelling? And what functionality have you slated to improve your site customers' shopping experience in the months to come?

Ideally, each of these applications or projects gained importance because they all tie directly to something essential about the products you sell and the reasons someone should buy from you. That makes these projects strong candidates for gadgetization. Strip them to their essence. Would anyone want to use this functionality on a Website other than yours? And if someone did, what would that mean for you?

Say you're an apparel merchant selling custom clothing and your site offers a virtual model that visitors personalize for their own body type. You could “widgetize” to get people thinking about the perfect fit before they visit your site.

Or maybe the products you sell require compatibility with your customer's house or car, instead of his or her body. If you've built a “fit finder” for your site, does it contain a potential gadget that's waiting to get out and find prospects on car and home community sites?

Are the products you sell tied to seasonality, or special events? A calendar may be the skeleton of a widget to remind people about the “to-dos” for their event — and the ways you can help make it memorable. Even if your selling proposition comes down to rock-bottom price, you can still offer unique functionality, providing a mini price-comparison app on content sites frequented by your clientele.

I predict that by the fourth quarter of 2008, widgets will matter to an increasing number of retailers. But ultimately, the gee-whiz factor of the technology will be a lot less important that the usefulness of the functionality. For widgets to gain popularity in a social network, customers need to choose to use them.

So think back to that souk or your open-air city market: What is the value that you are adding to move the conversation — and the sale — forward? Your answers form the cornerstone of your social media strategy.

Larry Becker is vice president and principal, Website effectiveness at the Rimm-Kaufman Group (www.rimmkaufman.com), an online marketing agency in Charlottesville, VA.

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.