[Via WebStrategy By Jeremiah]

Widget Strategies Panel:

The four panelists did a great job yesterday handling my barrage of questions in the Widget Strategies and Social Platforms session, Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Walker Fenton (NewsGator), Pam Webber (Widgetbox), Ben Pashman (Gigya) discussed widgets strategies. I asked each of them to suggest an image or icon that best represents their company (an idea to make the panel more memorable from Pam) and they each suggested the following:

Clearspring was like a cable, as they were a connector
Newsgator was like a kitchen where you come and create
Widgetbox was like a DIY Pottery store where you come in and make your own product
Gigya was like a like a spine, as they were the backbone or infrastructure

While there are many challenges to widgets (and every industry) the panelists did a great job refuting them, demonstrating their expertise in the area, and suggesting how to work around any bumps that we may see. If you want to refute the challenges, I certainly encourage you to leave comments on that post or leave a link demonstrating how you can overcome those. It’s all part of a healthy dialog.

The challenge questions? on the difficulties of measurement, lack of brand control, the hurdles of distribution, and how to monetize the space. I also asked them to share how they help clients develop strategies, and to provide clarity around the most common misconceptions. Each of them shined in their own right.

To hear what the rest of the panel said, Alex Nesbit did a great job live blogging the session. Beth Kanter (who did a great job presenting with passion yesterday) shares her notes from the session. And Peter Kaminski, CTO of SocialText writes on his wiki the high level notes. It makes sense if everyone updated the wiki, rather than having several blog posts it could centralize and make the effort more collaborative and efficient.

Jeremiah demonstrated how to moderate a panel. He had asked each member to come up with an image to represent the company. This required each of them to give some deep thought about what their company was. This is a great exercise for any company. And a couple actually brought nice visual aids. Widgetbox had a wonderful ceramic frog that would also serve as a nice logo for the company.

The questions Jeremiah asked were short, focussed and allowed each company to shine in its answer. Each got a chance to give a nice answer and the panel was not dominated by the most vocal member, as many panels are. Obviously, lots of preparation by Jeremiah was important.