Marketing Mashups
26.02.2008
No, it’s not anything to do with your dinner … web mashups are a new phenomena based combining existing content from different sources to create new content. Working in this way has many benefits to both clients and their consumers …
“A mashup is a combination of one or more data sources to create a unified interface and experience.”
The benefits to marketers are that instead of having to re-invent the wheel, you can use existing applications such as Flickr and YouTube and Facebook to produce customised and original content in your website without a whole lot of expensive custom development.
While the majority of mashups on the web tend to be fun, consumer orientated stuff, the mashup concept has much to offer businesses of all sizes, from both a marketing point of view and in terms of product and service offerings.
Some sites provide APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to allow web designers and developers to “plug-in” to these applications, and integrate them with their own sites.
For example, if you use Flickr, the online photo gallery, and YouTube to pull photos and video into your website, you are creating a “mash-up” gallery, that uses the existing functionality of Flickr and YouTube while allowing the look and feel to mirror your own site.
Benefits in this case are that a) you are able to manage , without having to use a content management system for your site, and you your photo and video content also exists on the internet in it’s original form ie in YouTube as well as in your website.
This can help drive traffic to your site, generate viral activity, reduce development time and provide interfaces for your users that they are already familiar with.
We are starting to use mash-ups more and more in the VGroup Interactive department – while we have our own CMS that can be configured to do anything we want, sometimes we find that it’s better for our clients to use combine existing technologies with the site we build for them.
Right now, we’re building a great new website for a Ratton School, a local performing arts school that uses mashup technology to great effect.
We’re using Flickr and YouTube to pull in content to their gallery, and using the API from our email marketing tool to integrate it with our CMS so the client can send short notifications in the secure parent’s section of the website out via RSS, SMS and email to parents, depending how they have specified they wish to receive them.
Developing things this way has allowed us to provide some genuinely useful functionality to the school staff, parents and students, without blowing their budget.
We’re encouraging our B2B clients to look at ways that they can pull data from different sources to provide useful, targeted and relevant mashups for themselves and their customers.
For a small real estate agent, we’ve mashed up their internal property management software, their website and huge online property portals such as Find A Property so that our client can enter their property data once, it populates their in-house system, their website and online portals all at once and they didn’t need a special content management system.
It was a little tricky at points persuading people to let us do it, but making life easier for people is something we’re rather passionate about. And it means we get to do geeky things.
The API is the limit – and then not even - when it comes to mashups; webbies everywhere are doing some really exciting and innovative things from the really useful to the downright silly.
Check out the MashupAwards at www.mashupawards.com to see some very cool stuff.
If you want to learn more about mash-ups or any of the technologies mentioned here, give us a call on 012373 766 300 or email us; we love talking to people about this kind of thing!
Tags: APIs, CMS, Interactive, Marketing, web development, web mashups