Content Marketing Today

How We Put Content Marketing Today on WSJ Online

Well, actually it’s on the Wall Street Journal’s new My Online Journal (MOJ). But, it’s a great start!

It means that any WSJ subscriber can customize a reader page that would include our regularly updated content. So, in principal, hundreds of thousands of WSJ online subscribers could include ContentMarketingToday as part of their individual MOJ home page.

What’s going on? It’s all about widgets, content aggregation, and Web 2.0. As we wrote in our post about the Customer Content Conference, the old web(and old media, for that matter) was all about getting people to congregate. Everyone went to the same place and viewed the same content.

That’s all changing. Today, we are all becoming aggregators of information.

We want what we want when we want it and where we want it. The smartest media companies are not only providing great online content in a structured way–where everybody sees the same thing–but they are enabling users to fashion a set of information that precisely matches what they really care about.

The Wall Street Journal was a pioneer with it’s Personal Journal that let you request certain topics on a page along with stock info of your chosen portfolio. However, the Personal Journal was limited to content from the Journal itself .

Now the Personal Journal has become a subset of the WSJ about personal stuff, while the MOJ replaces it. You now have the ability to add WSJ content component, individually created sections via search or topic selection. You can also rearrange everything on the page via drag and drop. And, here’s how we got there–you can add any RSS feed you want. Complicated and time-consuming? No it took me about 30 seconds to go to our site, copy the RSS link, and paste it into the MOJ component.

Widgets make it easy.

I learned a lot more about widgets at the Custom Content Conference from presenter, Peggy Fry, of ClearSpring, which has provided widgets for MSNBC, Time, National Geographic, Fox,and ESPN.

Here’s how ClearSpring defines widgets:

These movable mini-applications are used by consumers to craft custom experiences on their desktops, start pages, social networks, blogs and more. Widgets can be almost anything, common examples include games, stock tickers, video and audio players, quizzes, slideshows, personal productivity tools, system utilities — almost anything you can think of can be made into a widget.

As Peggy explained it, widgets are viral marketing enablers that are super easy to share so that friends and colleagues can act and react. The fit perfectly into social networks such as MySpace.

But, as we have seen, more business-oriented outlets such as the WSJ are putting them to work. This enables the user to pull just the content he wants to generate a user created portal. Essentially, the Journal is letting me monkey with its content to create just what I want.

Surprisingly, widgets aren’t all that expensive to create–$3-20,000, according to Peggy. If you have a lot of content to share and want to kick off a viral marketing tidal wave, you may want to consider creating a widget that lets your fans plunk in more and more places online. When the venerable Wall Street Journal has become widgetized, it may be time for the rest of use to consider it.

Too much information staring you in the face? Create your own portal.

You can do this with My Online Journal, iGoogle, MyYahoo, and MSNBC, among many other venues. There are so many great content sources across the Internet that you need to filter for what matters most. Now, thanks to widgets and some very smart media companies you get just what you want.

Oh, and if you are going to use My Online Journal, here’s the link you need for ContentMarketingToday’s feed: Put this on the Journal. You’ll find that it fits nicely in the top left hand corner of the screen!