Hachette Filipacchi UK get widgetised
View the live widget.
The Client
Our client Hachette Filipacchi is a high profile UK publishing house with a forward thinking approach to delivering content to their audience.
The Challenge
Having recognised that the readers of their magazine Sugar, aimed at teenage girls, are spending a large proportion of their time online engaging with social networking sites, their in-house development team built a social bookmarking website called Sugarscape.
Cool branding, funky features and an engaging tone of voice make this website ideal for further distribution via widgets that can be grabbed by readers and placed wherever they want.
Nixon McInnes’ social media specialists provided guidance on how best to go about this and ultimately designed and built the widget.
We started by sharing our knowledge about widget design and development, helping Hachette Filipacchi clarify their ideas within the technical and design constraints.
We worked up the proposed user experience in wireframes and translated the website identity into the widget interface.
Widget distribution platform Clearspring proved the perfect partner with which to work, enabling us to build a widget that is universally available to any social network or blogging platform.
We like Clearspring, they have set themselves apart from other platform providers through the clarity of their documentation, their comprehensive reporting interface and the responsiveness of their technical team.
“The NixonMcInnes team’s grasp of technical requirements and design best practices, coupled with a quick turnaround on a tight deadline, made them a real pleasure to work with. We are looking forward to growing our relationship and leveraging their expertise on future client engagements.”
Steve Touhill, VP Business Development of Clearspring
The Results
So with our assembled team of experts we created an application that lets users and the Sugar magazine editorial team share content with each other via RSS feeds.
Two versions are available, with registered users enjoying a richer experience – they can choose the content displayed within their widget and see content bookmarked by their friends.
Unregistered users see content provided by the editorial team which can then be filtered by category – and of course, are encouraged to visit the site, register and customise their widget.
By grabbing the widget users can post, send, or bookmark it; save it to their desktop or pop it on their Bebo, MySpace or Facebook profiles – enabling them to enjoy and share the brand experience wherever they are.
With this project Hachette Filipacchi is creating a wider, more complete social networking experience for the audience and increasing exposure to their great content amongst their target market.
“Given the amount of time that our readers spend online, it was crucial that we were able to connect with them through the social networks they use. We feel that this partnership with NixonMcInnes has given us a great opportunity to provide an engaging experience with readers online, which they will want to share with their friends.”
Marcy Richardson, Digital Brand Manager, Hachette Filipacchi UK
The widget is live and available to install on the Sugarscape website. For an easy-to-read introduction to the world of widgets please see our free eBook – Chapter 2 in our series of Marketer’s Guides to Social Media.
This project was delivered in March 2008 by Steve Winton, Josh van der Broek and Matt Mattheson.
