Feedonomics

Guy Kawasaki is a combination entrepreneur/heat-seeking venture capitalist who tries on new ideas like teeshirts. The latest jersey is Truemors.com, an SEO bloggers dream that posts any and all rumors about well-known people, places, and events. Truemor readers are even allowed to contribute posts.

Kawasaki built a “private label” Grazr widget, meaning the Truemors logo is prominently displayed at the top of the widget. With it, he collects the Truemors site feed, posts it on his “other” blog, and pushes it out to anyone else who wants to post the widget on their site. “It drives traffic from one of my efforts to another,” he says, “so that people who are reading my blog go to my Web site.”

Kawasaki says no technical know-how is required. “Between my web guy and the Grazr people, I didn’t have to do much at all.” He thinks a Grazr widget is a good way to add value to site content. “In my case, it’s from one property to another, but others can incorporate content from sites that they don’t own. It’s an easy way to enrich the information provided.”

Viral is an over used marketing term at this point, but it is also a very useful marketing technique. Simplifying the cloning of Grazr as a way of spreading it to other pages is one aspect of a viral approach. Another essential step is increasing the number of distribution points, so it spreads faster. We have now launched our private label program to give other companies the ability to give away their own branded copies of Grazr. They get a free tool that acts as advertising for their site, and we get greater adoption among users who might not otherwise have seen Grazr.

Our first group of private label partners includes: Feedburner, Talkdigger, and Zimbio. Here is an example of a Feedburner Grazr.

If you click the Feedburner logo on the bottom panel, the Feedburner.com site is opened in your browser, so this Grazr acts as advertising for Feedburner, not just for Grazr. We think this type of win-win approach is necessary to make the private label program attractive for our partners. Feedburner will be using this as part of their new ad networks.

Running a private label Grazr is done by adding the argument pl=[private label name] to the list of arguments used to call Grazr, or the URL for the config page. For example, you can reach the Zimbio private label page with http://grazr.com/config.html?pl=zimbio.

Once a private label Grazr is added to any Web page, its special status is propagated to any Grazr cloned from it. So the partner who initially distributes the private label version gets an ever widening advertising vehicle for their own site. It is essentially a multi-level marketing approach to widgets. The private label program is free, so if you want your company to participate, you can contact us at [bizdev AT grazr DOT com].

Right now we are creating individual private label versions as we receive requests, but we want to simplify that. We are also planning an extension to OPML that will allow any OPML file to be displayed in Grazr with a custom logo. This means that application developers can brand their Grazr applications, and be assured that as the the apps propagate across the Web they will all point back to the developer’s site.