Widget Marketing and Advertising
May 1, 2007
It’s Widget Madness! They’ve proliferated the social media landscape like a wild batch of mushrooms in a country field. And the marketers are scrambling to get on the widget bandwagon. So far though, there have been few, if any wildly successful widget monetizing strategies, most likely because of the yet-to-be-solved issues associated with Widget marketing. Before we get into that, let’s take a step back and discuss what exactly widgets are, why they’re growing in popularity on social media sites, and social networking sites, and what marketers envision with the use of these new marketing channels.
You can look at a widget as a mini web-page that is located within another web-page. Widgets are software tools, typically created from a Widget software developer, that allow users to quickly, and more efficiently share user content. Widgets are essentially pre-made bits of web code (html or otherwise) that are embedded within the code of other web pages. Widgets have paved the path for distributed media and have become vital outlets which content producers use to spread their web-based information, messages, and and other pitches. Viewers of a web page with an embedded widget can many times grab the code for the widget to embed into their own web spaces. This viral form of widget dispersion is a strategy that content producers and widget manufacturers embrace, as the free advertising is seldom rejected.
The most prominent example of a widget to date is the YouTube widget, that enabled the millions of YouTube users to share their favorite videos on the even more prominent social network, MySpace. Other notable widgets are the Photobucket widget, Twitter widget, game widgets, RSS feed widgets, music player widgets, etc. These widgets allow users (people that embed the widget code into their personal websites) to share information that they think might be interesting to the people in their social networks, blog-rolls, or random viewers. The common widget user or enabler views widgets as something that enables them to show other people what they’re into - that bit of personalization and customization ability is the reason why widgets have become so popular.
Used by marketers, widgets are social media tools that can help in consumer feedback for service/product improvement, customer service efforts, branding initiatives, drive qualified traffic to targeted websites, and extend their web presence and reach virally. From the consumer standpoint, widgets can show the consumers brand loyalty thereby contributing to the effectiveness of the overall marketing campaign.
With all of the opportunity that widgets present to the savvy social marketer, problems with effectiveness as marketing tools still exist. My concerns with widgets are as follows:
1. Relevancy of advertising to viewers. I would bet Google and Yahoo! are hashing this one out now.
2. ROI of the widget considering all costs (hosting, bandwidth, development, marketing, etc.)
3. Conflicting associations (your company widget spreading virally across every porn site)
4. User’s and viewers might be turned off by blatant advertising in or on widgets.
5. Monetizing strategies are evolving but not proven.
Even with the current issues with widget marketing and advertising, I believe that widgets will continue to gain traction as valuable marketing tools to not overlook.
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Posted by Rick Garcia in Widgets, Viral Marketing, Contextual Advertising
