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.
As a father of 3 young boys, I’m constantly having to find new ways to amuse them. The latest trend making stuff out of paper. You would not believe how many airplanes I’m building these days. I’ve built some of the coolest airplanes for my kids, all in the name of fun for the kids, and I admit, myself.
A much more technical dad shared an experience with his own son. He described how on Saturday’s the two go out for a special breakfast at a local restaurant. During these outings, his 4 year old son draws battle scenes on the back of the paper place-mat. His son recently asked if he could make a video game out of the drawing - His answer, of course, was yes. Here’s the dad and son’s place-mat game. And my kids think I’m great? haha
If you’re familiar with Second Life, then you have no doubt experienced the virtual advertising billboards that companies are utilizing to market to Second Life citizens. While the presence of these billboards may lead to increased conversions, the issue with this method of advertising is the relevance to any of the viewers of the ad.
ContextAds is a company that delivers relevant advertisements to Second Life avatars by listening to the avatar conversations around ContextAds billboards and displaying relevant advertisements based on certain keywords it discovers during conversations.
So this is how I envision the ContextAds system. I’m flying around happily in Second Life and I look down to see this hot little avatar, we’ll call Cindyrella Tenk, and I start chatting with her (is not usual Second life protocol as I’ve been explained by one avatar that you can’t just walk up to anyone and start chatting, would you do that in real life? I explained that (1) I wouldn’t be altering my appearance in public or flying from location to location either. We’ll leave Second Life suggested behavior for another post)…I’ve typed things like the snow was awesome and I notice that the billboard above us displays a Snow Summit advertisement. I then tell her I’m looking for a new house and the billboard shows a new development of an area where I live. etc. etc.
I have to admit, this method of advertising seems pretty cool, but very eerily freaky at the same time. It’s like “whoa…the sign can hear me”. I compare it to the first time I used Google search and was spelling something incorrect “Did you mean, blah blah blah?” Freaky! I guess it’s better than some of the Google Ads that I’ve seen that decide to show everything “Garcia” related since my last name is Garcia. Ya, I was really looking for Garcia Tires, and Garcia Landscaping.
Not to sound cold, but I intend to keep this post short and simple for personal reasons.
It’s a sad thing that happened at Virgina Tech. I feel bad for all involved, especially the students that got shot, their friends and family.
Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are social media outlets that traditional media stated as tools that were used to cover the shootings, for VT students to let friends and family know they were ok, and to pay tribute to those who have fallen.
After researching many of the alternatives to building the Macabbi Social Network I’ve decided on trying my hand at Drupal. I’m sure there will be people saying use Ning, code in PHP, use onesite, etc…..IT AINT HAPENNING. The reasons are complex but here is an extremely simplified version.
1. The developers that specialize in creating custom social networks are too expensive.
2. I don’t have any of my MIT software development friends knocking on my door for this project.
3. I want to learn something new and fun.
4. All the other “instant social network” alternatives don’t do what we want.
Since I don’t have a background in development other than education-wise, it should be an interesting project. I’ll document the process as best I can I stumble through it. Hopefully the Drupal experiment goes well so that we don’t have to decide on a different system for our other much more interesting concept. Stay tuned.
May 1, 2007
Posted by Rick Garcia in Widgets, Viral Marketing, Contextual Advertising 
2 Comments » 
