Widget Marketing and Distribution

So you are writing a propsal on widget development for a client and you need to know how you are going to market the thing. You probably also need some numbers of adoption rates and which demographics are the early adopters of widgets.
Forrester to the rescue! Here are some more helpful insights I have used in my experience:

It’s clear that these widget early adopters represent a small but important audience that marketers should be interested in targeting. How to best reach them? By using Forrester’s Social Technographics® framework, we found that there are significant differences in the participation profiles between adult and youth users, as well as between desktop and Web widget users (see Figure 3 and see Figure 4). By using the POST methodology — focusing on people, objectives, strategy, and technology — it’s clear that a widget strategy should differ depending on the specific objective interactive marketers are trying to achieve with different audiences. For example, a marketer may want to tap into a base of enthusiastic customers: 83% of adult Web widget users are Joiners, making them likely to share their enthusiasm with social networking site friends. Specifically, the following objectives are particularly well supported with widgets:


Click images to make them larger

· Talking: Go beyond “RSS in a dress” widgets. Many desktop and Web widgets — especially
those from media companies — are primarily RSS feeds with some design around them. This
is a start, especially if it makes it easy to add content from favorite media sites, retailers, or
marketers directly into a desktop, start page, blog, or social networking site profile. The problem:
The extra design often takes up valuable real estate. Content alone isn’t likely to keep the widget
around for long. The Staples Easy Button is a desktop widget that does more than just deliver
weekly online specials. It combines content and functionality by including a convenient search
box for Staples.com. And when not in use, it collapses down neatly into a small, but distinctive
Easy Button.
· Energizing: Leverage viral elements. Web widgets are often a form of self-expression or
sharing of a particular interest. Dell encouraged the members of Graffiti, a self-expression
application in Facebook to create advertisements answering, “What does green mean to you.”
The community created ads spread among the network and eventually drove traffic to the
microsite. Ticketmaster.com gives its affiliates the ability to create customized widgets. For
example, a music fan can showcase an artist’s upcoming concerts on a Ticketmaster widget
while a local city guide site highlights events at a particular venue. Similarly, Amazon.com
allows affiliates to customize and use widgets that enable advanced merchandising.
· Embracing: Spread polls and surveys. It’s one thing to conduct a survey — it’s another when
you enable your customers and partners to run them for you. This space is in its early stages,
but startups like PollDaddy and Vizu allow companies to create polls that can be easily placed
on their sites and on sites that attract pools of survey takers like answers.polldaddy.com.

The result: easy-to-deploy polls that are fully integrated into a site that generates results in hours, not weeks.

The recomendation here would be to keep your widgets and their strategy simple.

· Focus widget design on providing value to users. A widget with too many features will
fail because it strives to serve all users but in the process serves no specific user need well.
Widgets must first and foremost create user value, either because it serves a core utility or
is highly entertaining. Do neither and the widget will be quickly deleted to make room for
a more useful widget. The aforementioned “RSS in a dress” widgets fall prey to the utility
problem while also taking up too much room to justify their meager value.


· Aim for initial “long weekend” investments. Forrester recently spoke with a marketer
who had a six-month widget deployment calendar involving an ecosystem of agencies and
providers. This is a mistake — marketers shouldn’t have to wait months or even weeks to
launch their first widgets. Instead, aim to spend the equivalent of a long weekend creating
the first widget. How? Copy a successful widget, which is what Sony Pictures did with its film
30 Days of Night, by taking the popular Facebook Vampires application and reskinning for the
film.12 After learning from a few trial widgets, focus development efforts in one of two areas
that will have the biggest impact, namely, personalization (to encourage adoption of the
widget) and virality (to encourage its spread to other people).


· Market your widget. Marketing widgets are a bit odd in that they require a marketing
investment to make them pay off; it’s not often that you have to market your own marketing
channel. Make sure that your target audience can easily find the widget, either on your own
site’s home page or on your partner and affiliate sites. Add it to footers, mention it in email
newsletters, and place it in widget galleries across multiple platforms. Make it easy for other
people to download a widget that they like by replacing embed codes with one-button “add
to” features from companies like Gigya and ShareThis. Work with vendors such as RockYou,
Widgetbox, SocialMedia, and Context Optional that can help spread your widgets among
their own networks.

Stewart Severino
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sseverino@gmail.com

Widgets and what to consider

WHAT’S A WIDGET? IT DEPENDS ON WHOM YOU ASK
Some great insight from Forrester Research-


One frustrating aspect of Web 2.0 is that it’s difficult for developers to define which emerging
technologies are most applicable to enterprise development. Widgets are a case in point:


As programming models have become Web-centric, widgets have evolved from simple, reusable user interface (UI) controls into a diverse collection of gadgets, desklets, blidgets, badges, MySpace “furniture,” modules, minis, and flakes. While classifying this widget zoo may seem daunting, all of these Web 2.0 widgets share common traits:
They make it easy for nontechnical users to add dynamic content or functionality, such as search tools or maps, to locations where they can customize it to their own needs. Widgets sport optimized form factors that are graphically pleasing to users and deliver a maximum amount of data in a minimum amount of space. And users are often willing to try new widgets they find interesting because, unlike with email, users control widget communication links and can sever them any time.

Deciding which species of widget works for a Web 2.0 enterprise starts with shifting the focus from widgets’ similarities to their differences (see Figure 2). Some widgets are portable, while others are tied to a single Web site. MySpace “furniture” makes it easy for users to put rich media on their Web pages;

still other widgets deliver information right to users’ desktops or mobile devices. Finding examples of different types of consumer-focused widgets is easy, but sightings of business-to-business and internal widgets are rarer. Nonetheless, enterprise development shops find that some widget types fit their needs better than others.

Some recomendations:

USE WIDGETS AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO IMPROVE USER ENGAGEMENT

Widgets create significant opportunities for application development professionals to improve

user engagement because they are highly adaptable and don’t demand much from the user. To

capitalize on that potential, you should:

· Use Web widgets for broadcasting and desktop widgets for constant contact. It’s

important to consider the time sensitivity and desired frequency of contact when deciding

which type of widget to use. If you’re looking to cast a broad net, then the easy installation

and viral nature of portable Web widgets will make distribution less of a challenge. If you’re

regularly pushing time-sensitive information that your users need to see right away, then

desktop widgets are the best approach.

Some Stats-

· Few US online adults use desktop and Web widgets. Only 12% of US online adults use desktop

widgets at least monthly and 17% use Web widgets (see Figure 1). But of the 23% of US online adults who use social networking sites at least once a month, 59% of them also use Web widgets regularly.

· Almost one-third of all US online youth use Web widgets. Only 8% of US online youth use

desktop widgets at least monthly. In contrast, Web widgets are used by 31% of US online youth

regularly, reflecting their high use of social networking sites. Among US online youth social

networking site users, 64% of them use Web widgets, a slightly higher penetration rate than among their adult counterparts.

· US adult widget users represent an attractive audience. Adult widget users have high average

household incomes — $79,024 and $66,198 for desktop and Web widget users, respectively —

compared with $68,344 for the average US online adult.4 Web widget users have a slightly lower

household income primarily because of their lower age. But they exhibit specific psychographics

such as “I often tell my friends about products that interest me” that indicate greater brand loyalty, as well as a propensity to tell others what they like and don’t like.

Stewart Severino
Tweet me

sseverino@gmail.com

Mobile Benchmarking 2008

I am always searching for mobile data and find it difficult to get a relatively up to date snap shot. So here is my contribution to those seeking this info.

In North America 91% of house holds held by Generation Y'ers have a cell phone.
RIM and Windows Mobile are part of the top companies I wrote about in my previous posting .
These guys and IPhone make up the heaviest used OS's in the market today.

Just a couple of high level stats I want to point out:

· Four out of five households have a cell phone, and most have more than one. Cell phone
penetration hit 80% of households in 2008 — and a whopping 91% of Gen Y homes. The average
North American household has 1.7 mobile phones today; among households with at least one phone,
the mean number is 2.1 — fueled by cheap family plans. These low-cost shared plans mean that there
are 2.4 phones on average in Younger Boomer households with a phone, but homes led by Gen Xers
are those least likely to make do with just one phone.

· High-end phone owners are the heaviest mobile Internet users. Apple’s promise of the Internet
in your hand apparently resonated with those who bought an iPhone — across all phone brands,
they are the most likely to use the Internet on their phone and the most frequent users. But they’re not alone: Palm and RIM owners are nearly as likely to browse on their phones. While these three brands represent a paltry 4% of the overall market, they represent four times as large a share of mobile Internet users.

· The operator market continues to consolidate. Whether in the US or Canada, the largest operators dominate the market. North of the border, the top three carriers — Rogers, Bell Mobility, and TELUS — hold at least 83% of the subscribers.1 In the US, at least 78% of subscribers get their service from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile — and that number will tick up five percentage points should Verizon’s announced acquisition of Alltel pass regulatory muster.

· Data use is accelerating, especially among Gen Yers. Mobile phones are clearly no longer about
just voice. Half of all subscribers now use text messaging, more than a third use picture messaging, and more than one in six access the Internet on their phone. Gen Yers are not only more likely to use data applications on their phone than the overall population, they’re more likely to do so with greater frequency. For example, while only 5% of all mobile phone owners download or stream music to their phone every month, the corresponding number is more than twice as high — 12% — among Gen Yers.



Stewart Severino
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