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