Widgets are all Around Us: What is the potential for marketing?

They have invaded all the spaces of Internet: personal web pages, blogs, websites, social networks, etc. Today, widgets are an essential component of the Internet, having even found new playgrounds such as our desktops and mobile phones for which the company Goojet offers widget solutions. After that, 2007 was even called the “Year of the widget”, how can marketers harness the power of this tool?

One of the biggest widget producers on social networks, Slide.Inc – author among others of Facebook’s SuperPoke application - signed a deal with a division of Viacom. This partnership will enable the TV content producer to enter a new space of communication and will furnish TV promotion to Slide applications. This kind of situation presents widgets as a promotional and advertisement tool with the capacity of going beyond a social network marketing campaign.

Secondly, the industry itself has reached another stage, a stage where developers are no longer working out of a garage but instead have set-up companies such as RockYou or the aforementioned- Slide. Some applications have even become full-blown companies, for instance the application iLike which was launched for Facebook now gathers more than 20 million users. Their notoriety has even led them to strike a deal with major bands like R.E.M to distribute their new album on line.

Thirdly, innovation is increasing the potential of widgets year by year. This month the Techcrunch50 conference in San Francisco has brought forward two start ups specialized in the development of widgets. Adgregate, which enables business to turn their banners into shop ad widgets that can be exported to any website, and Tingz, which aims to provide customers with widgets that can be used on all our media tools for everyday life.

To conclude, widgets still have a huge potential for marketers in terms of media convergence, advertising purposes and providing a second life to downturn industries.

Widgets show high click-through rates and spreads quickly among a vast population, which means they can be the main weapon in a viral marketing campaign. They can even be used as a source of information to track and analyzed the behaviour of customers.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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