Making A Difference With Widgets
YouthNoise has recently implemented a widget campaign to help promote Animal Rights in partnership with Peta2. In so doing, YouthNoise is not only creating a win/win partnership with Peta2 but they are leveraging the power of widgets to empower their audience to spread the word. So far this has lead to 49 people signing up for the “I Am Not A Nugget” Cause on YouthNoise.
More important than the above numbers is that YouthNoise will be learning and refining their capabilities on using Viral Widget Marketing to help promote their website and message. Launching a campaign and having it go viral is very rare. However, over time you can learn what combination of content, design and functionality works best for the target audience you are trying to connect with. Improvement is an iterative process; you must continually test and improve your widget if you want to improve its reach.
Widget Uses
1. Self Expression - These are widgets that allow the creator to express themselves either creatively (RockYou, Slide, Scrapblog) or via promoting a cause (YouthNoise) on their social networking profiles, websites or blogs.
2. Functional - These are widgets that provide the end user with configurable program type functionality. The classic example would be a weather widget that shows the weather based on user enter zip code. More recently fund raising widgets such as ChipIn have demonstrated the immense power that a simple widget can wield.
In either of the above types of uses you want to enable a simple and intuitive experience for the end user.
Widget Platforms
So how do you know if the changes you are making to your widgets are making a difference? Excellent, question, grasshopper: YouthNoise is leveraging a cross-platform widget service called Clearspring which provides analytic tracking and widget creation. Clearspring provides a free and premium service. I found their service easy to use and was able to create a simple widget in under 5 minutes. Gigya is another player in this space that provides analytics for widgets that you might want to check out. Both services provide you with the ability to track widget views and site installs. They are both great tools that will enable you to demonstrate to senior management the impact of your campaigns. The best part is that these tools are free!
Tell Me More!
So how do widget companies make money? They don’t, or at least most of them do not. They are currently a business in search of profits. Have no fear, widget companies are backed by the leading venture companies in Silicon valley, check out the who’s who of widget funding at Widget Blog - Sexy Widget. The Widget market is in a similar position that Google was before they figured out how to monetize the millions of eyeballs that were using their services. You can be confident Widget companies will do the same. As a matter of fact, Max Levchin of Slide and former co-founder of PayPal will be making the bold move of allowing widget creators on the Slide platform to opt in to display ads on their widgets. It will be interesting to see if this is the secret sauce that pushes widgets into profitability.
Mark Glaser of MediaShift wrote an excellent guide on Widgets that I highly recommend reading if you want to impress your friends with your knowledge on the history and players in the widget field.
Widget promotion can be an extremely cost effective tool to promote your message. However, it does take time and effort to perfect. It is an exciting time to get involved with widgets as the industry is desperately seeking to win users to their platforms and are offering many excellent features and functionality for free.
So, what’s holding you back?
