Almost 90 million people use these online tools--
many without even realizing it. But can they be leveraged
as a viable marketing platform?

By Marty M. Fahncke

Say the word "widget" to me and, like a subconscious game of word association, the word "Acme" comes to my mind every time. It must be all those old math story problems from junior high: "The Acme Corporation makes 1,000 widgets per hour. If they increase production by 22 percent...." It seems the American Heritage Dictionary took the same math class. It defines widget as "an unnamed or hypothetical manufactured article."

That's an old-school definition, but the subject of the current discussion concerns the "high-tech" definition of widget, which the dictionary doesn't even consider. I found perhaps the best, most concise and simple definition for the type of widget I'm talking about in The New York Times: "Small online tools that function like mini-websites."

From a user standpoint, widgets are customization tools for their online presence. They allow people to "trick out" their browser home pages (what the user sees), their blogs and their social media profiles in communities like MySpace and Facebook (what others see) to feature the tools, games and gadgets which most accurately reflect their style and personality.

According to The New York Times article mentioned above, more than 87 million people now use widgets. In fact, many people are using widgets at this moment without even realizing it--perhaps even you. Do you have a button on your computer toolbar with weather conditions or stock quotes? Widget. Using any of the thousands of available Facebook applications? Widgets. Do you have the Google or Yahoo "toolbar" on your browser? Widgets both.

As you can see, Widgets are just about everywhere. So how does this benefit you, the marketer? The main benefits can be summed up in two words: reach and relationship.

Reach
People aren't surfing the web as much as they used to. And why should they? With customized browser start pages, Facebook, YouTube, a myriad of membership sites and widgets built right onto the desktops of both Apple's and Microsoft's latest operating systems, consumers are increasingly able to stay in one or just a few places to satisfy all their online needs. In other words, people aren't spending as much time searching for content. The expectation is now for the content to come to them.

Widgets help make that happen. By deploying a widget, you can take the Internet to the people.

What can they do? Widgets can do almost anything a website can do, they just do it in a different place. Here is a quick, but in no means exclusive, list of applications you can develop and deploy using widgets:

Video  DRTV clips, home shopping feeds, movie trailers and user-generated content;

Music  Top hits, "indy" music, local bands and specialized niches;

Games  Kids games, head-to-head contests, puzzles, branded games and licensed classic "off line" games;

Financial tools  Stock trackers, mortgage rates, insurance calculators and gas price trackers; and

Information resources  Weather, ski reports, surf reports, reminder services, restaurant reviews, dating compatibility tests, health and fitness reminders, recipes and gift registries.

As you can see, the potential uses for widgets which might appeal to your prospects and customer base are endless--you're only limited by your imagination.

All of these strategies can help you reach new markets with your message. Some of the most effective widgets are often designed to promote a viral effect, encouraging interaction with more than one person. An example would be a widget where users can vote on their favorite movies or music and then send the results to their friends. Another example would be a widget that allows users to create their own vehicle (or outfit, bedroom or dream house) and then send it to others for their reaction. These sorts of widgets have proven to have amazing viral power.

Relationships
As Jeff Molander, CEO of Molander and Associates, a Chicago-based marketing consultancy, points out, "Once you get over your excitement of how your widget can viralize' to 40 million impressions, you're left with the question of what you should actually do with such a technology." Great point.

The best uses we've found for widgets center around solidifying an online relationship with your prospects and customers. Your website simply may not be engaging enough to warrant people coming to it every day or even once a week. However, if you have a widget with features consumers are interested in, they will download and use it on a regular basis, perhaps even multiple times per day in some cases. Each interaction is a way to strengthen your brand position in the mind of that consumer, and further deepen the relationship.

Marketing a fitness product? Chances are, your customers would love a simple workout diary, mileage chart or calories-burned calculator. Have a financial or business-opportunity product? The widget applications for financial products are practically endless. Kitchen product? Create a widget with a stream of recipes or creative new ways to use the product.

Each and every one of these widget ideas can improve your direct relationships with your prospects and customers--relationships which can be translated into ROI if you carefully approach your widget users with relevant and exclusive information, content and offers.

Widgets can be a great way to build on your relationships with your marketing partners as well. Dave Witzig, senior director of online marketing and video at ShopNBC says his company is using widgets leveraging technology from Entriq and LinkShare to provide their affiliate marketing partners with video streams of the products being featured on the 24-hour TV shopping network. The affiliate places the widget code on their websites just one time, and ShopNBC can continually update the videos being shown from their own location. The affiliate marketing partners love the fresh, updated content--and love the fact that they can "set it and forget it." The upside for marketers like ShopNBC can be enormous; they have found sales conversion results for visitors who view video are approximately double those for visitors who do not.

BEST PRACTICES
Here are a few widget rules of thumb to keep in mind:

Keep it simple - Don't try to add too many bells and whistles to the functionality of your widget. One really great feature is much better than five mediocre ones.

Keep it updated - ShopNBC's Witzig advises to "make sure you have a system to keep content within the widget fresh; don't let the widget just sit there once the customer has downloaded it." The point is to have the customer engage with the widget frequently. The experience will soon grow stale if the widget isn't consistently updated.

Keep an eye on your traffic stats  If you are currently measuring traffic to your website, don't forget to count your widget traffic somewhere in the mix. Is a visitor to your website who came via a widget treated the same as a visitor from a search engine? Are you counting the traffic twice, or not at all? These are questions to consider when tracking and reporting.

Using widgets is still not a mainstream marketing activity, and the jury is out on the best ways to leverage and monetize this particular marketing strategy. However, the use of widgets continues to grow, and they show great promise. In fact, BusinessWeek magazine recently called widgets, "the Future of Online Ads"--and with good reason. With 87 million current users, the ability to engage your users with your brand or product message, and the growth curve pointing straight up, marketing via widgets can be an innovative and exciting strategy to explore for the leading marketer or agency.

Marty M. Fahncke consults with companies around the world about Internet marketing and electronic retailing strategies. His popular blog, "My Perspective," was recently ranked as the eighth-fastest-growing blog out of 1.3 million on WordPress. You can read it by visiting www.martyfahncke.com.