What's in it for marketers?
Building an audience, brand awareness, direct response -- there are all reasons why marketers are developing widgets. But how should they get started?
The first step is to figure out how widgets fit into your marketing objectives and how they can help you reach your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Drive people to your website? Download an artist's latest single? Attend a movie premiere? Make an online purchase?
Once you have figured out what the end result will be, you should partner with a developer to "widgetize" your best-suited content for syndication. This can be done in-house, it can be handled by your advertising or media agency, or it can be developed by a third-party widget specialist. Most developers will provide their own syndication platforms to distribute, track and measure the widget, and many developers may also have their own content partners they work with. So it is not absolutely necessary to come to the table with your own content. There are several widget developers to partner with. Clearspring and Gigya are two developers that have received a lot of press over the last few months as they carve out their niche in the widget marketplace. Let's take a deeper look at the two:
Clearspring is a provider of widget creation, distribution, tracking and monetization services, used by some of the world's largest media companies, advertisers and widget developers. It makes it easy for widget creators to get their widgets into social networks, start pages and blogs. The company has developed widgets for brands such as National Geographic, NBA.com, NBC Universal, Time and Maxim.com. Below is a look at the embedded functionality of a Clearspring widget, which enables cross-platform proliferation from the same widget entry point:
Gigya is another developer carving out a niche in the widget space. The company touts a full-service widget advertising model covering the design, development, hosting, distribution, viral promotion and tracking of branded widgets (think: rich media advertisements as widgets). Below is a look at Gigya's Wildfire platform -- again, the focus is on enabling attachment in a variety of ways:
Content distribution vs. sponsorship
We know that content is key. As mentioned previously, marketers with their own content for distribution (i.e., video, games, RSS, music, etc.) might find it best to work directly with developers. But for those without, there are several piggy-back like opportunities available through developers and content providers to utilize already existing (and successful) widgets. RockYou! and Slide are two examples of developers in the space that have allowed marketers to brand-wrap or sponsor some of the most popular widgets in the social networking space.
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