Creating Widgets That Don’t Fall in the Woods
Like most software development shops, we’ve been dabbling in widgets and educating customers on all the tools in your marketing toolkit to get your brand out there and to connect with your target audience.
If two years ago a company had to develop a “blog” strategy, and last year they had to develop a “social media” strategy, the buzz word du jour is “widget strategy”….what I like to call widgety goodness.
At the end of a recent project I sat down with Garry, our lead interactive developer, and Ben Pashman, VP Sales & Business Development for Gigya, a widget technology company that acts as the plumbing layer between your widget and facebook, myspace, bebo, etc.
Of course, Gigya can say it better than I can, albeit more modestly and without reference to plumbing:
Gigya is the leading widget and social technologies company. Our network connects web publishers, brand advertisers, and consumers, reaching more than 140 million unique users each month and installing more than half a million widgets each day across 50 unique web platforms. Gigya’s technologies extend audience reach and increase user engagement with web content by making content consumption a more social experience. More than 1,000 companies including CNET, DoubleClick, Electronic Arts, Levis, MTV, RockYou, Toyota, Unilever and Walmart use Gigya to power their social initiatives across the web.
Gigya’s free Wildfire technology gives content publishers easy-to-use tools for boosting and tracking widget distribution. Its unique Wildfire on Page and Wildfire in Widget quick-post interface gives people the power to quickly and easily grab and share the widgets they want. Currently, Wildfire installs hundreds of thousands of widgets per day from over 800 widget sites to the top social networks and blogs.
Like Zoinks!
We got into an interesting conversation about how brands that want to get in the game should measure the agencies that help them create and distribute their own widgets or the widget creators that turn to the brands as prospective sponsors.
What is success? Is it impressions? Installs? Are there engagement metrics like time spent on a widget? Or how many community influencers (a topic discussed in the video) install, use and recommend your widget? And how are those metrics measured? Is the Interactive Advertising Bureau providing one size fits all measurement guidelines and recommendations? Or is each vendor / client engagement unique?
In any event, it’s important that vendors and clients agree on the goals and the success metrics. Ultimately, whatever your metric, the effort should lead to more sales. All the buzz, installs and other widgety goodness don’t mean anything if the campaign doesn’t help you sell more candy bars or sneakers.
Peter Cervieri is co-founder of and Director of Business Development for ScribeMedia.Org. His fetish is collecting business cards.
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