Thrudigital

This is the second post in a short series on widgets. The first post was intended to serve as an introduction to widgets and to give some examples of what can be done with them. Now that you’ve been introduce to them, this post aims to introduce you to different methods of launching a widget campaign.

By this point you should have a good idea of what you would like your widget to do and more importantly the audience of your widget. If you have a concept in mind for a widget that your audience will find very useful you’ll hopefully find the widget spreading by itself, but of course before this happens you have to enable people to share it and even before that you need to get people using it in the first place.

When seeding your widget they are two approaches you can take. The first is to target those who are already familiar with your brand and your service. In theory this audience should be the easiest to get using your widget because if you’ve done the correct planning, you’ve produced something relevant and useful or entertaining for them. The second approach you can take to seed your widget is to target a relevant audience who might not be familiar with you but are your target audience or are people who are actively looking for widgets.

So, to return to the first approach, how can you seed your shiny new widget with your fans? Simply, use the existing channels you have to communicate with this audience. You probably already have a popular website so make sure you promote the widget prominently on the site. Secondly, you may have a good sized email marketing list, so why not use it to promote your widget. Finally, if you have a blog, make sure you write a post about your widget.

To tie it all in nicely, it would make sense to do all these things. So, create a new page on your website where you can embed the widget and can link to from all your different activity, write a blog post with screen shots of the widget, clear instructions if any are needed and let people why you think it will be useful or entertaining. Once you’ve done this, write an email newsletter (or write a section about your new widget in an existing newsletter you have going out), create an advert or promo section on your homepage and you’re away. PR’ing a new widget wouldn’t hurt either if you’ve got the resources to do so or work with an agency who handle this for you.

Ok, so how do you reach out to new audiences with your widget? Well, think about where your audience are online. Do they read specific blogs, visit certain websites? It’s very likely that they do and because you’ve produced a widget of relevance for your audience, the authors of the blogs and publishers of the sites you’ve found are hopefully going to be keen to embed your widget on their site. Once on these sites, you should find people engaging with your widget. If you don’t think it’s possible to get these sites and blogs to embed with widgets, you might be able to buy media space for your widget on their sites if you’ve built a widget that fits IAB standard sizes.

The other key way you can seed your widget with your target audience is by identifying widget communities, of which they are many, to post your widget. Each widget platform has a community/directory site where you can feature/advertise your widget. Yahoo, Mac, Vista, iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia all have widget communities/stores/directories that users browse looking for widgets that they will find useful. In addition to these are independent widget communities like widgetbox.

So now you have your seeding strategy in mind, it’s important to think about how you can enable your users to share the widget once they’ve found it. Unsurprisingly there are several widget distribution tools that you can plug yours into which enable users to easily post the widget to their blog, social network profile or website as well as share it with friends. At thrudigital, we actually built our own widget distributor for the In Bruges widget campaign we worked on. In search of a suitable web 2-esque name we named it Widgitio but also refer to it more simply as widget distributor.

Our tool allows users to easily post a widget to popular social network profiles and the reason why we created our own for this campaign rather than use an existing platform like Clearspring or Gigya is that our distribution tool enables the user to post the widget to more prominent positions on their profiles rather than to a generic boxes widget/application that might contain any number of widgets.

Finally, now you know how to seed the widget and have built in the tools to help it spread by itself you might want to include some kind of incentive to encourage people to share it. A simple way to do this might be to offer entry into a competition for every user who installs or downloads the widget.

Where next? Well by now you should know what a widget is and how to launch one but you probably need someone to build it for you. Infact you might be looking for someone to develop a concept and a launch plan in addition to building it, so why not give us a call to chat through what we can come up with. If you’re looking for examples of our work, you can check out the widget page of our services section or alternatively you might want to have a look at our portfolio.