[Text translated from the French version of my blog - patricealbertus.net/_blog]

As you already know by using your iphone or by reading blogs, the widget revolution is flying up! But what exactly are all theses widgets offering to e-marketers? Let’s look at it as a gadget, one easy-to-use application, something which has to be practical for its user, in order to simplify as much as possible the essential meaning of a widget: your product, your service, your branding. This post will outline how to figure out the new widget marketing and “ecosystem" and about the innovation that opened its field from the Internet over to all new media from the numeric convergence.

Widget History

Some time ago, Apple proposed for its users the dashboard, enabling them one-touch accessibility to lots of different information and services. Every small gadget was on the same screen: weather forecast, contacts, latest charts release, stock exchange, news, etc. This format was so user-friendly and popular that Windows Vista soon integrated widgets, opening the market to a wide range of developers and widget providers. Everything can now be placed on our desktop, the latest area where marketing could work. People can personalize their media with all their favorite brands via widgets, and marketers get a look at user profiles, opening up a real challenge for e-marketing. The widget extends and prolongs the brand, materializing as tiny virtual gadgets that follow users on their desktop, blogs, and mobiles (opening a big market with iPhones, Blackberries, the GPhone, and APIs and catalogs from social networks).

Yahoo! added fuel to he fire when they bought Konfabulator, Google widened the user base by enabling them to put “gadgets” on the iGoogle home page, and Facebook added applications to user profiles. All of these are different forms of widgets, but they're all identical concepts and a new economic model to develop promotion for brands, access to services, and generate lots of traffic for advertisers. This strategy has recently crossed over to mobile phones, with all new phones being designed to install such applications and give their users access to services (cinema tickets, MP3 catalogs, etc.), here’s another way to get customer loyal and big users.

All these things add up to the widget becoming increasingly popular, easy and sexy. People want to try them and share them, and a new model of diffusion gives brands more visibility. New websites open everyday that allow for widget shopping from your computer or directly from your phone. Buzz marketing strategies work very well and widgets are even getting into fashion trends!

One Concept Has Created New Media

This concept is indeed so practical in saving time and making web complexity easier that widgets are like the best facets of Web 2.0. Their goal is to catch all the services and put them in a box: RSS, picture viewer, XML integration from news sources, social networking, and everyday new applications that transform code into easy buttons. Here’s a very clear figure explaining the widget/web2.0 technology.

Here’s a figure showing the widget model with an example from a non-Internet product: http://patricealbertus.net/_blog/wp-content/uploads/widget-marketing.png

8 VERY Good Reasons to Widgetize Your Marketing:

1. Be prepared and think about new projects. Facebook, a big leader in social networks, opened their applications catalog to search engines. Thus, widgets are not only a code to install, they're information you share.
2. Ruppet Murdoch, media magnate, invested in MySpace. MySpace is working to compete with Facebook and is making their community more widgetizable for users, thus creating another market for your campaigns!
3. Google OpenSocial is allowing access to all Google APIs to integrate them into your solutions (ex: why not put a map into your outlet finder). That’s a strong signal for the next web generation: more support from Google helps both you and peer-to-peer vision with their partners.
4. In France, SFR is working on a widgets catalog for its mobiles users.
5. Most of the search engines propose to personalize your home page with widgets (Windows Live, iGoogle, My Yahoo, etc.).
6. Latest mobile phones use standard dev languages to install and run widget, one-click, one buy.
7. Social network trends remove the border between web and mobile, and users can now use Facebook everywhere.
8. The free applications and widgets get into the profit model (Slide company developing on Facebook is probably valued at 200M$).
9. .. so ?

More Than Another Innovation Coming from the Web

The big interest from this widget trend is that widgets are more than an ICT, it’s a whole marketing concept. When you look at all of the widgets on the web, you see that there’s no standard model or structure to follow. The widgets are all communication campaigns concentrated into a tiny tool, which people can find practical, useful, or revolutionary. The goal is to put the branding strategy into the concept.

Widgets have become multi-media, multi-support, and extremely effective. You won’t need to develop one specific tool for each support: technologies and languages from web and mobiles can operate the same widgets today. Mobiles display web, web works on mobiles. Ergo, one concept, one or more services associated, one widget and many new media.

Conclusion

Widgets are good assets and are a serious reason to think about your new marketing 2.0 strategies: development costs are cheap, there's a high support compatibility across multiple media, exponential diffusion and visibility, user interactivity with your information monitoring… That looks like an increasing output model, so be aware because like every fashion item, it’s only the winner who becomes the reference and wins everything. If you want to develop widgets or integrate your branding into them, there are already widget agencies on the market, so the widget economy is not a gadget anymore!