Common Widget Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Why most branded widgets built for MySpace, iGoogle and the newly opened Facebook Platform in 2007 failed to spread, and what got installed.
Widgets had a real moment in 2007. Facebook opened its Platform to outside developers in May, MySpace profiles were already covered in embeddable badges and countdown clocks and services like Widgetbox and Clearspring made it simple to package a small piece of functionality and let anyone paste it into a blog sidebar or profile page. A lot of businesses rushed to build one. Most of those widgets never spread past the company’s own site. Here’s why.
Building a widget that only served the brand, not the user. The most common mistake was designing a widget around what the company wanted to say rather than what a visitor would want on their own page. A logo with a slogan and a link back to the homepage isn’t a widget anyone chooses to display next to their friends’ comments and photos. A useful mini-tool, a stock ticker, a countdown, a quiz, a small game, gets installed because it does something for the person hosting it, and the branding rides along for free.
Launching once and never updating it. A weather widget that shows the same forecast for six months, or a “deal of the day” badge that stops updating after the first week, quickly gets deleted. Widgets that survived on people’s pages were the ones that kept giving a reason to leave them installed: fresh content, a changing number, something worth glancing at again next week.
No way to track where it landed. Because a widget could be copied and pasted anywhere, plenty of companies had no idea which blogs or profiles were hosting theirs, or whether anyone was clicking through. Without basic tracking built into the embed code, a widget campaign was mostly a guess dressed up as a strategy.
Ignoring the platforms with real distribution. Facebook’s decision to open its Platform in May 2007 mattered because it gave outside developers, for the first time, a direct channel into a fast-growing social graph rather than a scattered collection of personal blogs. Businesses that kept building for generic “add to your site” widgets while ignoring the new Facebook apps ecosystem missed where the actual growth was happening that year.
Over-branding it into uselessness. Some companies went the opposite direction and stuffed their widget with logos, taglines and calls to action until it stopped being useful as a standalone tool. A bulky, obviously promotional widget got passed over in favor of a plainer competitor that just worked. The brand mention belonged in a small corner, not plastered across the whole thing.
Expecting a widget to substitute for an actual audience. A widget can spread an existing message further, but it rarely creates demand out of nothing. Companies with no existing customer base or content worth sharing often assumed a clever widget alone would generate buzz. It didn’t. The widgets that spread came from brands that already had something people wanted to associate with.
Getting widget marketing right in 2007 came down to a simple test: would a stranger install this on their own page for their own reasons, with no relationship to your company at all? If the honest answer was no, the widget needed a rethink before it needed a bigger promotion budget.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2007 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
