Will widget marketing be a sustainable tactic, or will it become less useful? Underscore Marketing's president examines the paths widget marketing can take as it comes to a crossroads.

Widget marketing shares a lot of attributes with another once-hot digital marketing tactic that has since fallen off many marketer radar screens. See if you can guess which one. Both share the following traits:

• Highly viral in nature and rely on pass-along for effectiveness
• Characterized by a low cost of entry, priced according to the number of hours it takes to develop the assets for the campaign
• Prone to abuse, due to the low cost of entry (see above)
• Rapidly ascending toward ubiquity

See any similarities between widgets and email?

I think widget marketing is at the same crossroads that email reached more than a decade ago. Whether or not it follows email down the path toward ineffectiveness depends largely on how it deals with the four issues I'm about to cover.

Issue 1: Policing
Some platforms have it right and some have ignored the problem in hopes that it will go away on its own. The truth is that there are good widgets and there are bad widgets. One bad widget got ahold of me a couple weeks ago and sent messages to every one of my contacts. I have no recourse except to report it via email.

And that's one of the things that's wrong with widgets. There's little by which to make value judgments, other than the trust of your friends. We know that this trust can be hijacked by unscrupulous developers by coding a widget such that it appears to have been sent by a trusted friend. One thing they can't hijack, however, is the will of communities. That's why many of the successful widget platforms provide feedback mechanisms where the community at large can comment and vote on widgets, such that the crummy ones get buried and the great ones are given top billing. They also build in reporting mechanisms so that bugs or malicious code can be quickly discovered and removed.

Without a system for self-policing, widget platforms are doomed to repeat many of the same mistakes as email.

Issue 2: Standards
I'm not talking about the kind of standards that curtail creativity, or the kind that designate what size things ought to be. I'm talking about a Widget Bill of Rights that contains some basics, such as the notion that when a user tells a widget to uninstall itself, the widget should do so. Another might state that widgets can't use contact information without permission.

The assumption by many people who install widgets is that if it is refused permission to do something, it should abide by that restriction. If widgets don't live up to these basic expectations and continue to spread like malicious viruses, we've got a problem on our hands. Much like email, widgets could soon become things people want to protect themselves from, rather than engage with. And that would be a shame.

Issue 3: Prioritizing messaging above utility
Due to the dreaded GMOOT Syndrome (Get Me One Of Those), marketers are jumping on board with widgets before they necessarily know what they're good for. And that means thousands of new widgets designed to perform messaging functions rather than to provide useful utility. Don't understand the difference? Sure you do. Which would be more successful: a UPS widget that tracks packages from any desktop or one that plays a "Ship your packages with UPS" sound file every 10 minutes?

The best widgets extend utility to the people that install them. Messaging is a secondary concern, if a concern at all. If marketers fail to realize this, we could flood widget directories with thousands of useless widgets, killing off the widget ecosystem.

Issue 4: Crummy success metrics
Remember how, once the quants got ahold of email marketing, some of the worst banner ad and email marketing campaigns started to look good on paper? The same thing could easily happen to widget marketing. Viral pass-along can be one of the measures that marketers look at in order to gauge the health of the campaign, but if that metric is overemphasized, designers will start designing to fulfill on the metric, delivering "success" at the expense of compelling utility. Maybe they'll swap the placement of the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons when the app asks whether it's okay to send itself to all of a user's friends. And it will get a bunch of incremental pass-alongs that way, but at the expense of the user's trust.

That's how campaigns get off track. 

Many of these issues can be addressed by ceding control to user communities rather than centralizing it. Empowered with the proper tools, communities of users are really good at policing themselves and steering one another clear of bad apps. So issues No. 2 and No. 3 can pretty much solve themselves once control is decentralized. It's issue No. 4 I'm wondering about. Can marketers learn from the past and measure what really matters?

Let me know what you think in comments.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com . Read full bio.