Beyond the platform considerations, brands and marketers need to clearly understand their widget goals and the ROI potential for public and private widget networks.
Marketers are talking about widgets; a search of just iMedia Connection turns up 244 results, and comScore reports that during November 2007, nearly 148 million U.S. internet users viewed a widget, representing more than 80 percent of the total audience. There are a number of well-funded companies focusing on widget marketing implementations.
Marketers seem mostly to be looking at widgets as a new form of advertising media with a potentially large viral component, and indeed there have been some highly successful viral widget campaigns. The Cloverfield movie widget was viewed more than 17 million times, with more than 25,000 consumer embeds.
Certainly placing a widget on a public blog or social media site can lead to a large number of viewers, depending on popularity. However, users are also placing widgets on their personal start pages and desktops. Many users are using social media platforms such as Facebook as personal information spaces, without a large "audience" of watchers.
While these sorts of users are not going to contribute significantly to the viral reach of a widget media campaign, they are highly valuable to brands as part of their relationship marketing strategy. As customers continue to shift their attention online, and as online customers shift their attention away from banner ads and monolithic websites, branded widget networks are becoming the new ground to engage customers in an ongoing dialogue.
Beyond acquisition: relationship marketing engagement
The retention and nurturing of existing customers has become increasingly important to brands and marketing agencies as the costs and difficulty of acquiring new customers continues to rise. The reasons for the rise of acquisition costs are various: declining clickthrough rates on banner ads, the difficulty of getting people to return to websites, and most of all the increasing costs of search marketing terms, particularly for highly competitive terms.