What Are Widgets, Anyway? (And, Why Should I Care?)

Until recently, the funny lit­tle word “wid­get” meant very lit­tle. Today, wid­gets have the power to change the face of the internet.

Not more than a year ago — two at the most — a wid­get was a noth­ing, a thinga­ma­jig, a doo­dad. I recall the word was used lib­er­ally in my eco­nom­ics classes: If a wid­get fac­tory turned out 2,368 wid­gets on Mon­day and 927 wid­gets on Tuesday….

Today, “wid­get” remains a funny lit­tle word, yet wid­gets — those portable chunks of code that can be installed and exe­cuted through­out the online world — just may be the most dis­rup­tive force on the web today.

Sounds dra­matic, doesn’t it? Still, I believe it to be not far from the truth. I would even ven­ture to pre­dict that wid­gets will even­tu­ally become an inte­gral part of any company’s online mar­ket­ing strat­egy. And the com­pa­nies that begin now to har­ness the power of those lit­tle code snip­pets, and to exploit the abil­ity to mea­sure their wid­gets’ effec­tive­ness, will be miles ahead of their competition.

But I’m get­ting ahead of myself, as many mar­keters I speak to still seem unclear on what a wid­get actu­ally is. And that’s under­stand­able, because there really hasn’t been an industry-wide stan­dard for what the term even means.

Let’s look at the def­i­n­i­tion from Wikipedia:

A web wid­get is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and exe­cuted within any sep­a­rate HTML-based web page by an end user with­out requir­ing addi­tional compilation.

Clear as mud, right?

Per­haps the best way to describe a wid­get is to give an exam­ple. Apple offers a wid­get called My iTunes that lets users share their rat­ings, favorite songs, and new music pur­chases with any­one who vis­its their site. You can install the wid­get on your Face­book pro­file, MySpace page, per­sonal blog, iGoogle page, or really any HTML page that you con­trol. You can also cus­tomize the wid­get with dif­fer­ent sizes and col­ors. If you lift up the hood, the wid­get works by trans­mit­ting feeds from your iTunes account to the wid­get itself, where the infor­ma­tion is then dis­played for your friends to see.

But not all wid­gets are from major online play­ers directly – in fact, the major­ity are from third-party devel­op­ers that just lever­age data APIs that the major sites are now pro­vid­ing. Take for exam­ple eBay. A com­pany called Wid­get­box offers a wid­get for eBay that allows you to dis­play your own auc­tions or favorite item searches on any HTML page that you con­trol. Again, this could be your blog, iGoogle page, or other location.

This may all seem a bit triv­ial but it’s com­pletely dis­rup­tive and really excit­ing. Wid­gets give web­sites the abil­ity to become portable, to go any­where. With both of the above exam­ples, these online play­ers are effec­tively reach­ing a much greater audi­ence at a much lower cost than com­pa­ra­ble means like search engine mar­ket­ing or ban­ner advertising.

Think about it. Thou­sands of peo­ple sub­scribe to wid­gets, and soon it will be mil­lions as the value propo­si­tion con­tin­ues to increase. Fur­ther, the audi­ence for these wid­gets tends to be qual­i­fied by the very fact that the wid­gets are dis­play­ing con­tent in the con­text of a social net­work­ing expe­ri­ence. Friends are look­ing at con­tent that their friends are rec­om­mend­ing and val­i­dat­ing, and these friends share a mul­ti­tude of com­mon inter­ests. As a result, there is a higher like­li­hood that these peo­ple will buy sim­i­lar music, clothes, books, or items – and like­wise read sim­i­lar arti­cles, con­tent, etc – than the aver­age vis­i­tor to the site that mar­keters are work­ing so aggres­sively to attract.

Wid­gets can also be used to increase the effec­tive­ness and rel­e­vance of con­tent being served. For exam­ple, take the Cliq wid­get from Offer­mat­ica. Cliq allows a web pub­lisher to place a wid­get on their site that pulls together fea­tured sto­ries, most pop­u­lar sto­ries, and related sto­ries, both from the publisher’s own site and from third-party sites.

Wid­gets like this har­ness the power of social media while allow­ing for the shar­ing of read­ers and traffic.

So, as you begin think­ing about using wid­gets as part of your mar­ket­ing strate­gies, there are some basic things you’ll want to be able to know: How many web­sites have incor­po­rated your wid­get? How much traf­fic is being gen­er­ated from your wid­gets? Which of the web­sites that are refer­ring traf­fic via the wid­get are the most effec­tive? How effec­tive is your wid­get cam­paign in terms of your over­all mar­ket­ing mix?

The basics of track­ing and mea­sur­ing wid­gets are not dif­fi­cult. It’s usu­ally a sim­ple mat­ter of adding a track­ing code to the wid­get code. (If you have ques­tions about this, give us a call. The good folks at Omni­ture can help make it hap­pen.) Of course, as wid­gets increase in com­plex­ity, and you thirst for greater data insight, track­ing wid­get suc­cess can increase in com­plex­ity as well.

So. Online mar­keters have a won­der­ful new way to expand our reach online via a tool that could be as big and game-changing as paid search.

Those of us ready and will­ing to jump in and get started could be leaps ahead of our com­peti­tors by the time wid­gets become truly main­stream. And if we have the power to mea­sure our wid­gets, to under­stand how they con­tribute to our over­all traf­fic, we’ll be that much more ahead of the game. What do you think?