Over the last eighteen months or so I’ve been involved in defining strategies for, planning, designing, building and deploying widgets.

Widgets are one of those digital technologies that come along, all loosely defined, with the threat that if you want to succeed online you MUST divert your spend into them now. There’s a sense of panic-y ‘I need a widget, and I need it now’, in the same way that in the 90s some marketers needed a website - but couldn’t really say why or what it needed to do.

At the mashup event devoted to Widgets back in February there was a slightly aggressive undercurrent, with the audience (mostly made up of corporate marketers and VCs) demanding that the panelists ‘show me the money‘. I sensed that this atmosphere was largely due to a lack of understanding of what widgets actually are and how they might be used strategically as part of the marketing mix.

It doesn’t help that Google in its wisdom calls them Gadgets but for my purposes here I’m going to define a widget as a piece of content or functionality that can be sited and shared anywhere on the wider web. This is still pretty loose but we’re getting there - bear with me!

Broadly speaking we can then break it down further into ‘personal’ widgets and ‘public’ widgets. This refers to where the widget might be placed and for whose consumption it is.

Personal widgets would be placed on a private space, such as the desktop of your computer or a personal start page. As they tend to be of some utility they will typically have low reach - but more engagement and therefore longevity. For this reason they can provide an excellent branding mechanism.

Examples might include the weather widget I keep on my desktop (to save me the effort of looking out of the window to check if its raining) or the London Underground journey planner I have on my iGoogle start page.

STA (the student-focussed travel agent) have created a set of widgets that appeal to young travellers, including a trip countdown and a tool to check the weather at your destination.

So, a personal widget is a tool that provides ‘branded utility’ - a long and lasting connection with your customer that defines you as useful and helpful and keeps your brand front of mind in a very positive way.

A public widget is generally a very different thing. Ivan Pope, Brighton-based guru of all things widgetty, has called them the ‘bumper stickers of the web’ in that they are used as badges to proclaim belonging or afilliation. This might be easier to visualise if we think where a public widget might be placed - picture MySpace and it should all become clear. A successful public widget would typically see a very high take-up but with little longevity - making this type of widget better suited to campaign activity.

Bloggers also use widgets, generally to give a more rounded view of themselves and how they exist across the social web - so we can see what tracks Dan from Innocent’s been listening to via last.fm, whose been reading Anthony’s blog via MyBlogLog, the photos the NM team has taken on flickr, Will’s minutiae via Twitter or even where Matt is visiting via Dopplr.

For these online properties share-ability is a key part of the strategy for success - last.fm and flickr are ubiquitously used amongst the blogging population not only because they are excellent services but because they are so portable - and each placement on an influential blog leads to more referrals for the service - a form of free stealth advertising.

As ever understanding the needs of your audience is key to deciding what kind of widget would best serve your business needs - but it’s fairly certain that if you do use online as a significant business channel (and who doesn’t?) then widgetisation is something you should be considering.
Why? Because it’s all about distribution - and we’re marketing to an increasingly distributed and fragmented world. It’s no longer enough to try and shout your message to as many people is as possible - money can’t buy as much influence as it used to, but participation and usefulness can more than supplement that

As a marketer it’s kind of obvious that I’m going to slip in a bit of soft sell alongside all this educational stuff - so of course I’m going to mention our expertise in the planning, design and delivery of wonderful widgets. So far, we’ve run educational workshops for clients including one of the largest search agencies in the UK and a major clothing retailer, we built and deployed the Sugarscape widget for UK publishing giant Hachette Filipacchi (check out the case study) and delivered two campaign widgets for Oxfam. We know our onions and are more than happy to share them with you.

Thanks to Flickr user jyri for the pic