Marketing in Rambles - Is a Widget a Web 2.0 Trojan Horse?

I was just reading an article about widgets as a powerful marketing tool when it dawned on me: the most successful widget campaigns use the Trojan horse strategy.

Allow me to explain:

Four things were needed to make the Trojan horse attack successful:

1. Odysseus and his boys needed a place to sneak into, Ilium in Troy in their case.
2. A gift (the big wooden horse) to sneak into the realm of the unsuspecting victim.
3. Odysseus’s soldiers to carry out the objectives of the mission, within the gift.
4. The result – the enemy was annihilated.

So a few thousand years later, the Internet is born, a few years after that, the term web 2.0 is coined and shortly after that Widgets arrive on the scene creating the scene for the Web 2.0 Trojan horse:

1. Odysseus, your brand, needs to sneak into Troy – blogs, website and social networking pages etc
2. A gift – The widget with appealing, dynamic content.
3. Odysseus’s soldiers – your branding or brand message displayed on the widget, carrying out the objective of boosting brand presence or whatever other reason you had for doing the viral widget campaign.
4. The result – your objectives are measured by trackers etc.

The reason this observation inspired me to write a blog entry about it, is because it might be a useful way of explaining the basis of a widget campaign to those non-techie clients and colleagues of yours.

I think the focus of explanation needs to shift away from what is a widget to how we can effectively use widgets for our brand objectives because we need to accept the fact that some of the people ‘just don’t get it’ but they do get branding strategies and measurements which can all be done with Widgets.