Yes you can build Widgets… soon

If you are like me and have been dying to try your hand at creating a widget but know nothing about coding beyond basic HTML tags and are too cheap to pay someone to do it for you, then you will want to read this article.

Sprout Builder has arrived in all it’s glory and is set to make widgets accessible to a much wider group of ‘creators’. I imagine will mean a lot more niche widgets and hence a lot more widget users/viewers. For example, I enjoy a leisurely paraglide on the weekends and I have had an idea for a widget for the 100k + registered paragliding pilots worldwide. When you estimate how many of those are online, we are talking very niche. How many of them have used/seen or bothered by a widget, even more niche.

Confused
Please note that all the positivity I pour out above (being my optimistic self) is based on the promo video on the site and I haven’t actually given the tool a go. Confusingly, their blog says the tool had launched yesterday but when I try to use the app, I am asked to give my email address, to which I duly abided, as they are in closed beta phase. But, much like my potential card fraud query at the bank, I’m sure it will sort itself out in a few hours or days.

Either way the video shows off the interface a bit and seems simple enough. It reminds me of Swishmax’s linear editing style interface as well as Synthasite’s drag and drop building style interface. I’m hoping it’s more like the latter!

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.