Widgets Are a Phenomenal Marketing Opportunity - Get With the Program

By B.L. Ochman Typepad blog software from Six Apart now offers a Widget Gallery including this "Blog Tattoo"" that generates a "Kanji" (Japanese/Chinese character) at random.

Back in the day, this type of thing was called a value added service. Right now, Widgets offer an extraordinary Web 2.0 marketing opportunity and companies should be falling over themselves to add them to their marketing campaigns.

What's a widget?
Technically, it's a snippet of HTML and/or JavaScript that you can manage like any other sidebar content module on your blog. Six Apart has partnered with dozens of companies to bring you great new features such as job searching, polls, ways to share video, game playing, weather tracking, and photo sharing.

A phenomenal marketing opportunity
From a marketing point of view, it's an extraordinary opportunity for companies to gain high visibility on popular blogs by providing interactive,useful content.

It's the wave of the future for product and service marketing. No blinking banners, no annoying pop-ups, no BS, just useful information, packaged in a way that makes it helpful, interesting, and, hopefully, fun.

It's clear by now that, online, traditional advertising has gone the way of the dinosaur. But if you can provide content interesting enough for the MySPace generation or popular bloggers to want to display on their sites, you'll have brand building and credible exposure rolled into one little Widget.

A screencast demonstrates how to install Widgets on Typepad. The SixApart site says that Widgets for Moveable Type are under discussion. Hurry up guys! I want Widgets.

Love your letter, energy, edge, and saavy...but...

Hope you'll look into what Brands really are, and how to build them. No media, none old or new, can build a Brand. Synopsis: It's done inside-out with a lot of soul searching and correction to create rock-solid core values, incorporate them into powerful qualities, cement them into what you make, and offer realities that consumers understand, trust, and prefer. You are right, most conventional advertising has and will sabotage Brands (even good ones). The new media will not help either. Both have been, and will be guilty of doing the opposite.

Thanks for the nice words ... but ... actually, I said "add them to their marketing campaigns." Not make them your entire marketing campaign.

No media will help any brand without value added information, and that's what Widgets are.

Hi B.L.

Great post - I agree - Widgets present a great opportunity for marketers and advertisers

Typepad makes it super simple to implement - now we just need to convince people to "build them"

Talk Soon
Fergus