O Widget, Widget, wherefore art thou Widget?
No, wait, take the gun (or finger) out of your mouth, we’re done with the bad Shakespeare parodies, mostly because the comparison misses the mark. Widgets by any other name would be… better.
It’s a lousy name not only because widget doesn’t tell people what it is or does, the word actually refers to something that ‘cannot be recalled’ (Random House Dictionary). As you can imagine, that’s not a great way to have to describe your product.
To be clear, in the interactive world, a widget is a portable chunk of code that performs a simple (ideally a single) function and can be installed and executed on a web page, a computer desktop or a mobile phone. Typical functions include news readers, games, stock quotes, weather reports, etc. Emerge makes them (among many other things). We’re very proud of our work. Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure, self promotion, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Make no mistake interactive widgets are wonderful things, and they can do an awful lot more than we have room to describe here. Moreover, because they are portable, see above, widgets can be spread around the internet from user to user at no cost to you, the marketer. This gives widgets the capacity to take a promotion into the vaunted viral realm. Great stuff, huh? But that name… talk about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (sorry).
The term is generic, so people don’t know what to make of them, which creates kind of a high barrier of entry. On the other hand, the fact that the name widget is so generic, allows marketers and agencies to be really creative and to develop widgets in whatever way best suits a brand’s message. Widgets are like blank slates or canvasses that you can paint a masterpiece on, if you’re creative. How you use widgets depends on what message you want to send to your audience.
Consider what a widget did for the people of Galveston. The island of Galveston has long been a popular vacation spot. Its miles of beaches, tropical setting, and relaxed atmosphere are just a few of the reasons why. But when Hurricane Ike struck the island in 2008, it flooded much of the city and left it without basic services. In the wake of the disaster, the island received a lot of national attention, just not the kind the Galveston tourism board wanted. To counteract the image left by the storm that Galveston was in jeopardy and not such a safe tourist attraction any more, the Galveston board of tourism and Emerge Digital created a widget. Allowing users to look at live webcams trained on some of the island’s most picturesque spots, this widget not only showed visitors that Galveston was back on its feet and open for business, it also reminded people why the island is so popular in the first place—It’s beautiful.
Another example of what a widget can do for an organization is the University Challenge Widget Emerge built to promote Knovel’s interactive resource library to college students. The Challenge was set up as a contest in which engineering and science students answered difficult technical questions in order to win prizes (e.g. a Nintendo Wii, iPods, etc.). To meet the challenge, students were given access to Knovel’s searchable online resource library. In the process of completing the nontrivial quiz, these future engineers and scientists discovered how valuable a resource Knovel.com was. The students not only succeeded by winning prizes, they also learned how important Knovel could be for their future successes, at university and beyond. Not a bad message for a widget to pass along.
In other words, a widget is just a tool, a piece of code marketers can use to spread their message throughout the online community. Sure, it’s a poorly named tool, but let’s face it, the name is here to stay. What you get out of a widget, depends on the creativity and innovation you put into your messaging.
Think of it like a sonnet—Shakespeare’s famous fourteen-lined poem. It’s not a very big box in which to fit a whole story. You can make it be a cage, or you can make it sing.
Image credit: Adam Stipanuk
If you’re a Star Wars nerd (guilty), what probably came to mind when the phrase “cloud computing” came into public use this past year was an image of Cloud City, the floating metropolis governed by Billy Dee Williams (nee Lando Calrissian) in the The Empire Strikes Back (you know, episode two, er, five, of the series). What could be bad about that?