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Tips To Building Consumer Relationships Using Widgets and Social Networks March 31, 2008

By Josh Perlstein
Published in eMarketingandCommerce

As consumers become increasingly bombarded with messages, images and ads, marketers and advertisers are increasingly challenged to break through the evergrowing clutter, get noticed and received positively.

Developing relationships between brand and consumer that truly have relevance and value to each party is the secret to rising above today’s information overload.

Although the Internet allows for cost-efficient relationship building through web sites, email, web-based promotions, the current methods, channels and tactics are either declining in efficacy or efficiency. Email is too cluttered, postal mail is too expensive, SEM hit its plateau, and banner ads are ignored.

Here are some ways marketers can use new tactics and channels like Widgets and Social Networks to reach out and build relationships with consumers in an efficient, effective and less-cluttered way.

Widgets

Newsweek magazine named 2007 “The Year of the Widget,” and 2007 certainly lived up to its namesake. In November, ComScore reported over 148 million people in the U.S. had viewed a widget. That’s approximately 81% of the active U.S. Internet population.

Widgets are small applications that can be placed on a desktop or in browsers. Widgets are like portable web pages and applications that are shrunk down and “moved” to other locations. For marketers, widgets deliver decentralization of content and/or commerce. Instead of the expense and inefficiencies of driving a consumer to your site, then putting them through multiple pages for content, registration or shopping, it can all happen within the widget. You can interact, communicate, build relationships, and transact with consumers where they are or where they want to be, rather than making them come to you.

Consumers use social network widgets like those commonly seen on Facebook profiles to share favorite things like music, photos, videos, games and movies. Marketers can create activities that users can invite their friends into and play against through the widget, much like wildly popular Scrabble or Poker widgets. Also, widgets built for Facebook often default to alerting friends when you use the widget. This translates to an endorsement for the application. Talk about a marketer’s dream.

Further, widgets can be measured. Tracking downloads, usage, views, interactions, and transactions can be combined with typical tracking tools used with SEM, web analytics, ad-serving, and media. Widgets can also help your SEO efforts through generation of links to your site, as long as they contain keywordrich anchor text.

Keys to getting consumers to download widgets:

  • Be honest about what a consumer can expect from the widget, then deliver.

  • Be honest about what you do with the relationship – access to a consumer’s page or desktop, updates, personally identifiable information, etc.

  • Promote it in all communications and media, including email campaigns and display ads.

  • Find top online influencers (bloggers, content creators) and ask them to promote it with you.

  • Make it genuinely fun or genuinely useful to your audience.

  • Make it easy to use.

  • Position the widget as an exclusive club, or a way to receive “Exclusive Deals and Special Sales” that you can only get if you are a widget user.

  • Create incentives for your customers to recommend it to other friends.

  • Create widgets that adapt/work in a variety of different environments (OS’s and/or social networks).

To ensure the success of your Widget, make sure your goals are clear, your value propositions are strong, correct tracking and keyword links are contained, and promotion and proliferation strategies are fully considered and supported.

Social Networks Advertising within social networks may appear to be a bit of a conundrum, but are a number of marketing options for advertisers within social networks, including:
  1. Display media/banner ads. Expect really low click-throughs, like sub- 0.05% in many cases, and conversion to be lower. Although the impression inventory on MySpace seems endless, we have not seen any respectable ads generate high interest. The good news is that much of the ad inventory on social networks is priced appropriately.

  2. Create a group for your brand. Many brands have created groups on Facebook to support their message, specific brand initiative, or even specific campaigns.

  3. Incorporate some social aspects into your site. You can build a blog, message board or allow your customers to create their own groups on your web site. If you don’t want to build it, companies, such as Ripple6, have a plug and play platform that can easily be integrated into your site.

  4. Get involved in advertising “feeds”, e.g. Facebook’s Social Media. This tactic, perhaps the most powerful, integrates your advertising and marketing messages within the conversation on the page. These ads are served in the context of Facebook news feeds, attached to relevant social stories.

There is a wealth of marketing opportunities available when you enable your customers to do the talking for you. Widgets and social networks give them tools to do it easily.
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