Sunday, June 07, 2009

eMarketing Thoughts: 2 What is a widget?

Is it a book sampler, a look inside the jacket, a look before you buy? We have seen many widgets of all shapes and sizes. Some were very impressive giving you the real book experience with turning pages in duplex views and full colour, others crude scanned pages that in some cases weren’t even scanned straight! Some merely followed instructions and on displaying the first 10 pages even showed us the blank ones! Amazon gave us a ‘surprise me’ option which was often a poor surprise as it displayed a totally meaningless page and was not even a smart move. Others could only be managed by the publisher so were limited in their application to resellers. Although the reseller could with dexterity change certain fields like the buy now button resolution, each publisher did it differently!

We would suggest that the widget is just a container - nothing more and nothing less. When one starts to look at it this way one avoids the trap of it being a one-dimensional vehicle to merely sample a few pages. It is a marketing box which can offer as little or as much as appropriate, it can become the new tip sheet or advance information sheet, a door to more information, a collector of comments, requests the reps suitcase and much more.

We must remember that eMarketing isn’t about selling digital content but about selling all content; digital, physical, audio, rights and combinations of.
We must also remember that the material never leaves the repository - it is merely viewed and when viewed the information is current and real time.

The widget offers competitive advantage today which is sustainable.

We would suggest that the widget is the base entry point into the world of eMarketing. By itself it is not the answer, but part of the answer in this exciting new engagement with the market.

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