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.

What’s in Your Widget?

We have seen the emergence of the mighty widget - the ‘live’ jacket that with a single click, opens up the book for the buyer to briefly evaluate and qualify for purchase. Whether its called Search Inside, Browse Inside, View Inside, Look Inside, they all work fundamentally the same and offer that enriched customer experience. They bring much of that bookstore ‘touch, smell and feel’ to the online world.

Today’s widgets offer limited pages views, text search, linking, table of contents, customisable ‘buy now’ resolution and the ability to copy and distribute the widget. So is that the end of the story or the beginning of a new one?

Today we can see the availability of more supplemental information that could be used by retailers, librarians, consumers etc. So can the widget be extended from being content into a container that holds content, context and even rights? Imagine clicking on a jacket and having the option to hear the author via a podcast or see them via a video, read authoritative review, link to other titles. The interesting thing again is that widgets may be dispersed to the four corners of the Internet but they are rendered dynamically from a single source. That model enables the publisher to update information as it changes and maintain its currency over its life cycle.

Imagine a world where all we pass between us is a widget, a jacket image, a persistent resolvable URL. It makes you think about the waste, the duplication and the lack of consistency that happens today.