Applications and Widgets

Applications and widgets are another type of component that can be important to the organic ecosystem. Savvy marketers are finding that offering things of value not only improves brand exposure and awareness, but also brand interaction.

If your company’s product/service lends itself to developing your own media, why would you spend millions on display advertising when you could put a quarter of that budget into content development that supports your niche base?

For instance, when I was a kid, I used to go into a nearby surf shop to pick up a small pamphlet that listed the local tide tables. The pamphlet contained the surf shop’s branding and other marketing related content. Yet, those tables were so useful to my friends and me that we never minded having the store’s brand in front of us.

In our present-day connected landscape, there are more ways to provide that kind of utility than ever. What if I could order a Domino’s pizza with one click on my refrigerator screen – then see the GPS coordinates of the driver when I want to check on delivery status? Or what if I’m out volunteering at a Life Rolls On event and I’m so overcome with emotion that I want to donate, but I don’t carry checks or cash, and they won’t take credit cards. It would be nice to hit a Charity Navigator app on my phone and tap in the amount I’d like to donate.

Neither of these examples is at all far-fetched. The point is that if you truly understand the needs of your market segment, you can give them amazingly useful tools that improve their lives. Just make them effective tools that are a natural extension of your core brand value. As with all ecosystem extensions, the goal is to provide users with functionality they need or want, but in a way that suits your brand. Maybe it’s a calendaring or a time-tracking wizard, some kind of really specialized calculator or another helpful tool. Whatever it is, it should convey your brand value.

This is really wide-open territory. You can have large-scale, enterprise-level apps that solve a workflow problem, or quirky little widgets that act as small, highly specialized applications providing a very unique utility value. Applications and widgets come in many forms and can be provided to users in many ways – as downloadable, self-contained components or hosted on your main site, on microsites, or even on partner sites.

Platform-specific apps – such as for Facebook, MySpace and other active social sites – are continuously evolving, always staying just ahead of the curve. That makes doing platform-specific applications a little harder, but the trade-off can be many more impressions served. Not only do you get more brand impressions, but you also get them cheaper than you would if you’d had to go out to the market.

If an application is strong enough, it’s something that can stick with the user for a long time, too, which is another reason to make sure that the application is a natural extension of your core brand value.

An application that gets lots more impressions, but does nothing to tie back into your brand does little good because there’s a total disconnect. It’s a wasted opportunity.