"WIDGET" What's in a name?

When it comes to reaching your audience, quite a lot actually.

A widget is widely understood In digital marketing circles both client and agency. For the purposes of this article (don’t write in and correct me) - it’s basically content that your target audience can take away and install on their social network of choice, Facebook, MySpace et al.

Now here's the thing: A lot of your target audience don’t know what the term "widget" means.

In fact I conducted some pretty unscientific research before I wrote this post. I reached out to my own network, most of them unconnected to digital marketing - to ask what they think a widget it is.

“Is it something to do with Guiness or lager?” was a recurring theme.

Even the font of all knowledge WikiPedia is a little scant on actual detail here:

Running campaigns, with clear calls to action, asking, telling, begging your audience to ...

Install the widget! Grab the widget! Get the widget! Have you had our widget? Why not take our widget?

May all be failing in one big area. The term widget.

We recently ran a campaign for St Trinian's 2 – Our audience? Girls, 8 – 16 year olds. St Trinian's and Girls Aloud (Sarah Harding was in the film) already had an audience across “socialsphere” So, we built a beautifully crafted widget, we put in place a content strategy, begged the film company for exclusive content, enticed consumers with competitions, gave them news, basically if you were a fan of St Trinian's: you needed our widget.

So why didn’t they lap it up in the first couple of weeks?

We turned to our St Trinians Fan page on Facebook, and were shocked to realize that kids don’t know what a widget is. Not only that, but they were embarrassed to admit it, didn’t want to install it because they weren’t sure what it was, and so it snowballed.

So we took the bold step of changing the name of it, over a long call with the media planning agency, the client, and their marketing department, we knocked all sorts of words around, gadget, web widget, gizmo… weighing up the pros and cons of each. In the end we crowd sourced our answer from Facebook, the outright winner was…

WEB APP!! It seemed the term app, which in my head was the preserve of iPhone/iPod, is widely accepted by the kids and your target demo. It comes loaded with it it’s own meaning, people like it, they understand the term app, they know what they’re getting. And if you add the word FREE in front of it, then you’ve got a runaway hit on your hands.

Our campaign started with Grab the Widget and in 2 weeks we had a underwhelming 100+ installs.

We changed to Grab the Free Web App – we started getting 1000+ a week.

So I guess there’s a lesson to learn here: In an age where we’re racing to keep up with the latest advance in our industry, it pays to STOP, THINK and CONSIDER, are all our audience on our bus?? The answer is clear, probably not!