Colts “Widget” shows slow and steady growth

Some of you may remember we released our first widget onto the Web a just before Christmas. Thought I’d share the early returns – tracking data provided by Clearspring Technologies.

In case you missed it, here’s the widget:

Here’s how we seeded the widget

So far we’ve not done much promotion for the Widget. We placed it on the Myspace pages of 2, well connected Colts fans, and we sent the widget via E mail to 500 Colts fans who have pre-registered for our upcoming social networking site. I made the mistake of putting the html for the widget directly in the body of the E mail, which was a bad idea (as I learned) since not everyone’s E mail clients will display it properly. We should have shown a screen shot and offered a link to a Web page for people to go get the widget. We also notified the moderators of our fan forum

Speaking of links, one of the biggest challenges right now is that Myspace doesn’t allow links from widgets to outside sites. So while Myspace leads the way in terms of Colts widget locations, people who view the widget on myspace cannot click the links we’ve offered to get them back to our Web site. Clearspring is in negotiations with Myspace to fix this issue. Other social networking sites do not prevent links.

And here’s what we’re seeing so far

Below is a summary report from Clearspring. The overall report shows: number of locations where the widget is posted on the web, number of views it has received, and what Clearspring calls viral hubs. I’m just showing the summary here.

Here’s a look at number of locations over time

Sorry for the fuzzy image. I’m not much with graphics. But you can see the overall trend is going in the right direction. Allowing for a little dip through Holidays, we’re seeing decent adoption rates. Interestingly, a lot of our fans need to be taught what a widget actually is. We’re seeing the need for education. Perhaps we should not throw around the term “widget” and use words like “slide show” or something so that people will get it faster.

Plus, not everyone has a web page to put the widget. It will be nice when we can make a desktop version. I’m sure that will be popular, since we already offer a screen server product which pushes our latest action photos to fans who have downloaded the desktop application.

I’m told that Clearspring’s syndication and tracking services are not as fully developed as they eventually will be. We’re working together to study the “migration habits”. They’re collecting and sharing with me the adoption rates and places people are putting our widget. We hope to use this intelligence to improve our success over time. More on this in the future

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