Using Flex Widgets to Spread Your Marketing Message

Hello, I have not been around in quite a while and I think this is my first blog post here. Just been too dang busy for much in the way of social networking type stuff. But I found a little free time today so I thought I would share a few thoughts about something I have been playing with at my company, Work Media, that I think is pretty interesting.

And that is widget creation with Adobe Flex.

A widget, if you don't know, is a small piece of code that can be added to a web page or run as a program on your local hard drive that provides some kind of functionality, generally involving the display of data.

This is useful because a widget can rapidly spread your marketing message and brand. My company is finishing up a project for Regal Entertainment. The widget displays entertainment news (pulled from an RSS file) and allows its users to search for movie times by zip code. It is available as a Web widget that can be installed on a Web site or as a desktop widget on a PC or a Mac. Personally, there have been many times when I had to go through some trouble to look movie times. Not a whole lot of trouble, but if I already had a widget on my desktop that tell me what I needed to know with a single click, well I think that would be pretty cool. And so for the (hopefully) thousands of people who end up downloading the widget, Regal will keep their name in the person's mind and help them find their way to a Regal theater, rather than one of their competitors.

This same concept could probably be applied to your business. What information could you put at your customers' or prospects' fingertips that would provide value to them and keep your name in front of them? A specialty retailer of some sort could create an RSS feed that updates widgets about particular products when they come in. A stock broker could provide clients with customized streams of stock quotes that display in a widget. What could you do?

As for how to create these widgets, Adobe Flex is definitely the way to go. I won't go so far as to say that it's easy, but it is a development platform that makes widget development much quicker. It also integrates with Adobe AIR, a cross-platform runtime environment, so the same code base can be used to create a widget that will run on a Web site, on a PC, or on a Mac. Now that is cool technology.

Hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving!