On Blog Widgetry

When The Friday Project published Caroline Smailes’ debut novel In Search of Adam last year, we wanted to really capitalise on the huge web following she has. We wanted to find a way to reach all those people and more and even better, to find a way to plot how many of them we were reaching and where in the world they were.

What we were looking for, in short, was a successful web marketing campaign and such a campaign is often thought of as the Holy Grail of marketing. Relatively low-cost yet with almost unlimited potential if successful, it is as elusive as a ray of sunshine in an English summer.

We managed it in a small way with In Search of Adam. A blogger and friend of Caroline’s (Lindz) created a brilliant widget whose code could be added to any blog. The widget allowed people who were ‘searching for Adam’ to plot where they were in the world. This created a bit of buzz around the book and allowed us to define the audience for it. However it lacked that certain something that makes it go viral.

Black Boxes is Caroline’s second novel (and the second book we have published as an imprint of HarperCollins) and it was a great opportunity to put into practice what we had learned from the map widget. In Black Boxes the theme of the choices you make moulding the direction of your life runs through the book and we wanted to create something around that. Back to Lindz who, genius as she is, immediately outlined an idea for a new widget. This time one that she felt had what it takes to go viral.

The simple explanation behind the complex bit of widgetry is that you make a series of choices within the black box and these choices determine which blog you will be sent to. You’re encouraged to comment on the blog and enter your own choice suggestion and your url. Hopefully, if this has worked OK the widget will be below and you can have a go.

The widget was launched on 8 September. Within a day Caroline’s hits had soared, 4000 people had run the widget and 351 had added their url. Two days later the Americans were playing and by 14 September the server was out of bandwidth due to the amount of data passing back and forth between ‘blackboxers’, who were doubling every 30 hours and ever-faster. Lindz - conveniently holed up with a ‘troop of alpha-geeks’ (her words) in Boston worked late into the night to create a super-charged-version that allows the widget to handle up to 100 users per second. Yesterday alone the widget was displayed 9000 times, 600 new choices were added and bloggers used it to make 15000 visits to mystery blogs. Uptake continues to double every two or three days and this weekend Lindz will put the next level solution into place to support this rapid growth.

But will this interest convert to sales? That really is the Holy Grail and it’s difficult to tell at the moment. We need to keep the momentum going and make the jump from online buzz to offline buzz. Will we make it? I don’t know but please spread the word if you can and once the book is available and we can see how sales are going I will post an update.