Today's tip of the day is courtesy Andy, one of our client service managers here at NewsGator Media & Consumer Products.  This one applies to seasonal or time-limited viral widgets.  He recommends that our customers extend the life of these type of widgets by, when the time frame for the widget is over, automatically changing them over to "evergreen" viral widgets -- i.e., ones that are fresh at all times.

Let me give you an example: an Olympics widget is obviously of value only during the Olympics.  However, people interested in the Olympics are more likely than not to be interested in sports in general.  An Olympics widget can be designed to automatically switch over to a more generalized sports widget once the Olympics are over (and the end user would not have to do anything).  Or, let's say you have a Election 2008 widget; this widget could be designed to automatically change to a more generalized politics or news widget after the election is over.

What's the benefit of this switch over?  The end user is far less likely to remove a widget that, while more generalized than the original time-sensitive widget, has up-to-date, fresh ("evergreen") content than a widget whose relevance has passed and no longer contains updated content -- which is likely to disappoint the end user.  The best thing about these switches is that they can be done seamlessly behind the scenes and require no end user action. 

So, next time you're building a time-sensitive widget, consider having it switch over to a more generalized widget once the original widget is no longer fresh and relevant so that you can extend the stickiness of your widget campaign.  Think about it: the cost of keeping users by switching over the widget is far lower than the cost of acquiring new users with future widgets or widget campaigns.