It is quite a challenge to keep fans engaged during the very long build up to the release of The Wombats’ second album.

We were given a new song off the album that could be used to re-engage fans and encourage new sign-ups. Rather than using a simple sign-up incentive I was tasked with building a flash widget. The embeddable content made it far more appealing for news sites and blogs to include the promotion.

Fans can hear a sample of the new song, ‘Jump into the Fog’, before entering their details to receive the free mp3.

The widget was another great design by Kate Brighouse. We decided to make it subtly alluring by adding a pulse to the play button and neon lights surrounding the widget.

The widget includes standard sharing functionality for Facebook and Twitter as well as the ability to copy the embed code to your clip-board and insert it in your own website, blog or myspace page.

I configured a holding page to ensure that sharing on facebook would encourage the most users to engage with the widget and sign up for the download. It includes a custom preview image and all the right meta data. Once the widget is approved by facebook it will be whitelisted and allow people to interact with it within the facebook news feed. I created a tab on the Wombats official fan page and embedded the widget there too.

This widget was also my first attempt to gain insights from a flash file. The swf uses the gaforflash actionscript library, to record the number of times the widget is used and how often each button is pressed by passing the data into Google Analytics.

The widget was very well received and generated 550 new sign-ups within 2 hours of going live. It continues to spread around the web, reaching out to old fans and gaining new ones.