The basic premise of the article I found intriguing since it emphasis a theme we are very fond of. Leveraging your friends work to finding interesting content. In the article Chris talks how he’s doing this with Google reader, certainly very ingenious.
The larger issue here is time, and the amount of content on the web. How does one filter content to save time in finding the interesting stuff.
The election’s not over yet (well one is). If you’re experiencing post-election blues, are suffering from electoral map withdrawal symptoms, no worries, you can vote for Grouptivity! We’re running a bi-partisan campaign to win best Social Networking Application for the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards.
Vote for us, tell your friends to vote for us, tell people you barely know to vote for us - we’re not picky! Our campaign platform is to create the best content sharing application on the web, so you can e-mail a friend, post to your social networks, and see what your friends are sharing direct from your browser. Free!
We’ve all done it. Found an amazing piece of content on the web, only to bookmark and then forget what we called it. Copy and pasted the URL in an e-mail to send a friend, then lost the trail of the discussion in our overflowing e-mail box.
While content may be king on the social web, trying to keep track of it all and sharing with friends is no easy task. As I’m writing this article, I just remembered something a friend e-mailed me that I want to include, and now I have to scroll through all the names in my e-mail to see if I can find it (hopefully hasn’t been deleted already, or relegated to my “Old Mail” box).
Which is why I’m trying to get everyone I know to start using the new Firefox add-on from Grouptivity.
To start, let’s look at the numbers. In a recent study conducted by social scientist and viral marketing guru Dan Zarrella, he found that 80% of the people he surveyed use e-mail as their primary method of sharing content found on the web. Surprisingly, this was evenly distributed across the board, from what he calls “High Reach Individual Sharers” to the average user. So while there’s an increase in content sharing in individual social networks, the primary language of shared content continues to be e-mail.
But what if you could have the best of all worlds? E-mail a friend direct from your browser, post to your favorite social networks like Facebook, Myspace and Delicious, and save the content in a folder that you can categorize when you bookmark, or search later using keywords.
Sounds perfect. Additional and appreciated features include the ability to upload your e-mail addresses from all your address books like AOL and Gmail, and you can receive a notification when your friend opens your e-mail (now you’ll know if they really read that low-fat curry vegan recipe).
After all, the best web search engine is your own personal network of friends.
This just in from MediaPost. Looks like the big companies are discovering the value of giving subscribers the ability to share content within their own social networks. Just think - with Grouptivity’s simple tools you can do the same thing for free. Maybe someone should tell Ralph Lauren?
We’re all very familiar now with forward to a friend (FTAF), which allows your subscribers to share your emails with others via email. It’s an easy way to empower your subscribers to influence others on your behalf. Roughly half of the retailers that I track offer FTAF in their emails. But that’s the Email 1.0 way of sharing email content.
In the Email 2.0 world, you should also give your subscribers the option of sharing your email content via social networks, social content sites and social bookmarking sites. Let’s call it “Share with your network” — or SWYN.
Many bloggers have made this method of sharing available to their readers for some time now. For instance, about 1% of my blog traffic now comes from social sites like Facebook, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. If email marketers could match that level of sharing, for many companies that would equal the pass-along they get from FTAF — which, again, roughly half of the top online retailers employ.
Given that fact, it’s surprising that only one of the retailers that I track, Ralph Lauren, has made a full court press on social sharing of email content. The company started testing its “Share This Email!” bannerback in June and has used it in its content-heavy emails ever since, including its emails about the Olympics.
Buy.com experimented with using Digg and del.icio.us links for the product listings in its emails early last year, but ended the test pretty quickly.
The news earlier this month that Silverpop has launched a Share-to-Social feature gives me hope that more email marketers will be exploring SWYN in near future. I expect other ESPs to match that offering in the months ahead, highlighting the social opportunity further.
Here are a few things to consider when looking at SWYN:
1. Is your audience active on social networks? Are they young, professional or tech-savvy?
2. If you’re using social links on your Web site for products, videos or articles, what kind of usage are you seeing? If it’s significant, it probably warrants testing SWYN in your emails.
3. While there is at least one vendor that will help you determine which social networks your customers/subscribers are on, you can include links to the networks that you believe are most relevant to start and then trim links based on results.
4. It’s much cleaner to have the SWYN set up to share the entire email (as Ralph Lauren is doing) rather than individual promotions within an email (as Buy.com tried).
5. Do you send out both content-rich and promotion-heavy emails? Test to see which sees more sharing.
While I’m seeing significant integration among email and the store and catalog channels, there’s still lots of siloing within the digital channels. Hardly any of the retailers that I track link to their blogs or Facebook pages, which is a missed opportunity. Email and social can play well together. SWYN is your friend.
We are extremely proud to announce the launch of the Social Sharing Network that allows users to network on content they have shared.
There is little doubt that what your friends have found interesting you may too, movies, books, restaurants, fashion or news articles. They have done the tedious work of filtering web content.
This is not a unique vision the challenge is in the execution, in particular user adoption. This is what we believe differentiates us in two specific ways.
Firstly, we do not change user behaviour, users continue to post interesting content as they currently do, email a friend, post to social bookmarking sites or social networking sites. All their content is aggregated and viewable by their friends with the appropriate privacy settings.
Secondly, we partner with web publisher to replace their current share functionality with our widget. The Share widget is a conduit into the social sharing network.
So what is the size of the opportunity?
According to Dan Zarrella , 85% of the Internet population share content weekly or more often.
In addition, 80% use email as their primary tool for sharing.
This is backed up by Sharethis who state, “Email is still primary channel for sharing — 69 percent of adults cite email as the primary source of receiving information” .
What does this all mean, nearly everyone online shares and nearly everyone uses email.
Converting Sharing/emailing into a social network has exciting possibilities for users and we will be on forefront of this opportunity.
We’ve been busy over the summer, with the kids out of school and the team focused on a new release. One thing I’ve learnt as an entrepreneur is “hitting it” is like making a good cocktail, trial and error. You have to keep working the ingredients till it feels right to you.Today I feel right about what we are doing.
In building out our new version we’ve taken a lot of ingredients into consideration. Here’s a few that spring to mind, not in any particular order. Some are related to our model but most are general good tips.
User behavior: Very few companies succeed by changing user behavior, unless their solution is so superior to anything else out there. So if possible you need to leverage some current behavior.
Monetization: There are many successful companies out there that do not make money or did not make money in their early days. Some do or did not even have an idea on how they were going to monetize their offerings. Venture money will only take you so far, so if you cannot sell your company you need to be able to monetize your service to give you a runway to an exit.It’s OK not to make money in the early days but you must have a path towards that.
Copyright protection: This has been a contentious issue going back to Google’s issues with the Belgian’s Newspapers and AP’s recent stance towards protection of their content. If you are in the content distribution business you must be able to protect or monetize content producers content for them.
Publisher vs. User’s expectations: Many publishers, historically have had an unwavering objective to not make it easy for users to view content from other sites nor navigate away. Any solution that does not focus on this is viewed with skepticism. I’m glad to say I see that changing, since Publisher have begun to realize it’s not about what they want but what users want.
Social: It’s pretty obvious we are social animals; the internet has put a punctuation mark on that. Social/Community needs to be built into the solution.
Viral: I think of viral in two ways, firstly, getting your users to market the solution to their friends, great way to build a user base. Secondly, to ensure users return again and again and continue to add to their network. Ideally this should be baked into the solution.
Common theme: For users, analysts, media, employees etc to understand and articulate your solution, it’s got to follow a theme that they can relate to. i.e. It’s similar to xyz but targeting a different audience.
Partnerships: A great way to expand a service quickly is to develop partnerships with existing services that could have their offerings enhanced. There is nothing like leveraging someone else’s user base.
Expectations: You’ve been working on something for months or years and think it’s the coolest thing since draft beer, so you think everyone else will be jumping up and down. The launch is the start of the race. What you’ve been doing to date is preparing for the race. So keeping an even keel through good press, poor user adoption, bugs and good investor meetings is key. Otherwise you’ll be on an emotional roller coaster.
So we think we have many of the ingredients in place. We are looking forward to sharing our solution with you all in the next few weeks. Cheers
If you haven’t had a chance check out the new and improved Grouptivity Share+ widget (hint: Simply click on the Share+ button below).
The new widget features a simplified and streamlined user interface. Depending on its settings and where it’s used, the widget usually has three tabs: Email Article, Email Clip and Social Media. The Email Article tab, as the name implies, allows you the email the post or article you are currently looking at. Simply enter the recipients email address, a message as well as your email address and you are ready to go! The Email Clip tab is similar to Email Article but allows you just to email a clip (and not the entire article). The Social Media tab allows you to bookmark the article on one of the popular social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, Delicious, Furl, Yahoo!, StumbleUpon and many others).
Since the launch of Social News, our Facebook application, we have been flooded with inquires from publishers and bloggers on how they can add their sites or publications to the list of available news sources in Social News. These sources can be accessed by clicking the Choose News tab in Social News.
To help answer their questions I decided to summarize the process:
1. Sign up as a Publisher on Grouptivity Fill out the simple form on the Grouptivity website and get a publisher ID number and access to Grouptivity’s power sharing tools.
2. Embed Grouptivity’s Share+ Tools on your blog or website Add Grouptivity’s sharing tools to your site by simply cutting and pasting HTML code, or install the Grouptivity Share+ WordPress plugin on your blog.
3. Readers share your content and distribute it on social networks
Readers visiting your blog or site sharing content using Grouptivity’s tools. In the process, the share content is automatically made available to the Social News Facebook application. Additionally, if readers add the Facebook application from your blog or site, your publication is automatically added in their list of news sources.
4. Drive More Traffic to your Site from Facebook and Elsewhere As readers share your content with friends via email, bookmarks, and social networking applications such as Social News, you get increased distribution and traffic. It’s that simple.
Social News from Grouptivity is a Facebook app that allows Facebook users to read and share the most popular news headlines within the social networking site. News headlines get voted up every time they are bookmarked, e-mailed, or shared by a user - so great headlines rise to the top!
Social News supports any number of publishers and is pre-populated with news feeds from the BBC, CNN, TechCrunch, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other sources. Social News, however, allows ANY blog publisher distribute their news content through the Facebook application! Bloggers that sign up as as publishers and add Grouptivity’s sharing tools to their blogs or sites, can opt to have content shared from their site automatically syndicated into Social News. Users on Facebook can then access content from the publisher by simply adding them to their list of news sources in Social News. Facebook user can click here to add Social News to your Facebook profiles. Publishers and bloggers can click here to signup up and start syndicating shared content on Facebook!
Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch did a great piece titled Grouptivity Launches Social News On Facebook on the launch of our Social News Facebook application. Schonfeld does a great job of covering the key components of Social News and concludes by saying:
Blogs that want to create a Facebook presence that goes beyond merely republishing their feeds might find this appealing. It is an implicit recommendation system that shows someone’s entire Facebook network what news stories they are bookmarking and sharing.
