Forrester’s Charlene Li recently put out a report with Josh Bernoff titled “Social Technographics” that segments online users into one (or more) of six categories. These segments were derived from studying how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies.

Charlene summarizes the report as follows:

We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.

Social Technographics represents an interesting look at online users. Grouptivity’s target user would probably fall into at least three of the six categories:

• Creators: Creators self-identify themselves as leaders and influencers (52-56% of them share information with friends about products that interest them). Creators actively create and share content online, a quality that would definitely characterize Grouptivity users.
• Critics: These users engage in conversations and discussions. They make comments, post ratings and reviews. Critics would be most likely to engage in the content networking process that Grouptivity enables.
• Collectors: As the name implies, Collectors are “consumers” of information, they use RSS, tag and bookmark pages. Collector may not actively share content via email, but would most likely use Grouptivity to bookmark or “collect” news articles for later use.

There’s a lot to process and analyze in this report and while the report document is not available for free, a PowerPoint presentation the summarizes its findings is available for free on the web. 

According to Nielsen Online’s AdRelevance (November 2007), email sites are by far the number one generator of ad-revenue (followed by general and national news – a distant second and then portals).

This chart really speaks well to the fact that Grouptivity generates revenue for partners (many of whom are national news publishers) by marrying email-based content sharing with their news content.

Publishers increasingly are looking to ad-supported content as their primary revenue driver, adding more content outside their subscription barriers or doing away with premium content entirely to encourage readership and drive traffic. This strategy makes sense. According to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, “Internet advertising revenues in the US set a new record of $16.9 billion in 2006”. That’s a 35% gain over 2005! It hit another record of $4.9 billion for the first quarter of 2007, according to the most recent IAB/PWC report, a 26% increase over Q1 2006!

As publisher’s scramble to bolster traffic, many are turning to services like Grouptivity to help them drive more traffic to their sites! I summarized the benefit Grouptivity offers content publisher in a post I did on publisher-centric content sharing:

Grouptivity is a “publisher-centric” web service that provides content publishers with increased traffic and improved SEO by enabling content sharing and discussion on their sites and transforming the sharing activity into “user-generated” content that is readily exposed to search engines and syndication services.  By leveraging an under-used asset, the “Email this Link” button, Grouptivity captures user interest on a publisher’s site, builds a discussion community around it, and then promotes the content based on its popularity. By providing a real-world gauge of what content users are actually sharing, Grouptivity enables content publishers to get real-time visibility into who is sharing what, in addition to traffic and improved monetization.

Grouptivity users will notice that the home page or desktop has been redesigned to provide quick and easily access to your inbox as well as to recently emailed articles and other important or frequently used information.  We have also made it easier for users to search for content on and outside Grouptivity. Existing Grouptivity users can simply login in to access their Grouptivity desktop. If you are not a user yet, sign up for an account, its easy and best of all, its free!

Grouptivity allows you to kick start you social network by simply leveraging the “Email This” link or button! As a webmaster, you’ve got a number of goals.  One of the most important, of course, is to generate traffic on your site, and one of the fastest ways to do that these days is to set up a social network.  A social network is what it sounds like: a network of people, gathered for a social purpose.  In all of these networks, people are talking to each other, exchanging information, and trading links to sites.  From a webmaster’s perspective, they’re the traffic.

So how can you use the seemingly outdated “Email This” link to kick start your social network agenda?

• Manually: You can use the “Email This” link to highlight important text on your site, especially the text that you want people talking about, and you can use the html coding to add previous commenters to the address list, allowing your site’s readers to talk to each other

  or

• Grouptivity: Grouptivity takes ‘Send to a friend’ to the next level. It’s a simple link that looks and feels like the traditional ‘Email this’ link only much more powerful. With Grouptivity, you gather actual user analytics, you have the ability to track forwarded content, group email conversations and private discussion groups; Grouptivity’s is a simple snippet of code that allows you to create content based on what your visitors read most! It’s an excellent little widget that’s worth trying.

At Grouptivity, we see “Content Networking” as the next evolution in social media. The concept of “Content Networking” involves connecting and engaging with others around an interesting piece of content.  

In my previous post Is Email the Next Social Network? I talked about Saul Hansell’s (New York Times) article titled Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network. This is a great article that talks about how Yahoo and Google are building social networking features around their email offerings. Saul Hansell’s concludes his article with a great quote:  

…Running social networks is like starting nightclubs. You need music and beer, of course, and some hard-to describe magic that draws people to the club.  

Content networking describes the conversation at the bar! As patrons gather around the bar, the will strike up a conversation. It may be around current news, politics, religion or local goings-on. As the conversation progress, others are pulled into it. Content networking has the potential create a similar virtual social fabrics that connects people all over the web in an engaging conversation around a piece of interesting content.

Grouptivity leverages the prevalent “email a friend” feature to deliver “Content Networking” to any content publisher. This creates compelling user-generated content on a topic delivers higher quality traffic (via referrals). The captured conversations exposed to search engines through the iPond.com delivering incremental SEO benefits to publishers.

There is a big movement to make mainstream Web 2.0 technologies! I have seen dozens of articles recently talking about the main-streaming of Web 2.0. For example, Adweek points to research done by Avenue A/Razorfish that shows some “Web 2.0 staples” such as video sharing have gone mainstream. The article mentions that 17 percent of users shared bookmarks through social bookmarking sites. What was interesting was the fact that more mature Web 2.0 technologies have higher adoption: 85 percent used “most e-mailed/most popular stories” links, 60 percent personalized their home pages and nearly the same number of users subscribed to RSS feeds. Blogs also proved very popular with 61 percent of those surveyed saying they read blogs at least on a weekly basis.

What is interesting about Grouptivity is that we are taking a rather mainstream technology (“Email a Friend”) and moving it into the real of Web 2.0 as I pointed out in my post title Email a Friend 2.0. Grouptivity is doing this by building a “social network” around shared content (which is really what email a friend or forward to a friend is) by enabling community and discussion around each piece of content that a user shares, either privately (with a group of friends, family or co-workers) or publicly! The fact that more mature technologies have higher adoption rates, as the Adweek article points, definitely plays in our favor and Grouptivity users get the intuitive functionality of an “Email a Friend” button along with the rich sharing environment and other social media feature that Web 2.0 has to offer!

One way Grouptivity users share content with each other is via email! As a result, email trends and statistics is always an area of interest to us. I recently ran across some interesting email trends and statistics on the EmailStatCenter. Here is a short sampling of interesting stats that pertain to content sharing:

• 44 percent of the largest retailers offer send-to-a-friend functionality in their emails on a regular basis. - Email Experience Council (Nov 2006)
• 88 percent of respondents in a survey reported forwarding jokes or cartoons making it the first most popular category of emailed content. - Sharpe Partners (Jan 2006)
• 56 percent of the same group attest to forwarding news articles (second most popular category). - Sharpe Partners (Jan 2006)
• 89 percent of respondents said they actively share content with others via email. - Sharpe Partners (Jan 2006)
• 25 percent sharing daily or almost daily. - Sharpe Partners (Jan 2006)
• 64 percent of the female respondents said they shared content at least once a week, versus 58 percent of the males. - Sharpe Partners (Jan 2006)
• 100 percent of the end-users surveyed use email. - Datamonitor/Dimension Data (Aug 2007)
• More than 70 percent of the end-users surveyed say email impacts positively on their productivity. - Datamonitor/Dimension Data (Aug 2007)
• 15 percent of Americans describe themselves as “addicted to email”. - AOL (2007)
• 59 percent of people emailing from portable devices are checking email in bed while in their pajamas; 53% in the bathroom; 37% are checking email while they drive; and 12% admit to checking email in church. - AOL (2007)

You can find other interesting email trends, facts and stats by visiting their site.

A lot of users are aware that they can access (or share) the comment and discussion thread around any piece of content in their inbox using RSS! In case you haven’t noticed, at the bottom of each shared article in your Inbox, right below the list of replies there is a small RSS Feed icon at the bottom right hand corner of the page. Simply click on the RSS icon to open up a new new page with the entire discussion thread as a XML-based RSS feed.

Copy the url to this page and can add this url to their favorite RSS news reader and voila! For most, it’s as simple as clicking on the link. All of the new browsers have made it a lot easier to subscribe to RSS feeds. There are also many free online and desktop RSS news readers available to users. For online users, My Yahoo, Google RSS Reader, Bloglines and Newsgator online are some of the most popular readers. You can also download and install as browser add-ons or applications desktop-based readers. For more on the subject of readers, you can visit the Wikipedia.

Everyone likes to come up with a list of new rules. There are the New rules of Marketing and PR, the New Rules of Web Development, and the list goes on. A couple of weeks ago, Ankesh, Grouptivity’s president and CEO, came up with the 5 New Rules of Content Sharing that I thought were worth sharing with our blog audience – so here they are:

1. Comprehensive:
   Content sharing tool must be comprehensive and provide multiple ways for users to sharing content including at least the top three content sharing mechanisms: email, bookmarking, cut-and-paste.
2. Social:
   Content lives in a social context and shared content should be able to drive conversation and community around it. Content cannot live as an island but needs discussion and community to drive it!
3. Personalized:
   Today’s users should be able to personalize the content sharing experience. One size doesn’t fit them all! Online users have a broad range of interests and tasks and content sharing tools and services should take that into account.
4. SEO:
   Shared content needs to, whenever possible, to optimized for search engines so that it can be easily found. Backlinks and permalinks should also be used to allow readers to return to the source of the content and have a permanent reference to it. Obvious benefits to content publishers include return traffic.
5. Monetizable:
   We have all learned that there is no free lunch on the web. Content should be monetizable if we expect quality and continuity of content! Content sharing should take this into account.

In a previous post, I talked about one of the earliest forms of content sharing – the Email a Friend button. Obviously since then content sharing has evolved significantly. Here are list of content sharing milestones that paint a picture of how content sharing has evolved from its early days:

Bookmarking:
According to the Wikipedia, bookmarks have been incorporated since the debut of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, and soon appeared in most other web browsers. With bookmarking, users started to save links to web content, including articles, locally as bookmarks or favorites.

Email a Friend Button:
Provided basic functionality that allows a user to share a news article or piece of content with a friend or acquaintance via email. This functionality is still a popular way of sharing content, especially news articles and other types of content.

Social Bookmarking:
Social bookmarking, the concept of shared online bookmarks, was really popularized by Delicious in late 2003, which pioneered tagging (although it existed before then). After Delicious, social bookmarking really exploded as dozens of new social bookmarking sites start to appear on the horizon, including Furl, Magnolia, Reddit, Newsvine and many other.

Social Networking:
Social networks, as we know them today, really started with advent of companies like Ryze, Friendster and off course, MySpace. Although some would argue, and rightfully so, that networked online communities existed long before these companies made their appear, the term itself and the idea of full fledged communities that allowed users to interact share content, music, and video was really ushered in by this trio.

Community-based Popularity:
Pioneered by Digg, community-based popularity involved ranking or rating news articles and websites submitted by users, and then promoted them based on how users rated them.

Sharing-based Popularity:
The idea of rating news articles or other content based on how many users actually share them with friends, as opposed to simply rate them. I have argued that sharing-based popularity is actually a better measure of a content’s true popularity than bookmarking-based popularity used by sites like Digg and Delicious. Grouptivity has been a pioneer and proponent of this form of community-based popularity.