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?

When Subscribers Use SWYN, You Win

Posted October 30th, 2008 by Chad White

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!” banner back 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.

Sharing Is Where Its At!
Statistics show that Internet users like to share content! The other day I mention that sharing interest news or content on the Web is as prevalent as the Internet itself and that nearly ninety percent (90%) of adult Internet users revealed that they actively share content with others via email.

Social News: What is It?
So what is Social News? Social news is news and content that is shared, enhanced and leveraged in the context of a social network. At Grouptivity we are very much about taking the simple act of sharing content and moving it into the realm of social networking.  Grouptivity helps create “social news” by making it easy for readers to share content with their social network. As users share content they find interest on their social network, they also engage their friends in conversations and discussions around it. This in turn, allows social news to leverage the social network to continue

Sharing interest news or content on the Web is as prevalent as the Internet itself.  Nearly ninety percent (90%) of adult Internet users revealed that they actively share content with others via email according to Sharpe Partners, an award-winning interactive marketing firm. The study on viral marketing found that 63% of respondents shared content at least once a week with as many as 25% sharing content daily or almost daily.  The report identified news content as the second most popular category (56%), after humor.

Email usage patterns, however, are beginning to change, as social networks and other community sites are providing inboxes of their own.  With the growth of social networks like Facebook and Myspace, there as been a lot of talk lately about whether they will replace email as the primary form of communication. Earlier on in the year, Saul Hansell of the New York Times in his insightful post: Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network explored this recent phenomena and suggests that ISPs like Hotmail and Yahoo mail are taking the “The Facebook Threat” seriously.

Although email is probably not going to go away anytime soon, its undeniable that more and more people are heading in the direction of using social network as their preferred means of communicating. It is no coincidence that at Grouptivity, we have been moving our sharing tools and distribution network in that direction.  In coming weeks, we will be announcing a powerful set of social networking tools that allow bloggers and publisher to quickly and easily distribute popular content from their blogs or news sites directly into social networks like Facebook. This means that readers of publications in Grouptivity’s content network (such as Midland Reporter/Telegram – MyWestTexas, a member of the Hearst family of publications) can choose to either share interesting articles via email or social bookmarking, or access and share them directly on Facebook using Grouptivity’s Social News application.

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.

Yesterday, Webware’s Rafe Needleman compared Grouptivity to “Digg for E-mail” and today Mashable’s Kristen Nicole just posted a piece titled Email Becomes a “Digg” Network with Grouptivity’s iPond. Kristen starts by stating a very important point that publishers sometimes overlook:

Nearly every online publication (and social media, for that matter) has an “email this” option for its content. And considering that email is the most common form of communication on the web, it’s easy to see why emailing something to a friend is the easiest way to get them to look at something you’d think they’d find interesting.

Kristen also does a great job of complaining how iPond.com and Grouptivity work together to deliver value to publishers:

Grouptivity has positioned its new site, iPond, as a launching pad for publishers to further monetize their content, which looks a lot like a Digg for emailed content. From iPond you can see what’s “hot” and you can further discuss and bookmark content from there. The hope is to create an even more active community around emailed content.

Alex Iskold in his post “Long Tail of the Blogosphere” makes an insightful comment that “You can make money on the long tail but not in the long tail” that I touched on in my previous post on “Publisher-Centric Content Sharing”.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “long tail” has become an increasingly popular, especially in the Blogosphere! The idea behind the long tail is actually a simple one. The phrase was originally coined by Wired’s Chris Anderson in 2004 as a statistics concept used to refer to the idea that collectively, things that are in rather low demand can amount to quite large volumes.

Squidoo describes it in the following way:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

In the content publishing world, the long tails represents the aggregate of all the small or “niche” content publishers and bloggers.  If if this chart represents the distribution of content publisher traffic, there green area (“Head”) represents the aggregate “bulk” of high volue traffic to a small handful of popular sites, while the yellow area represents the Long Tail shared accross a large number of smaller publishers. Those interested in more information on the long tail should check out Chris Anderson’s Long Tail 101.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Grouptivity is about helping monetize the long tail. For smaller content publishers, we do that in three different ways:

• We expose and promote your content to generate extra traffic
  By allowing users to share content on publisher’s sites and then exposing that “user-generated” content to the community at large, Grouptivity sends traffic back to publisher’s sites.
  


• We build a community around content to increase page views
  By building a discussion community around the content your readers have shared, Grouptivity increases the number of page views and then shares the resulting ad revenue with the publisher.
  


• We increase the “viral” spread of publisher’s content
  By providing a robust set of sharing and rating tools (including browser add-ons, blogging plug-ins and widgets), Grouptivity accelerates sharing of content via email, social bookmarking and other forms of syndication (RSS, i.e.).

Given the revenue generating challenges facing publishers in the long tail, we feel a multiple prong strategy to traffic and revenue generation is the best one. I will share the highlights from our upcoming presentation at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit West event in future posts for those interested in long trail revenue generating strategies.