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?

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.

Last week CNBC and New York Times agreed to share original content with one another! Though initially limited to business and technology news and videos, the relationship obviously has the potential to flow into other areas. Obviously, this is a response to the surge of competition from News Corp and its recent acquisition of Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) as well as the launch of the Fox Business Network cable channel, but one thing is evident: as competition heats up, more and more publishers are interested in content sharing deals.

This spirit of content sharing is good news to us at Grouptivity, after all we are building a content sharing network aimed helping publishers become more successful in generating traffic. We work with both large and small publishers, some who obviously compete with each other in certain markets, so selling them on the benefits of working together with other partners to building a better content sharing network is something we are always trying to do – so its good to see publishers sharing content with each other!

Those who follow the social media space are well aware of the two “competing standards” for developing social networking applications. In May 2007, at the Facebook F8 event, Facebook launched its application platform and announced a slew of third party developers. By embracing the developer community, rather than taking MySpace’s cautionary approach of fretting over third party widgets, Facebook quickly captured the web’s attention and also accelerated the social network’s already runaway growth, contributing to 37% of Facebook’s growth since the platform was opened in May.

Not to be out done, Google announced its response to the Facebook application platform –OpenSocial in October 2007. This set of social networking API’s, defined by Google with “input” from its partners, was aimed at standardize social networking apps so that they can be run on more than one social network. Platform partners included almost every social network that wasn’t feeling the “Facebook Love”. In fact, Google announcement reminded me of the days when Microsoft ISV’s would put out press releases paying lip service to every new technology that came out of Redmond while taking a “wait-and-see” approach or simultaneously pursuing their own independent strategy.

A Better Social Network!
The continued success of Facebook, and the inability of OpenSocial to slow down Facebook’s momentum, clearly demonstrates that what the world needs now is a better social network, not a better social networking API! Despite some of predications made to the contrary, Facebook’s platform has become today’s social network of choice. In a way, Facebook’s success represents an evolutionary process in product design: MySpace looks like it was designed by high schoolers for high schoolers – Facebook was designed by college kids for (adult) college kids (and grads).

Facebook, OpenSocial and Content Providers
As a service provider to content providers, Grouptivity is about providing publishers with increased traffic through improved and widespread distribution. Facebook, with it’s 50 million plus users, is an ideal environment that can leverage (in concert with real-work networking) online content sharing tools and services (like Grouptivity) to reach an even wider audience. Look to see some interesting offerings from Grouptivity for social networks in the future.

A number of posts have come in response to Saul Hansell’s (New York Times) article titled Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network and Wall Street Journal’s Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again . AlwaysOn’s Brad Feld, for example, suggested that Microsoft may have a play by probing your Exchange server for social networking “data” in his post: Where is Microsoft In This Party? Others like Carmen Hughes (IgnitePR) see this as heralding the second coming of Email in her post: Is Email really Cool Again? Obvious because of what we do (allow users to share content via email and the web), we read these with some interest. Here are some of my observations, thoughts and predications on the subject of social networking and email:

• The idea isn’t a new one
  A number of companies have tried to use data in your inbox to create a social network. Spoke Software, Visible Path, and Plaxo are some “old names” you probably still recognize. Unfortunately, given their market focus and other factors, none have become a household name or gained any sizeable market share, just something to keep in mind.
• Data is not relationship
  Sure, social relationship “data” could potentially be gleamed by probing your email or even your exchange server. Other than the obvious security concerns, the idea that “he emails me, therefore he is my friend” doesn’t necessarily hold much water. With more and more “social networking” communication being done through the Web (or via other devices such as cellphone), looking only at email doesn’t give you a complete picture. Also, the WSJ article points out that most young people use the MySpace and Facebook inbox more than they use email.

Here is what I believe is more likely to happen:

• Social networks and email become better integrated
  True, social networks already have an inbox, but one can envision better integration between email and social networks. The WSJ article points to some great features Yahoo! is experimenting with such as profile info within your email and a “friend finder” based on email communications.

• Social networks will become email providers
  It isn’t very difficult to turn your social networking inbox into a full-blown email client. Sure you’ll need a couple extra thousand servers to handle a load, but companies like Facebook and MySpace can easily afford it. All they have to do is give users an email address they can use (john@user.myspace.com or sam@facebook.net). Ironically, perhaps email, not social networking, is the feature.

• You wont’ win the social networking war with an email client!
  Its always fun to get excited about second comings but the hype is probably going to die down soon. What do Yahoo!, Google and MSN have in common? Social-networking envy. None of the them have a thriving social network of their own (yet). Sure you can improve your offering by integrated social networking features with your traffic-leading product (email) but its probably not going to win the social networking war.

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.

The need and ability for both large and small content publisher to share content is a given! After all, what use is great content if no one knows about it? Sharing and other forms of distribution are becoming of paramount importance in today’s traffic-driven media marketplace. In fact, larger traditional publishers like the Wall Street Journal, USAToday and the New York Times are even under pressure from small “niche” content providers who are all trying to get their fair share of traffic and syndication. PaidContent.org recent points to this fact in David Kaplan’s post Niche Sites Are In The Driver’s Seat, With Portal Syndication Deals. To paraphrase Austin Powers, “It’s all about the traffic, Baby!”

Here is how we usually describe Grouptivity:

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.

So why is do we think this is so important to content publishers today. Here are a couple of reasons:

• It puts the content publisher in control
  It has become quite popular for content publishers to integrate Digg (or another social bookmarking) links on their sites, but why abdicate sharing to social bookmarking sites, when you can control and monitor it yourself? Grouptivity lets you capture valuable information about your reader and gives you better control of the sharing process.
• It gives content publisher visibility into the sharing process
  Building on my previous point, more and more publisher want to understand who is sharing their content, and in most cases, reach out and build a relationship with readers in the hopes of fostering community.
• It allows content publisher to build a community around content
  Besides providing a convenience to the reader, the goal of sharing is the draw new readers and increase traffic and no one will argue with the fact that the best way of doing that is by building a community around your content. The goal of Grouptivity is to provide content publishers with sharing and community building tools that moves them toward that goal.
• It provides content publishers with increased traffic
  By converting the “Email this Link” into a user-content generator, and exposing and promoting that content on the web, Grouptivity sends publishers referral traffic from its site. Users find the content based on its popularity (how many people shared it), browsing or searching for topics of interest, or through search engines and RSS feeds.
• It provides content publisher with an additional revenue stream
  Once a reader decides to share a piece of content, they are taken to a private labeled Grouptivity-powered community site that has the publisher’s same look and feel. The publisher shares in all ad revenue generated on this site as the reader continues to share and discuss their content or search for related topics. This is especially important for smaller publishers. Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web just did a great post of the difficulty of monetizing the “Long Tail of the Blogosphere” that is worth looking at.