ShareThis Blog

ShareThis is Heading to LA (for WordCamp that is) & New Head of Product

September 7th, 2010

Now that we have our new WordPress plugin with all the snazzy buttons styles that it supports, it’s time to hit the road and meet some of our users face-to-face. We will be heading down the coast to Los Angeles for WordCamp LA, which is hosted at Loyola Marymount University.

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We will also be attending the after party at The Custom at LAX. If you are going to be there we’d love to talk to you (about anything ShareThis related or otherwise). Look for Steve (aka Community Manager, aka me) and Manu (aka Architect aka World’s Tallest Indian) in our ShareThis shirts.

Also, we would like to announce a new member joining the ShareThis team, Bruno Furnari. Bruno will be our new head of product. Bruno comes to us from Current TV so his publisher background will help us focus on how to best serve you, the publishers. Here are a few words from Bruno about working at ShareThis:

Hello everyone,
I’m Bruno, the new product guy here at ShareThis. I like old cars, old guitars, old cameras and shiny new gadgets.
I’ve been managing web services of all sorts for the last decade and a half. I’ve worked on International, Search, Social and Video products at Yahoo! and, most recently, ran online product for Al Gore’s cable network Current TV. It’s a pleasure to be working for a network of publishers this vast and interesting. Please feel free to reach out to me with comments or ideas on how to improve our services and empower you get the most of out of social sharing! email me: bruno at sharethis.com

See you guys in LA!

-Steve R
@steversb

Introducing Social Reach and Audience Indexing – Make your Social Content Count

August 26th, 2010

It’s becoming absolutely essential that online publishers are able to accurately measure, optimize and value the sharing and social habits of their audiences. Today, we introduced two new metrics and reports, Social Reach and the Audience Index, that will help publishers do just that. You can also read about Erick Schonfeld’s take in Techcrunch and Gavin’s in Adotas.

Audience Index

Everyone has heard the old maxim, “Know your audience.” Until now, publishers may have known their demographic composition or “intent” profiles, but they didn’t know how their most valuable users – their influencers – compared to the rest of the web. Our Audience Index changes all that by letting publishers:

- Understand and compare their social audiences against 850,000 other sites across the web and soon, against your own category (i.e. your site against sports) and size of site (i.e. your site against other small blogs).
- Find out what types of influencers – say Fitness or Music – your site attracts.
- Find out how well you connect with influencers, listeners and engaged consumers.

Social Reach

We recently surveyed publishers (ours and others) and found that over 60% wanted (and were missing) social referral analytics. Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the web by looking at outbound sharing and inbound social traffic and, in the process, gives proper credit to the listener/responder of a share as much as the original influencer/sharer. Publishers can now get a more accurate measurement of how a piece of content circulates around the Web after it’s been shared across any service, rather than just the simple number of shares counted by a single service like Facebook.

Social Reach is built in to all of ShareThis’ new share buttons that we introduced a couple of weeks ago, and the Social Reach score of each piece of content can be displayed on any page where our buttons are installed. In fact, Social Reach is already being used by some exciting companies in new ways which we will share very soon. Both of these tools are free if you are a ShareThis publisher. This is a rolling release, so if you don’t already have access to these new reports, please check back in the next 1-2 weeks or email us at beta@sharethis.com with questions.

We’re excited about the possibilities Social Reach and Audience Index open up for our publishers – both for editors who are trying to make quick content decisions and for product and advertising teams who are looking to validate and better define their social audiences. You can read more about social reach here

Infographic

We also wanted to give a network-wide update on our social data and how it’s trending across our 850,000 publishers – you can see updated data on outbound sharing, social reach and social engagement in our new Social Equation infographic. We’re going to be updating our data much more frequently so if you have stuff you’d like to see, let us know.

Tim
@schigel

ShareThis and Your Privacy: Everything You Should Know

August 25th, 2010

If you pay attention to technology, you’ve most likely come across the issue of privacy in the past few weeks. The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel looked at the issue in the context of how companies gather user information for marketers. While privacy is in the spotlight right now, it’s a constant and growing issue in the digital age, and a longstanding guiding principle of ours here at ShareThis.

At issue in recent lawsuits filed against our competitors are Flash cookies, a type of tracking cookie that can respawn in a user’s browser, even after he or she has deleted it, and continue tracking information without users’ knowledge. Not all Flash cookies are used for this purpose, but a number of privacy groups and advertising organizations have advised against companies using them, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

ShareThis does not use and has no intent of using Flash cookies, nor do we respawn any tracking cookies. We have designed privacy into our product since we started the company. Since the beginning, we’ve retained independent privacy specialists to help us with best practices around privacy.

Launching today, we have added tools to let our users opt out of our tracking cookies if they choose. I am proud of our work and our values at ShareThis –and want to share our Privacy Manifesto, a set of core beliefs that guides everything we do surrounding privacy.

Our beliefs:

-   Be transparent.
-   Respect the user.
-   Be involved.
-   Be social, not personal.
-   Protect the publisher.

We Do:
- Give our users choices.
- Respect our users’ choice to opt out.
- Respect the publisher’s data choices.
- Collect only aggregate, anonymous data.*
- Sell anonymized sharing and influence segments.

We Don’t:
- Share information about our users in a way that can identify them individually.*
- Re-cookie a user when they’ve opted out.
- Use Flash cookies.
- Track keyboard entries made by users on their devices.
- Allow advertisers to buy publisher audiences by domain.
- Sell raw data, individual sites or consumers.

I welcome questions and comments on our new policy. I personally read every privacy email that comes into privacy@sharethis.com. We’re here and listening.

Tim
@schigel

* (OK, the fun stuff here) For people who sign in using ShareThis or third party registration, email addresses and other information are used only to send a share on behalf of the user. Regardless of whether a user has opted out of any advertising cookies, ShareThis will not use registration data to sell to third parties or provide this information to others to target advertising. Any information that is shared to provide our services are in the “aggregate”, meaning that we provide information based on categories, not identifying individual users.

New Buttons! New Twitter! More Social!

August 12th, 2010

As everyone has most likely heard by now, the Tweet Button launched today and we’re happy to be part of the excitement by integrating it in to our sharing buttons.

The new Tweet Button is essentially Twitter’s iteration of the Facebook “Like” button. It allows users to easily share information on Twitter, and gives publishers a one-click way for their readers to share content and get it noticed in the viral loop. This is a fantastic move for Twitter and – like the “Like” button – opens up a whole new world of data and sharing for the company.

New Share Buttons

Working with Twitter, we’ve taken the Tweet Button and folded it in to a new set of sharing buttons for our publishers to use on their sites. These buttons are for publishers who still want a one-stop shop for all their sharing needs, and want to see all their sharing analytics rolled into one place.

As you can see the look and feel of the Tweet Button is maintained, but we’ve added it alongside the Facebook Share button as well as options to share via e-mail and more than 40 other sharing networks.

With six new, customizable styles, the ShareThis buttons give publishers several options for display. They also show the social activity of each piece of content on a website, giving publishers a far more comprehensive picture of their content’s sharing and social performance than either the Facebook Share button or Tweet Button – or both – can provide.

So what’s next?

While we love the new look of Twitter’s buttons, we see a big shift coming to the sharing button movement… Counters and sexy icons are here to stay. But we believe people will begin to showcase and optimize their content based on its full social impact (such as incoming social traffic & engagement, not just outbound sharing). More on that soon from our analytics geeks!

Overall, we’re thrilled to be one of the first partners to work with Twitter on their new button and also to be at the forefront of the conversation around sharing and helping publishers understand the value of their social traffic. Look for more to come in the near future, but for now, be sure to grab our new buttons here: http://www.sharethis.com/publishers/get-sharing-button.

-Steve R

@steverb

Come find us today at OMMA Behavioral

July 21st, 2010

Social networks are still somewhat of a mystery to marketers. How do you effectively reach people without intruding on their privacy or personal space? How do you carve up audiences, or is behavioral targeting more effective? What is the most effective medium to communicate with consumers? These questions are going to be top of mind today at OMMA Behavioral in San Francisco as Tim (@schigel) participates in a panel called “The Social Media Challenge: Playing Nice in the New Sand Box.” The panel – which starts at 2:45 p.m. if you happen to be at the show and want to swing by – will explore effective ways to market to folks through social media and on social networks, with insights from Tim, as well as execs from Catalyst:SF, Research in Motion, Networked Insights, Peerset and Organic.

We firmly believe that the best way for marketers to break through the social networks is by concentrating on audiences. Defining and segmenting social audiences give marketers and advertisers the combination of flexibility and success in identifying who they’re reaching and why they’re reaching them. Our recent ad campaign with Mederma is a great example. By segmenting out slivers of audiences based what people were sharing and who they were sharing it with, then connecting the dots – and people – between the two, we were able to help Mederma reach their influencers and increase intent to redeem coupons through better targeting.

Like we said recently:
Knowing more about these audiences, publishers can increase the value of their display inventory, and by reaching these audiences, brands can tap into social engagement around relevant topics. At ShareThis, we believe influence is no longer about 10 people screaming at 10 decibals on Twitter. It’s about the millions of consumers who are interacting around trends on the web.

Swing by the panel and say hi to Tim before or after, and certainly be sure to share your thoughts with the panel. See you there!

/heidi
@heidiperry1

The Evolution of Influence

July 21st, 2010

More and more people are writing about, studying and commenting on the evolution of influence. As we look at the concept of influence today, it’s obvious something has changed. Back in the “olden days,” an influencer was defined as someone heard, loved and/or respected around the world through the traditional media channels of film, radio, TV and newspapers. Today, not only have the profile of influencers altered, but the method of influencing has changed dramatically.

Fast Company has picked up on this idea with its Influence Project, which measures people’s influence by their ability to get others to sign up for the site. We agree entirely with their premise – that anyone can influence friends just as much as “real influencers” like bloggers and industry luminaries.

Online tools for sharing information today have made it possible for anyone and everyone to become an influencer, maybe even famous, overnight. Consumers will still listen only to the social voices that they trust. And the constantly emerging new technologies that have contributed to this, are rearranging the resonating value behind everything. At its core, we believe influence is: big, democratized and measurable. It’s what keeps our data team awake at night and our ops team processing terabyte after terabyte in the cloud.

Sharing has remained one of the most powerful, broad-scale ways for social voices to engage online and we believe that sharing is a social signal that gives everyone an equal chance to influence. Measuring sharing goes way beyond who has the highest number of outbound shares on their sharing badges (lovingly referred to as the NASCAR problem of sharing badges). It’s about how friends and family – the listeners – reacted to those shares.

We are in the midst of studying several “response” mechanisms to sharing – such as clicks, engagement and velocity (which is a proxy for urgency and pass-along rate). When you compare two pieces of content on these metrics, higher metrics indicate higher value. If the sentiment is right, if the source is trusted, if the snippet and personal commentary are valuable, the shared content can and should get measured. If that is measured by a click, registration or time spent, great.

As marketers and content creators, let’s find more ways to track and refine content to slowly but surely improve influence in the same way we yearn and toil for higher search rankings. When influence becomes measurable “beyond the click” just as every form of marketing before it, that’s when we’ve evolved it.

/heidi
@heidiperry1

I wanna be a Tech Star [Video]

June 18th, 2010

If you haven’t seen this video floating around the internet in the last few days, you should definitely take a few minutes and watch it. Warning: it’s probably only funny if you work in the advertising/media world. It’s done by our friend Terry Kawaja and features many figures from the start up community, including our own Tim Schigel. See if you can spot him (hint: It’s really easy, he’s wearing a ShareThis shirt). Not sure who everyone in the video is? Techcrunch reveals many of these highly talented lip sync’ers.

–Steve R
@steversb

Oil spill outrage: have you shared it?

June 15th, 2010

As it has been for so many Americans, and people around the world, watching the slowly unfolding story of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been absolutely heartbreaking on so many levels.

At the time the initial news and during the following few weeks, it seemed that most Americans were watching the spill pensively, but hoping for the best. At the time, information was scarce and there wasn’t a whole lot of emotionally jarring imagery to move the needle for people en mass. That started to change, however once one of our publishers, Boston.com heavily featured vivid slideshows of the disaster, and they quickly went viral.

To date, this slideshow, “Disaster unfolds slowly in the Gulf of Mexico” from May 12, is the top shared article about the spill across our network of 800,000 publisher sites. Another slideshow titled “Caught in the oil” from June 3, featured the first dramatic pictures of oil-soaked birds and was a true tipping point in public opinion against BP and the start of a genuine wave of anger twoard those responsible for the spill.

In the same way that we reacted to the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, people are realizing the scope of the spill and being moved to genuine anger by what they see, only the medium is different today. In 1989, TV delivered the first pictures of oil-soaked birds, today, it’s the internet.

The next two highest-shared articles about the spill also represent interesting aspects of the typical emotional response to the spill: Fixing it, in this Esquire piece “The Secret, 700-Million-Gallon Oil Fix That Worked — and Might Save the Gulf”; and blame, in this Salon War Room post, “Who’s to blame for the oil spill? Dick Cheney.”

If you want to donate money to cleanup efforts, the Greater New Orleans Foundation is collecting funds to help displaced fisherman and other workers, while the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary is the largest avian hospital in the region and is helping to clean birds.

In the meantime, keep on sharing. Your voices are being heard.

/heidi
@heidiperry1

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