value of sharing « ShareThis Blog

Posts Tagged ‘value of sharing’

Weekly Top Shares 9-16-11

September 16th, 2011

Instead of fitness, food and fashion, ShareThis users were feeling fitness, politics and career this week. Doesn’t have the same ring to it but makes for some interesting subject matter to dive into.

First off, sharers found another reason to watch an enthusiastic David Jack demonstrating yet another routine designed to burn fat fast. In this short video posted on ThePostGame that could easily be mistaken for a Reebok commercial, Jack walks us through the barbell complex, a routine he describes as “medieval and unbelievable,” but a surefire way to blast unwanted bulges and get you on the road to looking, well, like David Jack. And here we were thinking that the winter months were a great excuse to eat whatever we want and lay off the exercise. Guess we were wrong.

Surely a gentleman like David Jack would never commit the following sin but apparently, many men do: the transgression of not calling after the first date. In this article, Match.com columnist Dave Singleton explores the myriad reasons why some men don’t bother picking up the phone to make that second date, a move that has baffled women since the invention of the telephone. Check out the full list here. Since it seems that making sense of the jungle that is the male brain (or the female brain, for that matter) may be a task beyond our control, we offer our own two cents, which you’re welcome to take or leave: Stop waiting by the phone.

While some are waiting by the phone for that call from a prospective love interest, plenty more Americans are crossing their fingers for that call from a potential boss. And it’s not just college grads. More and more, people are making midlife career changes, some going as far as to alter their professional paths entirely. While we usually take advice articles like this widely-shared one that ran on MSN with a grain of salt, we actually found a few nuggets of valuable insight, namely “Don’t ask too many people for their opinion. If you know in your heart that it’s time for a change, listen to what your intuition is urging you to do. You know yourself better than anyone else. Remember, career change, especially in midlife, goes against the traditional framework with which we are all so familiar.” We’re big fans of going against the grain and doing what we love, so we socked away this piece of advice for when we hit “midlife.”

Our mothers told us it wasn’t polite to talk politics, but we’re gonna do it anyway. In “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” published on truthout.org, former GOP Capitol Hill staff aide Mike Lofgren eloquently lays out the reasons he deserted the party to which he served loyally for nearly 30 years. Since the 6,000 word diatribe was a bit too long for us to tackle during the busy workday, we used this Daily Beast article authored by Michael Tomasky as CliffsNotes. In fact, Tomasky does a good job of boiling Lofgren’s polemic down to just one short paragraph: “He’s not very happy either about his party’s militarism, its cynical use of religion, its total opposition to doing anything about the environment, and other matters, but most especially its neo-Leninist posture in which political power trumps everything.” Our apologies for talking politics, but too many people disregarded their mothers’ advice this week to ignore.

by Tom Spano, Social Media Manager, ShareThis, Inc.

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Sharing Audiences

June 15th, 2010

Hi everyone,

We’re excited to see everyone this week in New York at OMMA Publish and OMMA Social, where we’ll be participating on the Futurescape: Analyzing a Social Media Effort’s Present to Predict Its Future panel, speaking to the value of influencers for both brands and publishers.

We believe sharing audiences consist of valuable consumers – those who are sharing, listening to, and engaging with millions of topics across the web. These are the audiences that are driving social intent and filtering the good stuff, all in real-time.

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 such as the iPhone 4, NBA Finals, cruise vacations and more. 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.

To see it for yourself, check out our audience segment estimator (some publishers have access to this tool already) or send us your ideal topics and we’ll size up your sharing audience.

/heidi
@heidiperry1

Influencers Engage with Mederma

April 20th, 2010

ShareThis is thrilled to let the world know about the results from our first advertising campaign using ShareThis Influence, a segmentation methodology which helps advertisers and publishers reach and identify social influencers. Along with our partner Empower MediaMarketing, we helped run a display advertising campaign for their client, scar management brand Mederma, which was aimed at tapping into influence as an alternative to search and contextual display. Not only did we see the invaluable and direct benefits of sharing on the Web, but were blown away by the results and we think you will be too.

Here’s why:   In previous months, Mederma launched a similar campaign utilizing both search and display advertising to reach and engage with consumers, and encourage the download of a coupon for the product. Through search ads, 1-in-4 people in that campaign clicked to redeem the coupon, compared to 1-in-10 from contextual display. In our campaign using ShareThis Influence segments, 50 percent of people who clicked through to the coupon showed intent to redeem. We also saw that “Influencers” (people who shared often) were 7x more likely to click to view the coupon, and the affected (people who reacted to the shared information) were 1.6 times more likely, compared to the previous campaigns.

But what does it all mean?

We think this is the start of something huge. The results speak volumes to the importance of sharing. It’s not just the center of the social web for consumers, but it is massively important for advertisers and publishers too. The results show that sharing helps identify and reach highly-engaged audiences, and that sharing can outperform search and redefines what’s possible with display advertising. Tapping into the power of influence works, and sharing is the foundation of this scalable social behavior on the Web.

So, What’s Next?

We are going to do more – lots more. This was one of our early tests with our influence segments that were accumulated from reaching 400 million consumers per month across the 135,000 sites that use ShareThis, and analyzing millions of social topics a month. And we’re just starting to skim the surface with publishers, too. We’re now helping our publishers in closed beta to create their own influence segments and monetize them with their own advertisers.

Looking ahead we hope to use ShareThis Influence to continue to connect brands with influencers and redefine the industry’s idea of social audiences. It’s an exciting time for us, opening another chapter in our company’s history, and we couldn’t be more pleased with it.

(For more information, come hear Jim Price of Empower present the findings at ad:tech or grab the case study PDF)

Tim Schigel
@schigel

The Value of Sharing: Social Engagement

December 16th, 2009

Sharing is Growing

First, and foremost – and most exciting for us – we found that sharing is growing. On a “per page view” level, we’ve seen a 200 percent increase in the shares per page view across our 125,000+ sites in 2009. This means for every page view consumed, the rate of sharing has doubled, meaning our publishers are getting better at optimizing their sharing and consumers now expect it to be there.

Sharing is Valuable

On an aggregate level, sharing is now accounting for as much as one-third of the amount of traffic driven by search, which is most often the top source of traffic for sites. So say a site gets 100,000 unique visitors per month from search, they’re also getting 33,000 from sharing. Now, 33 percent is at the high range of our network, but we’re seeing sites across several verticals (mainstream news, tech, entertainment) achieving these levels.

Sharing vs. Search on Social Engagement

Even more important than the gross traffic originating from shared links is the social engagement of sharing. When compared to search, sites in our network are seeing up to 50 percent more engagement from sharing. Meaning share-originated links are driving up to 50 percent more page views per unique than search. Search drives a very focused click and is still the standard for intent. We feel influence is a proxy for the new social intent. There is no question why companies like Google are rushing to create a more social search-driven experience.

Now we’ll break down the stages of sharing, which we extrapolate into influence. Influence is calculated as Shares x Recipient Clicks x Engagement x Virality.

Despite reports of its demise, e-mail is still the most popular method of sharing, and despite its meteoric rise of late, Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel. In our research, we found that 46 percent of shares came via e-mail, 33 percent from Facebook, 14 percent from other channels such as Digg, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, etc., and just 6 percent from Twitter.

Sharing is the Core of the Social Web

November 23rd, 2009

I ran across an interesting blog post that fit perfectly into a discussion we had recently at ShareThis.
In the post, Rick Leibling, from marketing agency the Taylor Group, laid out his eight elements of social media behavior, which were share, monitor, friend, converse, customize, listen, engage and dialogue. As you can guess, we have our favorite one over here – sharing, of course – but I thought it would be interesting to lay out why.

Looking at Leibling’s list, I’d cut it down to six. Though, I’m sure a case could be made for unique distinction from each other, I’d say that converse, engage and dialogue could be rolled up into one, leaving us with share, monitor, friend, converse and customize and listen. Sharing is directly tied to five of those six.

Think about it, the act of sharing initiates each one of those social activities. Sharing helps you monitor what your friends, those close to you, and even the outliers in your social graph care about – the good stuff. It’s obviously an act that happens among friends. Sharing is the top way we start conversations online – think about all the e-mail conversations you’ve started with people in reaction to a link that’s been sent around – and it’s a great way to listen to the pulse of what’s going on among the people you’re close to.

The point is that sharing is the central act of a lot of social activity online. It’s the act that allows us to distribute and find valuable stuff, interact with people and keep on top of what your friends care about. All those things form the essence of the social Web. While there are many other elements to social media – networking, real-time communication – sharing is one of, if not the most important social activities online.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to send this post to a few friends …

Tim

@schigel

We the Influencers

October 22nd, 2009

in⋅flu⋅ence

– noun
the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others.

Influence is a pretty big word in the online world. It represents a combination of several things – trust, authority, authenticity and attention among them – that determine how people perceive a source online. Influence is basically the currency of the social Web. It’s massively important to businesses, brands and startups, who’s reputation and future can often hinge on what a few influencers have to say about them.

But what does influence mean for everyday users – people who use the Web to catch up on the day’s news, pass along funny e-mails and watch last night’s episode of “The Daily Show“? For as much influence as they have inside the tech sphere, folks like Michael Arrington, Om Malik and other various other well-known bloggers, journalists and entrepreneurs are actually largely irrelevant outside their own circles. For most people, online influence lies close to home, with the family and friends they communicate with everyday. It’s less about expertise, background and the sheer weight of who you are, but more about trust and knowledge.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb brought up something related to this during his keynote last week at the Real Time Summit. He pointed out that as the flow of information continues to speed up, Web users are increasingly overwhelmed by the amount of content available and are starting to either miss it, or simply give up trying to search for new information. Kirkpatrick suggested that the problem will be partially solved by the evolution of tools we use to corral all that information. He’s right, but there’s another huge factor here: You and I, the influencers.
With all the noise online, your social circle becomes a de facto filter, surfacing useful information because they know exactly what’s interesting to you and what isn’t. That piece is so important – it’s the essence of influence. While there might be influential people on the Web, for the vast majority of us, they don’t matter and most of what they disseminate is noise. The real influencers in our lives are your 65-year-old aunt, teenage son or significant other who shares a story with you that they thought you’d like.

They may not have 50,000 Twitter followers, or might not even be on Twitter, but they know you, you trust them and you’ll automatically read what they sent you. You can’t get much more influential than that.

Tim
@schigel

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