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Filtering the Social Web With ShareThis

Aliza Sherman — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:00:46 +0000

I don’t think there’s much of a downside to giving your readers tools at their fingertips to easily share your content with their contacts. From the early days of “share this with a friend” buttons, to the more sophisticated sharing widgets like Tweetmeme, AddThis and ShareThis, publishers are more empowered than ever to provide site visitors with the power to be part of the syndication process. Plus, these applications provide various degrees of measurement to help any publisher quantify the actions taken with their content.

This week, ShareThis announced a shift from being a utility to becoming a “smarter app,” with better analytics and incorporating a real-time stream of data of related content from a reader’s own friends and contacts (the ShareThis Stream). Basically, readers of sites using ShareThis are now able to see what their connections are also sharing.

When Is Sharing “Oversharing?”

From a user standpoint, I think there are pros and cons to seeing a real-time stream of what my connections — or other ShareThis users — are sharing. I’m a huge fan of the human filter and even follow certain Twitter users solely because I know they spend a lot of time scanning blogs and regularly post content that interests me.

But I’m a little on the fence about a sharing tool that lets me send out links to what I’m reading giving me back information about what other people are sharing. Because while they may be my friends or contacts, I’m not sure all of them will be sharing anything interesting or useful to me. And frankly, I’m not sure I need another channel where I can be social around the things my contacts and I read — I’ve got Twitter for that.

From a publisher’s standpoint, however, it’s an interesting proposition. After your site visitor shares some of your content, they not only get a “successfully shared” message, they also see additional related content you’ve published so they can read or share more. They can then view what everyone else who has shared content from your site is sharing, which strikes me as similar to “what are the most shared stories” links on other sites which I’ve always found valuable or at least interesting. And they can also opt to see what their ShareThis-using friends are also sharing.

Measuring More With ShareThis

ShareThis has also upped the ante on measurement. You can track how your content fares across numerous networks, starting with Facebook and Twitter, with Google Buzz, MySpace and LinkedIn pending. ShareThis claims to measure more than most other social analytics tools, which generally just measure when your content is shared and the the number of clicks it receives.

ShareThis also measures audience engagement with your content and the spread of that content. ShareThis calls these metrics “Influence Analytics” so you not only see how your content is shared, but where, and you can measure what it calls your “socially-referred traffic and engagement.” It even goes a step further, breaking down your audience into “Influencers,” “Affecteds,” and “Potentials.”

Because just publishing content is no longer enough, finding ways to facilitate and measure the new social landscape is potentially valuable. But it remains to be seen how well the tools work and what real value they bring to the table. I’m looking forward to finding out.

How are you measuring the paths your content takes and the influence of your audience?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

AddThis Gets Smart(er)

Aliza Sherman — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:00:58 +0000

Which do you prefer as a tool to let your visitors share your content with others: AddThis or ShareThis? What were the criteria you used to come to your decision on which one to use? Here are a few things you should consider when deciding which content-sharing app to use:

Ease of integration — Is it easy enough for you to embed the widget code into your web site or blog so you can offer sharing functionality to your readers?
Ease of use/performance – Is it easy and fast for your readers to share your content with others via multiple options such as email, their favorite social networks and microblogs?
Analytics — Does it offer you robust insight into the sharing activity on your site or blog?

Having been a longtime user, I can tell you that my initial response to the above questions about the ShareThis service would be “yes” on No. 1 and No. 2, and “sort of” on No. 3. But then I learned about the changes to the AddThis service, and I think that it may win me over as a customer. Here’s why.

At the time I started using ShareThis, AddThis was an underfunded tech startup that looked more ad hoc than professional. I was swayed by ShareThis’ polish when it entered the content sharing space. Today, AddThis gets the added professional muscle of Cl earspring, a tools and platform sharing company; this acquisition bodes well for the AddThis application.

AddThis is a community-driven platform with the goal of letting people “share anything to anyone anywhere.” It no longer limits visitors to sharing content only to a small hand-picked list of sites. It now wants to be a “switchboard for the web,” which means that the providers and networks that show up when your visitors click on the AddThis button are dynamic and flexible.

The new AddThis menu is a “smart menu.” If you are visiting sites using AddThis, you’ll get tagged with cookies that the AddThis application can read at the next AddThis-powered site you visit so it gets to know you and makes a note of your network preferences. So if you tend to share content mostly on Evernote and Posterous, instead of Facebook and Twitter, AddThis will now customize the menu you see to see your most frequently used networks instead of a pre-selected hierarchy of services.

Another smart aspect to the newly enhanced AddThis service is the ability for any social network to get added to a vast and growing list of potential places where visitors can distribute content to, which makes AddThis more open. Users can also recommend additional services; AddThis will then contact those services to get listed in the directory.

AddThis believes these enhancements to the application are good for the user and good for the publisher. As a content publisher, I see its point. As a user, I like the idea of a smarter menu so I don’t have to sift through additional screens to find my favorite sharing forums. And smaller service providers can also benefit by not being automatically relegated to the “last screen” of a sharing menu.

Another addition to the new and improved AddThis is translation of the tool into 50 languages.

Some other benefits of using AddThis over ShareThis include pure market share. The company says that according to Comscore, AddThis has about three times the reach of ShareThis in terms of sheer unique users.

On the analytics front, the company says it has the competitive horsepower to crush the competition over time. I’ve just signed up for an AddThis account to start testing it out; analytics are a big deal to my company, so we’ll see how that measures up over time.

So which one do you use? AddThis or ShareThis? And why?

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Grouptivity Takes on ShareThis and AddThis

Aliza Sherman — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:00:20 +0000

I’ve been using ShareThis on my blogs and recommending it to my clients for a while now. I explain to my clients that ShareThis is a “passive broadcaster” of their content, giving their blog and web site visitors handy tools to email posts or articles to others, to easily blog about the content they are reading or to link to the content via any of over 30 social media and networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Mixx and del.icio.us.

For a while now, ShareThis had only one direct competitor – AddThis.

When I first went to sign up for one of these services, it seemed pretty much six of one and half a dozen of the other when comparing the two. I went with ShareThis because I liked their button, not a very strategic decision-making process, but when two services are quite comparable, it really boils down to going with either other people’s recommendations or with your gut.

There’s a new kid in town, however, giving both ShareThis and AddThis a run for their money.

A vision of Grouptivity, according to the company’s founder Ankesh Kumar, is to make sharing web content more powerful than ever. Kumar says that while sharing via bookmarking sites and social networks is important, his company has found that so far 80% of site visitors still opt to share content via email. So Grouptivity facilitates emailing content – integrating with users’ email account address books – rather than trying to change their more common behavior. ShareThis offers similar email integration while AddThis focuses more on the publisher.

Besides being an application that resides on the blogs and sites of content producers, Grouptivity is also a tool for the site visitor who can finally save all of the things they’ve forwarded on to others or linked to on their social networking sites in a single place. Grouptivity becomes the repository for the content that you’ve found interesting enough to share so you can find it again and share it in other ways. ShareThis has a similar functionality (ShareBox) while AddThis again focuses on the publisher versus the user.

Grouptivity let’s you connect with “friends” in a social networking way and view your friends’ recent activity to see what content they have shared. And yes, you can also add content privately to your account in case it is something you want to refer to later but don’t want to share publicly. Grouptivity also adds private discussion forums to start a dialogue around shared content.

Another aspect of Grouptivity that sets it apart from similar services is the exploration of monetization and revenue sharing between the company and content publishers. This model will need time to prove out, however, it is an interesting addition to content sharing services. Grouptivity also allows content publishers to “own” their user data so you can build relationships with the people who are sharing your content. ShareThis, for example, provides you with stats but not with detailed user information. You can export user data as CSV, Excel or PDF files.

Companies like Grouptivity may be the third or fourth to market but get the benefit of expanding on existing services. First or second to markets like AddThis and ShareThis have to work twice as hard to hold their positions.

Do you think Grouptivity has a real chance to overturn the market hold that ShareThis and AddThis currently has? Is monetizing and sharing revenues with publishers the winning ticket?

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Broadcasting to Your Social Networks

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:00:58 +0000

I’ve been working with clients to set up social media “satellite sites” as I call them to extend their brand and take advantage of the exponential power of social networking for reaching out to consumers. The question I hear time and time again is “How in the world can I manage all these social networks if I can’t even get to the rest of my work?”

I know we are all crunched for time. Sometimes, I don’t even know how I keep up with all of my writing and blogging, client projects and social networking sites. But I have found some cool “social aggregation broadcasting tools” that are making at least some of my tasks easier to handle.

What is a Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tool?

Okay, I have to admit, I just made that term up but I think it covers what I’m trying to convey. There are tools out there that help you aggregate your social networking sites for the purpose of broadcasting a message to more places with fewer steps hence Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tools (SABT? lol!).

These applications are a combination of standalone apps like HelloTxt or ShareThis along with the connectivity features within many of the social networking tools. Some SABTs help you pull all, most or many of your social media sites into one place so all you have to do to broadcast a message the ones you’ve aggregated is to post once within the SABT and the tool distributes that post to your MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. – so easy. Something like ShareThis facilitates a slightly different type of action – allowing your readers to do the distribution of your content for you so I would consider this a Passive SABT.

So I would say there are Active SABTs, Passive SABTs and Integrated SABT functionality like what you get on Utterz, for example. When I post an Utterz, I have my Connections set up so that it automatically posts to my blog and my Twitter page. I can also have it post to my Blip.TV account, Pownce, among others.

Are you with me so far?

On the flip side, Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tools are different from Social Aggregation Listening Tools (SALT?!?) that are sites like FriendFeed that pull together your feeds and the feeds of your “friends” so you can hear what they are Twittering about, Facebook statusing (?!), ad nauseum. But let’s not forget the feed features now on so many of the social networking sites made popular by Facebook and quickly adopted by MySpace, LinkedIn and many others. I’d call those Integrated SALT functionality.

So Where is the Time Management Aspect Here?

Clearly SABTs are the time savers here. Although having your friend feeds from all of their social networks brought into one place for “easy reading” must save someone out there some time, I am still finding SALTs to be the proverbial firehose that I’m trying desperately to drink from before I choke.

Another type of broadcast tool I have not mentioned because it is more of an add-on – although it does save you time – is the tool that allows you to easily post to one of your blogs or social networking sites. These would be tools like Twhirl that lets you post to several Twitter accounts easily. Or any bookmarklet such as Typepad‘s that let’s you post a link and excerpt of an article or blog post you are reading to your own blog or Tweetburner that does the same for Twitter. Or Twitterfeed that let’s you enter your blog RSS and automatically checks your blog for new posts and Tweets them.

Let’s call these Narrow SABTs for right now, not because they are narrow in power but because they are narrow in reach yet still useful. They aren’t mass broadcasting tools but, of course, once you have set up for SABTs properly, posting to your blog once, for example, could trigger a series of automatic actions to broadcast that post with just one click of the Publish button.

The key to remember is that you only need 1 or 2 of each at most to pretty much cover all your social networking bases. So instead of posting to 30 different sites, you shouldn’t be posting more than 4-6 times at most to get full broadcasting distribution. And for those using the most popular social networks, you can probably get that down to 2-3 posts. That means you publish the same post in 2-3 SABTs and those 2-3 actions then reach over 10x that many sites instantly. Then you add on the Passive SABTs and the potential reach of your post grows exponentially as others share your content for you.

These are the SABTs that I personally use.

Active SABTs

1. HelloTxt – Covers Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Meemi, Beemood, Gozub, Frazr, Numpa, Mexicodiario, Fanfou, Feecie, Hi5, Bebo, Myspace, Brightkite, at press time

Passive SABTs

1. ShareThis – Allows others to share your content on Reddit, Facebook, del.icio.us, Technorati, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Windows Live, SlashDot, N4G, Blinklist, ma.gnolia, Digg, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! MyWeb, Propeller, Newsvine, Mixx, Furl, Mister Wong, Faves, Simpy, Yigg, Fresqui, Care2, Kirtsy…

2. AddThis – Readers can post your share your content on Google Bookmarks, Delicious, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Furl, Yahoo MyWeb, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine, Live, Technorati, Twitter, Yahoo Bookmarks, myAOL, Ask, Fark, Slashdot, Propeller, Mixx, Multiply, Simpy, Blogmarks, Diigo, Faves (Bluedot), Spurl, Link-a-Gogo, Mister Wong, FeedMeLinks, Backflip, Magnolia, Seganlo, Netvouz, Tailrank, Blinklist, and..

Integrated SABT features

1. Utterz – Let’s you form “Connections” with Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, Twitter, WordPress, Movable Type, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, Twitxr, Drupal, LiveSpaces, YouTube, MetaWeblog API, Pownce and Blip.TV as of press time

Narrow SABTs

1. Twhirl – Have more than one Twitter account (like me)? This desktop app let’s you open a tiny window for each to cross post when/where appropriate.

2. Tweetburner – If you are reading something interesting that is worth tweeting about, click this bookmarklet, add your comments, then Tweet.

3. Twitterfeed – Use this tool app to link your blog and Twitter account so a single blog post can Tweet automatically.

What are you using to save time and manage your social network postings?

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