awe.sm: the blog

Meet the new awe.sm for Developers

By Jonathan in awe.sm, General

When Laurie and I set out 2.5 years ago to quantify the effectiveness of sharing integrations and other social marketing efforts, we honestly didn’t know who would find our technology most useful and in what ways. We just believed there was a broad-based need to move the conversation about the effectiveness of social media beyond proxy metrics like fans and followers, and towards true measures of business value like visits, pageviews, signups, and revenues.

As the space evolved and we worked with more partners and customers, it became clear that our primary focus should be on application developers. We want awe.sm to enable a thriving developer ecosystem that innovates and creates value from real social performance data.

With that goal in mind, we set out to add many of the features our developer customers were asking for, expose everything awe.sm can do as a service, and package those APIs in a way that made our customers’ jobs easier.

awe.sm: the platform

Today we’re very proud to announce the latest release of the awe.sm platform, which includes:

new and expanded APIs for tracking sharing, measuring results, retrieving data, and managing your account;
a brand-new documentation site featuring more examples and quick start guides for Javascript, PHP, and Ruby;
and an open-source example application (initially built during the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon) that demonstrates many key features of the awe.sm platform in a working app with documented source code.

Our platform is already being used by hundreds of developers to track how sharing from their application drives value to their business and to put that data to work in interesting ways. We’re particularly excited about some of these integrations that showcase how awe.sm helps our customers “concentrate on the core problem they’re solving and…create better products in less time“:

Topspin Media is the most complete technology platform for artists to create their own retail channels, effectively promote their music, and connect directly with their fans. Topspin uses awe.sm to quantify the impact of fans who share artists’ music on Twitter and Facebook. “It’s impossible to overstate the importance of direct connections between artists and fans and the power of fans spreading the word about artists they love,” said Ian Rogers, Topspin’s CEO. “Using awe.sm, Topspin has been able to build unique data-driven tools to encourage and measure the use of social channels to help artists grow their audience and make money.”
StockTwits provides investors, public companies, and market professionals with a platform to create, share, and gather information across a distribution network that includes StockTwits.com, top social networks, and major financial media outlets, with a combined audience in the tens of millions. StockTwits uses awe.sm to measure how word spreads when publicly-traded companies report their earnings or other financial news and information. “With awe.sm we are able to measure the reach and engagement with those messages across our network,” said Chris Corriveau, CTO of StockTwits. “The whole integration with awe.sm was done in just a couple days and we now have a full range of analytics APIs at our disposal to deliver these and future features for our clients.”
LocalResponse is the world’s first cross-platform “check-in” based ad network, helping marketers reach individuals in the most contextual, local medium. LocalResponse uses awe.sm to track the effectiveness of the messages their clients send to potential customers. “awe.sm filled a major hole in our infrastructure — we had it integrated in a matter of hours and it instantly made our platform way sexier,” said Michael Muse, LocalResponse’s co-founder and VP of Product & Operations. “awe.sm made it possible for our engineers to get back to building our core product.”

We believe that focus on the hard value driven by sharing holds the key to unlocking social media’s full potential for businesses large and small. We also believe this potential will be realized by a robust marketplace of solutions like those above, serving the specialized needs of many different kinds of businesses. Our goal is to enable these tools.

Mo’ money, mo’ solutions

Today’s platform launch is just the first step toward our vision of enabling developers to harness the value of social media in their applications. That’s why we’re happy to also announce a new round of funding led by Foundry Group and GRP Partners, to grow our team and help us bring the awe.sm platform to more developers.

We’ve been very fortunate to have worked with great investors up to this point. GRP’s firm-wide focus on tangible value-creation and Mark Suster‘s understanding of the social media landscape have been invaluable. So have the counsel and efforts on our behalf of Jerry Neumann of Neu Venture Capital and Jennifer Lum and Peter Wernau of Apricot Capital. We can’t recommend these folks enough as investors and colleagues.

We’re equally excited to be working with our new investors, Foundry and kbs+p Ventures, who are joined by GRP and Neu Venture Capital in this round. Foundry’s reputation and portfolio, including investments in SendGrid, Gnip, and UrbanAirship, are unparalleled in the platform space, and we’re very happy that Foundry Managing Partner Ryan McIntyre will be joining our Board. kbs+p Ventures is the investment arm of leading full-service advertising agency Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners. They’re led by Darren Herman, who is a great ambassador of technology to the media world (and vice versa) and an excellent golfer ;-) .

You can read more about our funding over on TechCrunch and in our press release. After a brief discussion of whether or not to blow it all on hats, we’ve decided to use the money to grow the team. So please head on over to our jobs page and tell your friends.

Don’t forget to check out the new http://developers.awe.sm, and you can click here to chat with someone from our team.

Twitter drives 4 times as much traffic as you think it does

By Jonathan in awe.sm

27 comments

Over the last few weeks, TechCrunch has run a couple posts using their own referrer logs to measure how sharing on various social services drives traffic. In these and other analyses based solely on referrer information, Twitter performs surprisingly poorly relative to expectations many of us have based on our own observations of the volume of link sharing on Twitter.

Does that mean the people you follow on Twitter who share links all the time are that atypical? Do most normal people just not click on links in Tweets? Is LinkedIn far more popular with the rest of the world than it seems to be with the people you know?

No, no, and no. There is a much simpler answer behind this disparity: referrers are a poor way to attribute traffic from social sharing.

Referrer analysis is based on the outdated metaphor of the web as a network of links between static pages that could only be navigated by browsers. Today’s web is built around social streams and other APIs that are consumed via dynamic web applications, desktop clients, mobile apps, and even other web services, all of which render referrers obsolete as an attribution mechanism.

awe.sm was built for the modern web — a network of people, not pages — to track the results of Tweets, Likes, emails, and other sharing activities no matter what path they follow. So our system knows with certainty where each link was originally shared in addition to all the places where it was ultimately clicked (i.e. referrers). This approach gives us a unique set of data that demonstrates just how misleading referrer information can be.

And in the case of links shared on Twitter, it’s very misleading: the referral traffic one sees from Twitter.com is less than 25% of the traffic actually driven by Twitter.

Twitter is the perfect storm for referral traffic

We looked at awe.sm data from the first 6 months of 2011 spanning links to over 33,000 sites, and the numbers were astounding:

only 24.4% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had twitter.com in the referrer;
62.6% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had no referrer information at all (i.e. they would show up as ‘Direct Traffic’ in Google Analytics);
and 13.0% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had another site as the referrer (e.g. facebook.com, linkedin.com).

Twitter is the quintessential modern web service — all the ways to consume Twitter, even Twitter.com, are just clients for the Twitter API — so the failure to effectively track it using such an outmoded methodology as referrer analysis should come as little surprise. Twitter’s openness and the many resulting ways users interact with it are what have made it so successful, but they are also the things that have made its value largely invisible to publishers.

‘Direct Traffic’ explained

When a user clicks a link in any kind of non-browser client, from Outlook to a desktop AIR app to the countless mobile and tablet apps, no referrer information is passed for that visit and your analytics software basically throws up its hands and puts the visit in the ‘Direct Traffic’ bucket. The assumptions behind this fallback behavior show just how arcane referrer analysis is — if a visit didn’t come from another webpage (i.e. no referrer data), someone must have typed the URL directly into their browser address bar.

If you’ve spent the last few years wondering why the proportion of ‘Direct Traffic’ to your site has been on the rise, the answer is the growing usage of non-browser clients, especially on mobile. And since 2/3 of Twitter consumption is happening in desktop and mobile clients*, it’s safe to say that a lot of your ‘Direct Traffic’ is actually coming from Twitter.

How Twitter sends traffic through other sites

While the incredible growth of mobile apps and desktop clients and their importance in the Twitter ecosystem is news to no one, the value Twitter drives through content syndication is a bit more surprising: more than 1 in 8 visits driven by Twitter sharing are actually referred from other sites. Many other sites use Twitter’s API to pull in Tweets that they display on their own sites, where links in those Tweets are then clicked. For example, look at this screenshot of my LinkedIn activity stream. Notice that every update says ‘via Twitter.’ Yet when someone clicks on one of those links, the referrer will be linkedin.com, even though it only got to LinkedIn because someone shared it on Twitter first.

The same is true of Tweets syndicated to Facebook, About.Me, and myriad other websites that allow users to connect your Twitter feed directly. And because Twitter’s API is open and most Tweets are public by default, there are also many applications and sites that display Tweets based on hashtags, search terms, and other criteria without a user ever needing to connect their own feed.

In addition to the programmatic syndication of Tweets through Twitter’s API, sharing is fundamentally social and the human element is responsible for much of the serendipity that makes social media so powerful. A great example of that is this Tweet by @zeyneparsel, who only had 144 followers at the time. However, she happens to be a self-proclaimed “veteran hipsterologist” and this Tweet was on the subject of hipsterism (?!). As a result, the link contained in her Tweet ended up being included in a Psychology Today blog post on hipsterism (see UPDATE 3), which drove a significant amount of traffic.

In these cases, which showcase the amplification effect that makes Twitter so uniquely valuable to publishers and marketers, analyzing referrer data alone would attribute traffic to a variety of other sites, even though it all originated with sharing on Twitter.

Improving social attribution

Last week, MG Siegler noted that Google+ started rewriting all outbound clicks to come from plus.google.com. Facebook has rewritten outbound links for quite a while due to phishing/malware and privacy concerns. And both LinkedIn and StumbleUpon frame all external pageviews, which means you can see all the views they drive. As t.co rolls out to 100% of the links shared on Twitter (a topic we’ve previously covered in some depth), they may very well start rewriting all clicks on t.co links to show Twitter as the referrer. This would ensure Twitter gets the credit they deserve for traffic they send to publishers, but it would have the downside of obfuscating the diverse paths that a tweeted link can take.

Until then, it’s possible to correctly attribute visits driven from Twitter sharing by tagging your outgoing links using a solution like Google Analytics campaign tracking parameters. For example, the Tweet Buttons on Business Insider use links like this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/closing-bell-july-12-2011-7?utm_source=twbutton&utm_medium=social&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=moneygame

Google Analytics can then properly attribute traffic to those buttons. Google Analytics offers a handy URL Builder tool, and other analytics solutions, like Omniture, support similar campaign tracking parameters of their own.

Why awe.sm is, well, awesome

And if all you want is an accurate count of the aggregate traffic Twitter drives to your site, that should be enough. But our customers have found there’s a lot more value to be had in understanding the mechanics that drive successful sharing — who is tweeting, what they’re tweeting, where it’s being tweeted from, when it’s being tweeted, etc. So in addition to automatically building the outbound links to integrate our social attribution with Google Analytics, Omniture, and other web analytics solutions, awe.sm tracks the performance of each Tweet (and Like, etc) individually. By connecting the rich information we have about the context of each share with the visits, pageviews, conversions, and revenues it drives, we enables our customers to go beyond just looking at social data and to start acting on it (and to build cool stuff like this).

If you’re interested in learning more about how awe.sm can help your business harness the value of social, please drop us a line to questions@awe.sm or just click here to chat with someone from our team right here.

* The full list of sources of clicks with no referrer information (i.e. ‘Direct Traffic’) not only includes mobile and desktop clients, but also web-users who have https security enabled for their Twitter accounts (which strips out referrer information).

How big brands use social media (and you can too)

By Jonathan in awe.sm, Marketing & Promotion

1 comments

Greg Shove, CEO of Halogen Media, had a great post yesterday on the paid, earned, owned (PEO) media model. This framework for integrated marketing campaigns isn’t new: I saw it mentioned on Darren Herman’s blog recently; Fred Wilson was the first I noticed applying the earned media term to social media back in 2009 (part 1, part 2); and in a former life in electoral politics, I was first introduced to “earned media” (then applied purely to press coverage) way back in 2003.

Greg does a great job of discussing how a large brand can apply this integrated model by reallocating their substantial marketing budgets in ways that take better advantage of the amplification effect of earned media (see below chart from his post). And we’re actually working with Halogen right now to comprehensively measure the impact of the various components of an integrated PEO media campaign they’re planning for one of their brand-name clients. But what about everyone else?

The PEO media model for the rest of us

What got big brands looking at social media to begin with were the early examples of exceptional success by independent marketers — Fred’s original earned media post was about @kogibbq, hardly a big brand. And what originally inspired us to tackle performance marketing for social media was its efficiency (what we call the word-of-mouth superconductor). We believe this efficiency is potentially even more disruptive than SEM in democratizing online marketing, because — at its best — social media enables small marketers to reach the right audience with the right message in the right way at minimal costs.

So, how does a smaller business that may not even have a robust website, let alone a microsite or a display advertising budget, take advantage of the potential power of the PEO media model? First, you have to redefine what each of the terms mean (in order of importance for smaller businesses):

Owned Media: There are 3 basic components of your owned media presence: blogging; email; and social media. The blog should be the center of your online universe — email and social media are essential in syndicating your content to wherever your audience lives and interacting with them when they engage with your brand there, but you always want the source of the content to be on the site you control. And you should be trying to turn every new visitor to your blog into a subscriber (and ultimately an evangelist) with a prominent Twitter Follow Button, Facebook Like Box, and email subscribe form.
Earned Media: This is basically how the ‘evangelist’ segment of your audience is sharing your message with their friends, and it’s the levelest part of the playing field because earned social media basically works the same regardless of the size of your brand or your budget. And the smaller your audience, the more intimate (and thus stronger) your relationships with your evangelists can be — they are helping their friends discover something new that they love, capitalize on their passion. The basic value of syndicating your content to Twitter and Facebook is not so people can see it (because of the real-time Twitter stream and automatic Facebook newsfeed optimization, an email or RSS subscriber is much more likely to see a given piece of new content than a Twitter follower or Facebook fan), it’s so the people who do see it there engage with and share it in those contexts (i.e. reply/retweet on Twitter and comment/like on Facebook). You also want to give every site visitor the opportunity to be an evangelist by adding appropriate sharing calls-to-action to your blog.
Paid Media: For a lot of smaller marketers, this isn’t necessarily a must-have as long as you’re creative with your audience-building efforts through owned and earned media. Some relatively straightforward examples include: exclusive deals for Facebook fans; one-off contests and promotions to drive your existing audience to turn their friends into fans and followers; and adding more systematic recognition and rewards for your most effective evangelists (aka gamification). If you are going to buy ads, use Facebook’s engagement ad formats and experiment with their robust targeting to get the most bang for your buck. But keep in mind it’s not the quantity of fans that counts the most here, it’s the quality of fans you acquire. So don’t just optimize for acquiring the cheapest fans, try to figure out ways to quantify the LTV of the fans you acquire in terms of the effectiveness of their evangelism rather than just their own engagement.

Optimizing your PEO media funnel

As a smaller marketer, it’s all about performance — you can’t afford to waste your precious time and possibly money on anything that doesn’t have a positive ROI. I always find the best way to think about performance is a funnel, so let’s use the following funnel analogy to talk about the PEO media model in performance terms. You fill the top of your funnel with Visitors through interesting content on your blog (owned media), which helps with SEO, and is possibly augmented with some very targeted paid search (paid media). Your site is designed with clear calls-to-action and possibly incentives to become Subscribers in the form of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and/or email subscribers (owned media), and you can potentially directly acquire Twitter followers and/or Facebook fans with ads (paid media). You activate those Subscribers to become Evangelists by syndicating your content to the places they share and through community management (owned media). And those Evangelists start helping you fill the funnel with new Visitors and Subscribers as they share your content and brand with their friends (earned media).

The key to all of this is obviously the earned media component. As Greg says in his post:

“Earned media isn’t new, but nowadays it’s scalable, sustainable, and influential. Maintaining this earned media presence requires budget allocation, but it’s more ‘management’ than buying: creating an editorial calendar, monitoring the conversation starters, and consistent measurement (over months, not days).”

If I can get 1,000 evangelists to share my message with the right 10 of their friends, that is the most effective way possible for me to reach those 10,000 people. The key for a smaller marketer is making sure it’s also an efficient way to do so. And that takes data.

As Greg says at the end of that quote, the PEO media model is a marathon not a sprint. It’s about ongoing optimization of chronic marketing efforts, not trying to maximize the impact of a single acute campaign. The narrative nature of the human mind means we love looking for that one tweet by an influencer that gets 100 retweets and 1,000 clicks, but the reality is much less glamorous — success is built from a broad base of passionate evangelists who are likely only influential with their core network. So, the challenge ends up being more like how do you go from an ongoing average of 10 clicks per tweet by 100 evangelists to an average of 12 clicks per tweet by 150 evangelists rather than how do you get someone with 10,000 followers to tweet your link once.

The most valuable ways we see performance-focused marketers using data to optimize their efforts within the PEO media model are:

Optimizing your owned media: When it comes to producing and syndicating content on a regular basis, what your sharing, with whom you’re sharing it, and when you share it all combine to play a role in how it’s received and ultimately the results it drives. Only over time and repeated attempts will you be able to start seeing the patterns in the data that can distinguish the impact of each of those factors (think multi-variate testing). And because your fan and follower counts change over time (hopefully up ), we offer a metric we call ‘Efficacy’ that shows the results per 100 fans/followers at the time of the post so you can compare apples-to-apples. Other products that can help you with this specific use-case include Timely (powered by awe.sm ) and CrowdBooster.
Motivating earned media: The steps to building good game mechanics are deceptively simple: design the rules to channel individual motivation into the common goal; make the rules clear to all the players; and publicize the leaderboard. Whatever metrics you’re trying to drive through earned media, whether they’re visits, pageviews, new fans/followers, or signups and sales, you need to tie any recognition and rewards as closely to those results as possible. That’s why we offer trackable share buttons (including FB Like buttons) tied to real conversion tracking.
Quantifying the value of your earned media: If you really want to close the loop, you need to be able to measure your CPA, which could be in time as much or more than money, of an evangelist against their LTV, which has to include the referrals they drive not just direct purchases. So it is important to tie any programmatic sharing by your evangelists to their identities where possible. Many of our customers make use of the ability to tag the shares of their registered users to be able to see the aggregate results each user drives (for example, that’s how we built VIPLi.st on top of the data we track for Plancast).

Why the agencies get the big bucks

Unfortunately for smaller marketers, social media marketing in general and the online PEO media model specifically are still so young that there are no turn-key easy answers on how to put these concepts to work. There are so many emerging use-cases that coming up with the right strategy with optimal ROI for your business is a hard and often times iterative process (and that’s why the services agencies like Halogen provide are so valuable to the clients who can afford them). But we believe data is the great equalizer in marketing and we’ve built awe.sm as a platform that can be tailored to understand the effectiveness of a wide variety of social media use-cases in the terms that matter to your business.

So if you’re interested in discussing your ideas on how to harness social media for your or your clients’ needs, drop us a line to questions@awe.sm or just click here to chat with someone from our team right now. And please follow @awesm on Twitter so we can practice what we preach .

URL shorteners are dead. Long live URL shorteners!

By Jonathan in awe.sm

8 comments

Last week, 364 days after first announcing their t.co link wrapping service, Twitter started rolling out automatic URL shortening on Twitter.com. URL shorteners existed long before Twitter and will continue to exist, but this move by Twitter means the need to shrink links will no longer be mainstream in the way it has become over the last few years.

While this may be the end of consumer-facing URL shorteners as we know them, it’s a key part of Twitter’s efforts to become more approachable to mainstream users and build a bigger, more engaged audience. Achieving those goals will make Twitter even more valuable to publishers and marketers, for whom it will be that much more important to understand how Twitter drives traffic and ultimately revenues. URL shortening has always been the wrong way to think about tracking the value created by sharing. Social media marketing can and should be driven by real performance, not proxies like followers and clicks. And this move by Twitter helps move the conversation in that direction.

Why t.co is essential to Twitter, and what it means for everyone else

There are 3 reasons that wrapping every link on Twitter in t.co is an essential part of their strategy to become a media company:

Twitter needs more mainstream users engaging, not just consuming, and making them have to use a 3rd-party URL shortener to share links is unnecessary friction around the most valuable behavior in the Twitter user experience.
The only way for Twitter to protect users from malicious and offensive links is to get between the click and the destination page. If lots of people are getting hacked, phished, or otherwise scammed from clicking on links in Twitter, they’ll stop clicking.
The reason Twitter doesn’t talk about is that they need the data. Facebook and Google collect information on every click out from their sites, but before t.co Twitter knew nothing about where they were sending their users. Knowing not just what content is being shared but also knowing what content is being clicked is essential to Twitter’s ability to serve their marketer customers in the long-term.

So, the future for links on Twitter is clear. All links shared on Twitter will be wrapped in a 19 character t.co URL, which means there’s no more need to shorten links before sharing them. And thanks to tweet entities, the unwrapped URL will be displayed in the Tweet (see image), so people will know what they’re clicking on.

Beyond shortening: how to get actionable data from social media

With link length and branding no longer a factor, the only reason to use any kind of redirect links (which is what ‘short links’ are) on Twitter is data. And frankly, URL shorteners are fundamentally limited in how useful the data they track can be. That’s why, despite being best known for starting the vanity URL shortener craze (we’re sorry ), awe.sm has never been about making links smaller. Our goal from the start has been to help our customers understand not just what happens in social media but why it happens and how they can create more value from that knowledge.

awe.sm is designed to be more analogous to an ad-server or the way that email marketing software tracks opens and click-throughs, it’s just built for social media (hence the Twitter-friendly tracking links). The core of what sets us apart from a conventional URL shortener is that, in order to make their links as short as possible, they collapse down to always give you the same short link for a given long link (or “canonical URL” in geek speak). This means that if, for example, you wanted to see how tweeting the same thing at different times of day works, you won’t be able to know for sure what traffic was driven by which tweet because all your tweets will have the same link. Whereas, just like an ad-server tracks every impression individually and email marketing software tracks every recipient individually, awe.sm tracks every share individually. This enables our customers to find patterns of success in their sharing activity based on factors like when something is shared, how it is shared, and who shares it, not just the single dimension of what is being shared (i.e. the canonical URL).

Every data-driven marketer knows that proper attribution is the key to understanding and optimizing performance. Our approach of tracking each share action individually and tagging those actions with information about the context of the share provides the ability to understand the truly unique dynamics of social media. But any attribution is only as good as the results to which you tie it. That’s why awe.sm integrates with web analytics solutions like Google Analytics and Omniture to add a social attribution layer to your existing visit, pageview, and goal tracking and it’s why we have also recently added our own conversion tracking abilities to build the entire social funnel from clicks to pageviews to goals and even revenues.

Social data == Big Data

At this point you might be saying to yourself, “Ok, I get it. awe.sm isn’t a URL shortener, it’s a social analytics product.” But for us, analytics is just the tip of the iceberg. We fundamentally believe that the real value of social data doesn’t lie in generating reports for a human to analyze and then figure out what should be done. When you’re tracking every share action, the data are too dynamic and voluminous to make sense of in a spreadsheet — there’s no person sitting behind the AdWords algorithm looking at what gets clicked on and making the decision to serve more of those ads, and harnessing social data should be no different. Our goal with awe.sm is to provide social data as a platform on which others can build, whether that’s determining the authority of Plancast users based on how many attendances they drive, helping companies like BigDoor and OneTrueFan offer turn-key game dynamics around sharing, or enabling ecommerce platforms like Topspin and Storenvy to empower their merchants to identify and engage with their most valuable customers.

Our belief that there are more interesting uses for social data than we could possibly build ourselves is the reason that everything we do is built on top of our own powerful APIs. This approach allows us to power components of other applications, integrate with 3rd-party tools, and support effectively limitless customization to deliver sharing data in the most valuable ways to our customers’ businesses.

The ROI of social media is real and it can be measured

"To put it bluntly, if you’re focusing on fans and followers, then you’re almost certainly doing it wrong."
– Nate Elliot, Forrester

The bottom line is you shouldn’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t track social media the way you track your other outbound marketing channels like paid search, graphical media, and email marketing. Yes, social is different. It’s a word-of-mouth superconductor driven by human dynamics that are as powerful as they are complex. But in the end, the same core methodologies of connecting the results that matter to your business with the actions that drove them can and should be applied.

If you’re interested in learning more about how awe.sm can help your business create more value from social, please drop us a line to questions@awe.sm or just click here to chat with someone from our team right here.

awe.sm @ #sxsw

By Jonathan in General

2 comments

Along with apparently everyone else in startupland, awe.sm’s two Jonathans (middle and second-from right above) will be descending on Austin this weekend to mingle with the social media elite at SXSW Interactive.

If you’re there and want to learn more about what awe.sm does, how cool it would be to work with us, or to chat about ways to measure the performance of social media marketing in general (or if you just want a shirt or some stickers ), we’re @jhstrauss and @cowperthwait on Twitter and you can stalk us on Plancast here and here, respectively. Or you can always just email us at questions [at] awe.sm, which we will be checking throughout the conference.

See you in Austin!

Introducing VIPLi.st

By Jonathan in awe.sm

1 comments

If you’ve ever wanted to see exactly how information spreads through social channels like Twitter and Facebook, now you can with VIPLi.st, a fun visualization of the data awe.sm tracks for Plancast.

Plancast is a great service that enables users to share and discover events with their friends. One of the main ways that social discovery happens is through Plancast’s deep integrations with Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. All of this activity happening off their site is a big driver of traffic and engagement to Plancast, so they integrated with awe.sm to track how these external shares drive results.

The core integration is completely white-labeled using the awe.sm API and Plancast-branded tracking links, giving Plancast full control of the design and functionality of their sharing features. In addition to the dashboard we provide, awe.sm data also is pushed into Plancast’s Google Analytics account so they can see everything in one place.

We originally built VIPLi.st for the Strata Startup Showcase*. It uses the data we track for Plancast and combines it with their attendee data to build a map of how word of an event spreads through the social web. Enter the URL of any Plancast event to see how many sign-ups each attendee drove and through what channels, like this VIPLi.st for SXSW Interactive.

VIPLi.st is just one example of the many powerful use-cases that can be tracked with awe.sm and it was built in under a week using our APIs. For more thoughts on the potential applications of awe.sm, check out my interview with Pete Warden on ReadWriteWeb. If you’re interested in learning more about awe.sm, drop us a line at questions [at] awe.sm.

And if the challenge of turning the chaos of high volumes of sharing data into compelling products like this appeals to you, we’re hiring!

Finally, here’s a video of me telling Robert Scoble basically what you’ve just read :

* Credit to our friend @gregarious for the initial idea for VIPLi.st.

Tweet Button with Shortening for WordPress

By Jonathan in awe.sm, Marketing & Promotion, Publishing

3 comments

On Thursday, Twitter released their ‘official’ tweet button. By default, it uses Twitter’s t.co URL shortening, which means it will display an excerpt of the full link in the tweet. But some folks, like our awe.sm customers (yes, I mean that both ways ), want to easily use the new official tweet button with 3rd-party tracking tools.

So, we’ve whipped up a WordPress plugin that supports awe.sm, bit.ly, tinyurl, su.pr, and digg URLs as well as some other nifty features.

Get the plugin here

Here’s the full feature list:

Configure the placement of the button on your posts: top; bottom; top & bottom; or manual
Choose the type of Twitter tweet button you want: vertical count; horizontal count; or no count
Optionally use awe.sm, bit.ly, tinyurl, su.pr, or digg to shorten the links shared through the tweet button (default is Twitter’s t.co)
Specify the via Twitter username to be included at the end of the tweet and in the recommended users to follow screen after the tweet
Optionally add the author of a given post to the recommended users to follow screen after the tweet (requires the author to enter their Twitter username in their WP profile)
Disable the button on Pages

Use 3rd-party URL shorteners, like awe.sm, and specify the via username.

Add the author of a given post to the recommended users to follow after the tweet.

Try it here:
Tweet

This plugin is primarily based on the excellent BackType Tweetcount plugin and I adapted part of the post author code from the also excellent Twitter Publisher plugin.

If you have any issues or feature requests, please let us know at support+tbws [at] awe.sm.

TweetPo.st Suspending New Signups :-/

By Jonathan in TweetPo.st

16 comments

We are disappointed to announce that we have closed TweetPo.st to new users until further notice. This was a hard decision for us, but our top priority is delivering a high quality user experience for our current users and this is the only way we can do that at this point.

If you have already signed up for TweetPo.st, you will continue to be able to use it and we hope most of the issues that have cropped up in the last few weeks will soon be fixed. If you haven’t yet signed up for TweetPo.st, we really appreciate your interest and hope to open back up soon (please follow @tweet_post to be kept up-to-date on our progress).

The brief history of TweetPo.st has been a series of lessons in building products on other people’s platforms. The first version (called TweetFace until Facebook made us change it a couple weeks after release) was basically a public prototype built in a week about a year ago. It grew out of our desire to have ‘a smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter’ for our personal use and we only did it because it seemed so easy at the time. We didn’t even tell anyone about it other than our friends, but somehow people started to notice. We were happy that folks liked it and even happier that we didn’t have to worry about it while we worked on other things.

But then last fall, we began to get reports of strange behavior when new people tried to signup. When we finally had time to do some serious investigation, it turned out that Twitter had changed things in a way that made it impossible for TweetPo.st to add any more new users without us having to basically rewrite most of it, which we didn’t have the time to do then. It was wasn’t until this February that we were able to go back in and basically build a whole new TweetPo.st from the ground up using the latest APIs from Twitter and Facebook.

Based on our research and planning, we blocked out a couple weeks to implement and test the new version. But very soon into it, we realized that things weren’t going to be that easy — specifically, some of the Facebook APIs we had planned to use were broken and all of them were really slow and/or unreliable. In practical terms, this meant we had to do a whole bunch of extra work and testing to make things work correctly for our users. Unfortunately, the very issue with the Facebook APIs is their unpredictability and so at a certain point we had to make a best guess at how to deal with it and then see what happened.

The good news is that after seeing how the application has performed (or not) in the real world over the last couple months, we have a better sense of the pattern of the underlying issues. The bad news is that the long-term fixes for these issues are again going to require significantly more time than we can give right now. So, we have made some smaller fixes that should restore performance for existing users in the coming days and we have decided to close TweetPo.st to new users until we can make the long-term fixes to properly support them.

We can’t tell you how much we appreciate the patience and understanding of our current users. We recently added Tilly to our team to help with customer care across all our products starting with TweetPo.st, and she has been totally impressed with how cool you all have been. And to anyone finding this because they want to use TweetPo.st, we’re even more bummed than you that we can’t let you in yet (and we recommend Selective Tweets as a lightweight alternative in the meantime). We only want to build products people love to use and sometimes that requires us to go for more love from fewer people. We’re hard at work on a new version of awe.sm, which is going to be our main focus for the next few months. And hopefully, we’ll be able to do some more work on TweetPo.st soon after that. Thanks again for your support!

Find us IRL this week

By Jonathan in General

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It’s a busy week of conferencing for us here at Snowball HQ.

The new guy (more on that soon), Jeremiah (@jeremiahlee) and I (@jhstrauss) will be at Chirp all week, starting with the Prechirp party we’re co-sponsoring that’s happening *right now* at 550 3rd Street in SOMA. We’ll be at the conference all day tomorrow and participating in the hack day on Thursday.

Laurie (@seldo) will be at MySQL Conference all this week and will be attending StreamCamp over the weekend (and coding in between ).

If you’re going to be at any of these events and you want to talk about joining our team, using our products, or building cool tools on our APIs or you just want a sticker, please find one of us and say hi.

Welcome Laurie!!!

By Jonathan in General

3 comments

This is a bit belated, but I’m very pleased to officially announce that Laurie Voss (@seldo) has joined the Snowball team as our technical lead.

I first met Laurie when we hired him to join the Yahoo! Widgets team in early 2007. While I’m not sure he always felt the same way, I liked Laurie from the start: he’s extremely intelligent and hard-working, yet he’d be the last person to acknowledge either. And most importantly to me, he loves what he does and takes great pride in it. I know that if I can convince Laurie to get excited about something, it’s a genuinely good idea.

When I decided to start down this road, Laurie was my first choice as technical co-founder. I remember taking him to dinner and telling him the idea and being greatly relieved when he thought I might be on to something . Unfortunately, U.S. immigration law prohibited Laurie, a UK citizen who was at the time on an L-1 visa with Yahoo!, from joining right away. So, after going it alone (with much help from our friends at Cloudspace) for over a year and more hoop-jumping than I care to think about right now, I can’t express how pleased I am to finally be working side-by-side with the partner I wanted.

Laurie brings to the team the technical expertise to turn our early efforts into scalable platforms, the passion for the web to help us deliver truly compelling products, and the patience to deal with me . We’re both very excited about what we’re building and how we think it will be valuable to others.

You can read Laurie’s much more eloquent account of how we got here and where we’re going on his blog. And if you find the challenges we faced in teaming up as ridiculous as we do, please support the Startup Visa movement (Laurie will be blogging a fuller account of his immigration odyssey just as soon as we ship a couple new things ). Finally, we’re also looking for a kick-ass Back-End Engineer to join our growing team. So, please spread the word.