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Starting today, it’s easier to track the performance of mobile marketing right alongside your other marketing channels. Use awe.sm to create unique QR codes, and measure how many site visitors come to your site from scanning mobile ads in the same way you track clicks & conversions for social networks.

Creating QR codes is easy. When you use the awe.sm publisher or the awe.sm bookmarklet to share a link, click the new QR code channel icon. We’ll generate a unique tracking link with the channel “mobile”, and a downloadable PNG QR code, too.

Pro tip: You can also retrieve the QR code for a link by viewing its details in the awe.sm Stats Explorer. Click “Download QR Code” for a full-sized file.

That’s it! Happy scanning…

PS: Want to learn more neat tricks, or a refresher on how awe.sm can help you measure & optimize social media marketing? Check out our free weekly webinars!…

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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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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We hear those new-fangled iPhone thingies are pretty cool and a lot of the kids today are using them for the Twitter with an app called Tweetie 2. Since the nice folks over at atebits were kind enough to add a custom URL shortening feature to Tweetie 2, we made an awe.sm API endpoint to work with it (and any other Twitter client that supports a similarly standardized URL shortening API call). Here’s how to use it.

1) In the Tweetie Settings, select Custom URL Shortener and you’ll get a screen like this:

2) Enter the following string replacing ‘{YOUR API KEY}’ with your awe.sm API Key (if you don’t have an awe.sm API Key yet, we appreciate your continued patience):
http://create.awe.sm/tweet?create_type=tweetie&api_key={YOUR API KEY}&target=%@

3) When writing your tweets, enter the Compose Menu and click the Shrink URLs button as seen here:

This will create awe.sm-powered URLs using whatever custom domain you have as your account default with the channel (share_type) ‘twitter’ and tool (create_type) ‘tweetie’.

If you’re a developer interested in integrating awe.sm support into your app, please check out our API documentation and feel free to drop us a line at developers [at] awe.sm.

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We hadn’t really planned to announce this yet, but the cat is now out of the bag.

A few weeks back I decided to build a button for my blog that would give me the same functionality of ‘retweet’ buttons, like the ones from TweetMeme and Backtype (both of which support awe.sm by the way ), for sharing on Facebook.

I built it in a weekend on top of our powerful Aggregate Data API, and then we decided some other folks might like it too. So, we put up a little splash page and started quietly asking people to test it. Mashable was the first major blog to launch it this past weekend, and were very helpful in providing feedback. You can now also find it live on The Next Web, and grab it for your own site at fbShare.me.

What it does:

• Displays the number of shares and on hover the total number of clicks for those shares (displays Facebook logo when 0 shares)
• Gives you a choice between a large or small button
• Tracks the shares from the button using your awe.sm API Key or fbShare.me links
• Allows you to add Google Analytics parameters to fbShare.me links

Please note, this is NOT an officially endorsed Facebook tool. It doesn’t have special access to secret Facebook APIs that tell you how many times a link has been shared on Facebook. The count and click numbers are only for share actions that happen via awe.sm. In addition to the shares that occur through the fbShare.me button, any that happen through other awe.sm-enabled sharing or syndication tools, like Sociable, AddToAny, and TweetPo.st, will also be counted.

We put this out there because we thought it was cool and hoped others would find it useful. It is also a great reference implementation for the kinds of valuable sharing tools that can be built on top of the awe.sm APIs. awe.sm is a social media campaign tracking platform for publishers, and we want to offer them the broadest selection of syndication and sharing tools possible. Our real value isn’t in building our own tools, it’s in helping the developers of the thousands of great tools out there offer publishers a way to connect those individual solutions together to form a cohesive system.

Our hope for fbShare.me is that it will inspire more great tools developers to incorporate awe.sm-powered functionality into what they’re building. So if you’re working on a social media syndication or sharing tool for publishers, please check out our APIs and feel free to drop us a line at developers [at] awe.sm.

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First of all, thanks so much to everyone who has expressed interest in joining the awe.sm private beta, especially those of you who have taken the time to complete our survey. We’ve frankly been overwhelmed by the response and sincerely apologize to anyone we haven’t been able to contact yet.

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to continue to limit access to the beta for the foreseeable future. We’re a small team with a new product and our primary focus continues to be on delivering the best possible experience to our existing users. We currently communicate very closely with all of our customers to understand their needs and how we can improve the product to best serve them. Obviously this is quite a labor-intensive process, but we firmly believe it is the quickest route to delivering a great product to everyone else.

We truly appreciate your patience and are seriously bummed not to be able to give more folks access yet. If you’ve already filled out the survey, there’s no need to do so again. And if you want to discuss anything with us, drop a line to support[at]awe.sm (though please allow a couple days for a response). Please note if you’re a developer interested in exploring our APIs, we’re being a bit more liberal about granting access to http://developers.awe.sm so go ahead and apply.

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WP plugin developer Timan Rebel just launched a new WP plugin called Twitter Publisher, which is a great way to automatically tweet new blog posts when they are published.

Twitter Publisher supports both bit.ly and awe.sm to shorten the links going to Twitter, and it will even add Google Analytics campaign parameters to the bit.ly links for you (awe.sm does this automatically ). But the coolest feature IMHO is the ability to give the author of the post credit in the tweet. This is great for larger blogs with multiple authors. However if you’re just rolling solo, it’s not a huge advantage over Twitterfeed (which also supports awe.sm ).

We’re gonna test it out on this blog to see how it works, but probably stick with Twitterfeed on my personal blog for now.

Update: It looks like there are still some bugs in the Twitter Publisher plugin, specifically it is ignoring the setting to use awe.sm and using bit.ly instead. We’ve alerted Timan, and hopefully he will release a fix soon.

Update 2: The plugin should be working correctly now.

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We’ve mentioned awe.sm a couple of times on this blog, and now it’s finally time to pull back the curtain and tell you guys what it’s all about. awe.sm is an open sharing analytics platform — a way to instrument, track, and analyze how content and attention flow through the social web. Since February, we’ve been working with a select group of application developers, tools partners, and content publishers to test and refine awe.sm and help us get it ready for today: the launch of our private beta! While we’re not quite ready to take all comers, we are now officially opening up the invites beyond the group that’s been so helpful these last 3 months. If you’ve already been in contact with us, thanks for your patience and we’ll be reaching out to you directly over the next few weeks with your invite. If you want to know how to get an invite, read on…

awe.sm for Publishers
Our mission here at the Snowball Factory is to help connect creators of interesting content with the people who love it. And we believe social media provides an incredibly powerful infrastructure to do that. awe.sm is the centerpiece of our efforts to make social media a more efficient, effective, and measurable marketing channel for content publishers. awe.sm integrates with the tools you already use to make the whole of your social media self-promotion efforts (e.g. pimping your latest blog post on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc) greater than the sum of the parts by giving you a comprehensive view of the resulting traffic *right in Google Analytics*. awe.sm is currently supported in Twitterfeed, AddToAny, TweetFace (which we built too ), and our version of the Sociable WordPress Plugin. We’ve been working with TechCrunch as well as a number of smaller publishers during our alpha, and as of today we will be handing out invites to publishers who complete our survey. For more information on our publisher offering, please drop us a line to publishers [at] awe.sm.

awe.sm for Developers
In building awe.sm, we realized that sharing analytics is a pain point felt by a broader group than just publishers and we wanted to make our solution available to others building applications with sharing components. To that end, awe.sm was built from the APIs up and developers can recreate any of our features (or build new ones of their own) entirely in their own apps. We like to think of it as analytics infrastructure-as-a-service. And we’re proud to already be powering features of Zentact, Famery, SimplyBox, and KISSmetrics. We’re still limiting access to our API documentation at this point. But if you’re a developer who would like to check it out, please send a brief description of your application and how you would like to use awe.sm to developers [at] awe.sm.

awe.sm Partners
Each publisher’s approach to social media marketing is different, and we don’t believe there is (or should be) a one-size-fits-all solution. And while we will build some tools, like TweetFace, ourselves when we can’t find existing ones that do what we want, we’d much rather partner with folks who are totally focused on making a great tool to solve a particular publisher need. That’s why we’re very excited to announce awe.sm support in AddToAny, one of the most innovative share widgets out there, to go along with our previously announced Twittefeed integration. In addition to recommending partner tools to awe.sm publishers, we also plan to offer an affiliate model for partners who drive premium awe.sm signups. So if you’ve got a publisher tool that you’d like to integrate with awe.sm, please hit us up at partners [at] awe.sm.

Private-Label URL Shorteners (What you can get right now!)
One of the most notable features of awe.sm is that it can shorten long URLs, which we’ve been told is particularly useful for this thing called Twitter that everyone is talking about . It is such a notable feature that a bunch of people asked us if we could do it using domains other than http://awe.sm, which we can. In fact, we’re already powering URL shorteners for some of the above mentioned partners including TechCrunch (tcrn.ch), KISSmetrics (klck.me), Topspin (t.opsp.in), and AddToAny (a2a.me). So starting today, we’re officially offering *private-label URL shorteners running on your domain starting at just $99 per year*.

For $99/year, you get:

• a hassle-free hosted solution with no set-up costs
• 10k shortened URLs per month and no limit on redirections
• full clickstream stats and Google Analytics integration
• support in all awe.sm-enabled publisher tools
• 99% monthly uptime money-back guarantee

We also offer advanced features like the ability to build your own stats UI as well as dedicated servers and higher SLAs. You can get started now or ping us for more info at domains [at] awe.sm.