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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).

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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 .

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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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* Update: We’ve suspended new signups on TweetPo.st until further notice. Full details here. *

I’m very happy to announce  we have begun private beta testing the new version of TweetPo.st. I’ll include the full back-story below, but I personally apologize for the lack of communication on TweetPo.st the last few months and for any frustration it may have caused. We’re really excited about the new version because, in addition to being able to take on new users again, we have added support for Facebook Pages, our top requested feature.

TweetPo.st is a smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter. Here are the key features of the new version:

• Post tweets as Facebook Status Updates
• Post links you tweet on your Facebook Wall (so your friends can watch videos and see pictures right in their News Feed)
• Ignore @replies
• Change @mentions to real names
• Only post the tweets you specify to Facebook (using either inclusive or exclusive filters)
• Track links posted to Facebook with awe.sm
• *NEW* Supports both Facebook Profiles and Pages
• *NEW* Manage multiple posting configurations from Twitter accounts to Facebook Profiles or Pages

While we’re eager to get as many people using the new version of TweetPo.st as soon as possible, we need to limit the number of users until we work out all the kinks. We don’t anticipate this private beta period lasting more than a couple of weeks, but feel free to email support [at] tweetpo.st if you’d like to help us test before then. Otherwise, please follow @tweet_post to be the first to know when it’s publicly available.

The Back-Story

About 4 months ago, we started seeing bug reports from users who were encountering errors signing up for TweetPo.st. It took some investigation, but we soon figured out that, due to the way we originally built the app (i.e. not using Twitter OAuth, which wasn’t available at the time), TweetPo.st had hit Twitter’s following/follower ratio limit. Without going into too much detail, this required us to completely re-architect TweetPo.st from the ground-up using Twitter’s new Streaming API.

Originally, we thought we’d get this all done in December. But, we’re a small team working on 3 products (awe.sm, TweetPo.st, and fbShare.me). So, sometimes things don’t happen as quickly as we’d like. However, we dropped the ball on communications in this case. We didn’t want to announce a revised schedule until we had one we felt we could stick to, and new things continued to come up that kept us from finishing TweetPo.st. So, instead we went radio silent, which was not the right thing to do.

We apologize for not handling the situation as well as we should. And we hope you find the new version of TweetPo.st worth the wait when we make it publicly available in the next few weeks.

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I am flattered to have been invited by Sean Power and Alistair Croll to participate in a panel during their Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York this Monday (February 16). I honestly don’t know what I’m going to talk about, but the other folks on the panel (Jascha Kaykas-Wolff of WebTrends, Jennifer Zeszut of Scout Labs, and Lenny Rachitsky of Webmetrics) are really impressive .

It looks like the bootcamp is sold out, so I’ll see you there if you’ve already booked. Otherwise, feel free to get in touch if you’d like to meet up at the show or in the city: I’m @jhstrauss on Twitter or jonathan [at] snowballfactory.com.

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It’s been a little over a month since we first launched our sharecount button for Facebook and what a month it’s been. With very little promotion, our weekend coding project was quickly being served on over 5M pageviews per day. And now, Facebook has released an official version of their own.

As part of Facebook’s button release, they also announced a new API for pulling the share data directly from them. They were kind enough to give us a preview of this API, and we actually launched a new version of our button using the combined Facebook and awe.sm share data over the weekend. Here’s what’s new:

• Uses combined share data from Facebook and awe.sm for the most complete stats
• Cleaner look and slightly taller (9px) large button (it is now 53px wide by 69px tall)
• Ability to customize the background and text colors of the badge in the large button
• When there are no shares, the badge in the large button is clickable as a sharing interface

We also upgraded our WordPress Plugin to accommodate these changes and include some user requests:

• Support color customization in plugin
• Added the ability to disable the button from appearing on Pages (vs Posts)
• Improved plugin performance by eliminating javascript

At this point, our version of the button is primarily targeted at existing awe.sm publishers. But, there are a few reasons other folks might want to use it over the Facebook version:

• You think ours is purdier
• You like our WordPress Plugin
• You want to use the Google Analytics integration

Please let us know if you have ideas on how we can make the button even more useful.

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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.

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I just finished my presentation at BarCampLA 7 called ‘URLs are the new cookies’ (name credit: Alistair Croll). I talked a little bit about awe.sm, but the point was more to discuss the problem statement awe.sm is trying to solve.

See for yourself:

And here’s a link to the PDF version. Thanks to everyone who attended for being a great crowd and having some really insightful questions.

P.S. This is my second time presenting at BarCampLA. The last time was at BarCampLA 1 in 2006

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I just got back from a really fun (and delicious) lunch with Peter of Pantless Knights, who is in LA working on a hilarious new video, and one of the main things we discussed was the idea of Entertainment-as-a-Service. The term is a reference to the concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is a business model generally contrasted with the conventional packaged or ‘shrinkwrap’ software model. Essentially, SaaS is a subscription business and packaged software is a retail business.

The entertainment industry is a retail business. Books, movies, tv shows, music are almost universally sold as one-off purchases. But, those things are just the packaging and the people selling them to you are just middle-men. The business of entertainment (not to be confused with the entertainment *industry*) is fundamentally a marketplace of attention between fans and content creators — fans have a finite supply of attention for which content creators are competing. So, then what is the entertainment industry? To use a very relevant analogy, it is the collection of intermediary businesses (i.e. publishers, studios, networks, labels) that have been acting like investment bankers, taking the raw materials of talent and creativity and packaging them up in a form they know how to sell (i.e. retail) and commanding a big slice of profit along the way. Entertainment doesn’t want to be a retail business, and that is the fundamental essence of the disruption the Internet has unleashed on the entertainment industry.

[Clarification: For the sake of this discussion, I'm using the term 'content creator' to represent those who add unique creative talent to the production process. As my dad pointed out, content creation is rarely a solo effort (most notably in film production, which can involve hundreds of individual contributors) to which studios, networks, labels, and publishers often contribute substantial value. But as those contributions are opaque and thus interchangeable as far as the consumer is concerned, I am excluding those who make them from the class I refer to as 'content creators' in this post. Otherwise said, even though the sound engineer plays a crucial role in creating the album, no one buys it based on *who* the sound engineer was.]

When you think about what elements of the entertainment business technology has really undermined, it’s nothing more than the packaging — the time slots and release dates and viewing windows and region codes that are artificial constructs of these middle-men trying to slice-and-dice the content into as many tranches as possible to squeeze out every last cent of profit. Just like the investment bankers and their CDOs fragmented and obscured the connections between investors and their investments, so have the studios, networks, publishers, and labels introduced complexity into the connections between content creators and their audiences. While that complexity, and the companies who created it, may have been a necessity in an era of technologically inferior marketing and distribution systems, they are simply market inefficiencies in the Internet age.

So, what is the difference between retail and subscription when it comes to entertainment? In a recent post on my personal blog about SaaS vs shrinkwrap software, I wrote:

The business model of packaged software invites feature bloat, because it’s upgrade driven and you need to continually find ways to justify why Thingamajig 2009 Pro Edition™ is so much better than Thingamajig 2008 Pro Edition™. Software as a Service businesses have a much different (and arguably greater) challenge, they need to continue to create value for their customers month after month….So, you end up with a much more customer-centric product…and a vendor who is truly interested in addressing your customer needs.

The first priority of a retail business is to maximize sales, building brand loyalty and repeat business may be means to that end but they always take a back-seat to whatever else will drive more sales. Whereas in a subscription business, customer retention (and thus customer satisfaction) is always top priority, even above new customer acquisition. So if a studio believes they can get a lot of people to see a crappy movie by spending more on marketing and less on quality, they will (and do, again, and again, and again…). Because all you’re buying from them is the packaging, they know you aren’t really paying attention to whether it’s a Fox or Warner Brothers or Paramount film (do you buy your cereal based on who made the box it comes in?). But, a director would rather disown a bad film than endorse the studio releasing something that doesn’t meet his standards and his fans’ expectations. This is because the director knows that his relationship with his fans is a subscription business, and if he disappoints them he will be unable to continue exchanging his content for their attention in the future. The studios understand this too — they don’t give Tom Cruise $25M (plus a cut of the gross) per movie because his acting skills bring $25M of quality to the screen, they do it because he has more than $25M in ticket, DVD, and merchandise sales worth of fans. 

Entertainment is naturally a subscription business, and the Internet returns it to its natural state. The content creators who thrive online are those who understand this and focus on the ongoing satisfaction of their customers (see Ze Frank, Michael Buckley, Chris Leavins). The level of customer satisfaction these creators deliver is really only possible on the Internet because they can go direct-to-consumer without need of the middle-men and their packaging. These creators publish in all forms — video, photos, blogging, micro-blogging, music. They do not see themselves constrained by the legacy dividing lines of the entertainment industry, their goal is to entertain their audience by any and all means available. There is no distinction for them between primary and ancillary content, they are 360° entertainment brands. The other thing that has made these creators so successful online is their direct interaction with their customers. The best your most engaged fans can do offline is give you their personal attention (and the money that comes with it) and try to recruit others to do so as well. But online, they can interact with you and become part of the show. Empowering your customers is the surest way to make them even more engaged. As I wrote in another recent post on my personal blog:

Bringing your customers into the product development process has the dual benefits of helping you build better and more customer-centric products and making your customers your most passionate sales people (because after all, it’s their product too).

So, the Internet enables these creators to spend more time listening to their fans and creating new content they’ll enjoy while outsourcing the marketing to the community for free. This is the exact opposite of the offline retail model in which the studio takes money out of production budgets to put it into marketing campaigns. The ability to establish deeper relationships with their fans also allows online content creators to attain higher average attention per customer (ARPU) than is possible in the retail world, thereby making it easier to build more value by going deeper with a smaller audience. 

To be clear, I’m not trying to say the only business model for content on the Internet is a recurring subscription fee. The ‘subscription business’ to which I’m referring is more the theoretical exchange of value between content creators and their fans, which can and will take many forms — including selling packaged goods. I’m also not saying that the online entertainment market is solely the domain of Internet-only content creators. In fact, I believe the Internet is most powerful as an entertainment marketplace when the quality and reputation of a historically offline content creator is freed of the constraints of the legacy packaged goods business model. Take for example Josh Freese, who gets extra points for using this freedom precisely to illustrate the absurdity of the conventional retail approach.

And now, I leave you with the profound product of the coming entertainment revolution:

P.S. Hat tips to Ian Rogers for the marketplace of attention thinking and Umair Haque for the marketing vs quality dichotomy.

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I just read a great post over on Mashable, that I wanted to share here:

Presenting: 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media

While this is ostensibly a post about large national/global brands, I found the underlying lessons from these examples to be potentially useful to *anyone* seeking to use social media to build brand equity. You should definitely go read the original post for the full details on each campaign, but here’s my take on the important lessons from each one:

1. Blendtec Blends it on YouTube – Creativity is king; advertising is just content someone is willing to pay for you to watch, it doesn’t *have* to be annoying and uninteresting
2. Burger King and the Sacrifice Facebook Application – People like to have fun
3. Starbucks Asks for Your Advice – Making your customers feel like they’re part of the process builds brand loyalty through a sense of co-ownership
4. Sun Microsystems and the CEO Blog – Kill them with transparency (a variation on my dad’s old adage: ‘kill them with kindness’); disarm your critics by giving them a voice and answering them back
5. IBM With Lots of Blogs – Content == Authority; as long as it’s quality content (and on-brand), more *is* better on the Internet — it gives you higher search engine ranking and it doesn’t hurt to be the first thing a prospective customer finds when they do research on your area of interest/expertise (what do you think this blog is all about? )
6. Zappos on Twitter – A company (not just a brand) can have a personality in the Internet age, and it is defined by its employees; being accessible and relatable reminds your customers that there are real people behind your brand, and that tends to make them like you more (unless those real people really suck )
7. Comcast on Twitter too – Empower your community manager to address customers needs; Frank from Comcast doesn’t just spew marketing platitudes into the Twittersphere, he actually helps customers in need (Corollary: if you have an unempowered community manager fronting for your brand, he/she is bound to get slaughtered and likely do more harm to brand equity than good)
8. Ford and Social Media PR – Bad press doesn’t go away on the Internet; it’s not like the conventional media world in which all you need to do is weather *this* news cycle — that disparaging blog post will be popping up in searches for your brand for the rest of your life and beyond, so you’d better get out there and address it
9. Graco Uses Pictures on Flickr – *Every* customer should be writing a testimonial; make it so easy and fun for your customers to show their brand loyalty that it’s a no-brainer for them
10. Dell Doing it Everywhere – Social media isn’t media; this isn’t an ad buy you make selectively based on demographics and vertical content, it’s a horizontal platform for customer engagement comprised of many different elements — you may not have the time or resources to be everywhere, but take the time to craft a campaign in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts