Sep03

Shared links on Facebook doubled to 18mm from 9mm per day, in last five months

Trends in Activity Streams
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I spoke with a VC at a top-shelf firm the other day. He said (paraphrasing), “Sure, users spend a lot of time on social networks. But they aren’t a significant source of traffic to other sites.” Well, there is further evidence that this past, Google-centric view of the Internet is changing – fast. To wit: the number of links posted by users on Facebook doubled from 9mm to 18mm each day in the five months between April and August 2009, according to this story in the Financial Times.

And the impact of this sharing can be dramatic. According to the article, links from Facebook now represent 19% of all traffic to the Huffington Post and they are the number one driver of traffic to Perez Hilton.

Imagine if your site grew its user base by 19% with links from Facebook. Imagine if Facebook referred more traffic to your site than Google! It’s possible now, and it will be increasingly important as the volume of external links from Facebook continues to explode over the next year. And of course, we’d love to help you do it.

Jul11

Are you triggering your users to share?

Otherwise Interesting!,Trends in Activity Streams
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The point of SocialFeet is to increase the velocity of sharing. BJ Fogg of Stanford University has an interesting model of behavior change that can inform us how to do that. Here’s how Fogg recommends increasing an important target behavior, like sharing:

if the behavior you want is not happening, work backwards. Is it being triggered? Is the person able to do the behavior? Is the person sufficiently motivated to do the behavior?

Applying this advice to sharing on your site, SocialFeet is unique because of its triggers. It’s not rocket science, but we are the only product that actually prompts users to share right after they have taken a valuable action! Also, we facilitate sharing by making it a simple straight-through process of lightboxes that do not leave the current site. And perhaps most importantly, we simplify the process of sharing by allowing users to automatically share everything they do.

Contrast this approach to a typical “share this” button. Sure, they also give users the ability to share. But how do they trigger the behavior? It’s not enough to just hope that your users will click on a share button if you are serious about increasing sharing as a behavior.

So, are you triggering your users to share?

Jun07

Disintermediation 2.0: From pages to streams

Trends in Activity Streams
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Over the past decade, the web has transformed how customers discover products and services across all sectors in the economy. (One example: Amazon’s sales are up 2x over the last 5Qs, whereas retail sales in general have actually declined.) Will “streaming” be “Disintermediation 2.0″?

Streams are small bits of information that flow linearly. Twitter is an obvious example, but also Facebook, RSS feeds, Bloomberg and lots more. People are now less concerned about the totality of an information resource and more concerned about what has changed and what is new than they were before.

So, the Internet is shifting from pages to streams. From static to fluid information. From isolated to connected information. From consuming to engaging information. From seeking to discovering information. The fundamental character of the Internet is becoming transformed. Nova Spivack in an interesting lecture at Stanford (transcript as .doc, more elaborate blog post on the same topic) puts it this way:

This is a shift; we’re moving from a static web to a real time web. I’ve been calling this the “stream,” so we had the web and now we have the stream. It’s just a metaphor, but I think it’s going to be a big metaphor, just like the web is a metaphor, for this coming next ten years of the web.

This new metaphor is going to be big, indeed! Think about how you use google, up until now. Google is amazing at helping you achieve what you intend to do. Somehow, you want to know something or purchase something. You fire up google and type something in, and with luck and a little ingenuity, you find a perfect match for the thing you were seeking.

But streams can influence the prior step–determining what you intend to do. Think about how you use Facebook or other social network like twitter. You are “bored” (e.g., looking for something new) so you want to check out what your friends are doing. There, you find ideas about movies, books, tv shows and other things that interest people you care about. You can be linked directly from the idea to the thing itself, whether it is a book purchase or an online video. You go directly from new intention to action, bypassing the need for google entirely.

As a successful web site operator, you probably rely on search engines and email lists to drive traffic. But do you have a streaming strategy?

At a minimum, streaming represents a terrific new marketing opportunity. But I’d go further. Will you be a pioneer like Amazon of the ’90s or be like a dinosaur like Best Buy? Think about streaming as Disintermediation 2.0.

May28

Borthwick on the opportunity of Activity Stream Publishing

Trends in Activity Streams
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John Borthwick of Betaworks has a thought-provoking piece on the opportunity for sites to tap into activity streams on social networks to drive traffic to their sites. He points to a few interesting data points and quotes to highlight the opportunity:

The impact of Activity Stream Publishing is large and growing.

  • Betaworks companies receive “15-20% of daily traffic via social distribution — and the percentage is growing”
  • 28 million items are shared on Facebook each day, with 18 million users sharing something daily. (source: Newteevee)
  • An increasing number of sites, like PerezHilton.com, get more traffic from Facebook than google

Activity Stream Publishing is critical for mass adoption of interactive content

  • An increasing amount of the web isn’t easily searchable–like flash game and toolbar plugins, and so alternative distribution is critical for mass adoption
  • “In the last trailing 30 days, twitter has been the #1 referrer of traffic. And the conversion rates are strong.” (Duncan Miller, founder someecards)

Inaction is a serious threat. He boldly claims: “The complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web.” (read)

You should read the entire article, which has a terrific style that I cannot even attempt to imitate here. And needless to say, SocialFeet is excited to help you capitalize on the disruptive opportunity that activity stream publishing affords.

May27

The "converse" of FriendFeed

Trends in Activity Streams
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After hearing our elevator pitch, an executive at Yahoo said: “SocialFeet is the converse of FriendFeed.” I think that description is entirely apt.

Friendfeed and other services like Tweetdeck are aggregators (see its definition). They combine, filter and sort streams from multiple sources. As Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures points out, these services will indeed play an important role in the social media space. Used this way, aggregation means “aggregation across multiple publishers.”

What’s the converse of aggregation across multiple publishers? Rather than readers aggregating publishers, the converse is publishers aggregating readers. Readers aren’t the only ones that want to play across all these emerging streams of information; destination sites want to participate as broadly as possible, too!

So, the “converse of FriendFeed” is indeed an interesting way to think of SocialFeet. We are indeed an aggregator of readers across multiple streams for destination sites.