If you haven’t had a chance check out the new and improved Grouptivity Share+ widget (hint: Simply click on the Share+ button below).

The new widget features a simplified and streamlined user interface. Depending on its settings and where it’s used, the widget usually has three tabs: Email Article, Email Clip and Social Media. The Email Article tab, as the name implies, allows you the email the post or article you are currently looking at. Simply enter the recipients email address, a message as well as your email address and you are ready to go! The Email Clip tab is similar to Email Article but allows you just to email a clip (and not the entire article). The Social Media tab allows you to bookmark the article on one of the popular social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, Delicious, Furl, Yahoo!, StumbleUpon and many others).

Since the launch of Social News, our Facebook application, we have been flooded with inquires from publishers and bloggers on how they can add their sites or publications to the list of available news sources in Social News. These sources can be accessed by clicking the Choose News tab in Social News.

To help answer their questions I decided to summarize the process:

1. Sign up as a Publisher on Grouptivity
Fill out the simple form on the Grouptivity website and get a publisher ID number and access to Grouptivity’s power sharing tools.

2. Embed Grouptivity’s Share+ Tools on your blog or website
Add Grouptivity’s sharing tools to your site by simply cutting and pasting HTML code, or install the Grouptivity Share+ WordPress plugin on your blog.

3. Readers share your content and distribute it on social networks

Social News from Grouptivity is a Facebook app that allows Facebook users to read and share the most popular news headlines within the social networking site. News headlines get voted up every time they are bookmarked, e-mailed, or shared by a user - so great headlines rise to the top!

Social News supports any number of publishers and is pre-populated with news feeds from the BBC, CNN, TechCrunch, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other sources.  Social News, however, allows ANY blog publisher distribute their news content through the Facebook application! Bloggers that sign up as as publishers and add Grouptivity’s sharing tools to their blogs or sites, can opt to have content shared from their site automatically syndicated into Social News. Users on Facebook can then access content from the publisher by simply adding them to their list of news sources in Social News. Facebook user can click here to add Social News to your Facebook profiles. Publishers and bloggers can click here to signup up and start syndicating shared content on Facebook!

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch did a great piece titled Grouptivity Launches Social News On Facebook on the launch of our Social News Facebook application. Schonfeld does a great job of covering the key components of Social News and concludes by saying:

Blogs that want to create a Facebook presence that goes beyond merely republishing their feeds might find this appealing. It is an implicit recommendation system that shows someone’s entire Facebook network what news stories they are bookmarking and sharing.

Sharing Is Where Its At!
Statistics show that Internet users like to share content! The other day I mention that sharing interest news or content on the Web is as prevalent as the Internet itself and that nearly ninety percent (90%) of adult Internet users revealed that they actively share content with others via email.

Social News: What is It?
So what is Social News? Social news is news and content that is shared, enhanced and leveraged in the context of a social network. At Grouptivity we are very much about taking the simple act of sharing content and moving it into the realm of social networking.  Grouptivity helps create “social news” by making it easy for readers to share content with their social network. As users share content they find interest on their social network, they also engage their friends in conversations and discussions around it. This in turn, allows social news to leverage the social network to continue

Sharing interest news or content on the Web is as prevalent as the Internet itself.  Nearly ninety percent (90%) of adult Internet users revealed that they actively share content with others via email according to Sharpe Partners, an award-winning interactive marketing firm. The study on viral marketing found that 63% of respondents shared content at least once a week with as many as 25% sharing content daily or almost daily.  The report identified news content as the second most popular category (56%), after humor.

Email usage patterns, however, are beginning to change, as social networks and other community sites are providing inboxes of their own.  With the growth of social networks like Facebook and Myspace, there as been a lot of talk lately about whether they will replace email as the primary form of communication. Earlier on in the year, Saul Hansell of the New York Times in his insightful post: Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network explored this recent phenomena and suggests that ISPs like Hotmail and Yahoo mail are taking the “The Facebook Threat” seriously.

Although email is probably not going to go away anytime soon, its undeniable that more and more people are heading in the direction of using social network as their preferred means of communicating. It is no coincidence that at Grouptivity, we have been moving our sharing tools and distribution network in that direction.  In coming weeks, we will be announcing a powerful set of social networking tools that allow bloggers and publisher to quickly and easily distribute popular content from their blogs or news sites directly into social networks like Facebook. This means that readers of publications in Grouptivity’s content network (such as Midland Reporter/Telegram – MyWestTexas, a member of the Hearst family of publications) can choose to either share interesting articles via email or social bookmarking, or access and share them directly on Facebook using Grouptivity’s Social News application.

Many of you have noticed that Grouptivty has updated it logo and branding!

You will also notice that we have also updated our website as we continue to focus on providing content publishers with tools and solutions that allow them to distribute their content more effectively. We would love to get your feedback on the recent changes so feel free to drop up an email to blog@grouptivity.com

MySpace is finally ready to launch its OpenSocial-based development platform. According to Mashable, developers can now submit applications for review and the first set of approved applications will be available to users on March 13! In January, I talked about MySpace and OpenSocial in my post Facebook Platform vs. OpenSocial. Although it was announced last November, Google’s OpenSocial partners are only starting to launch their platform initiatives with 3 large sites (MySpace, Google’s Orkut and Hi5) launching over the next month! MySpace’s Jim Benedetto did a great job at the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference outlining MySpace’s upcoming platform’s strategy.

I also mentioned that as a service provider to content providers, Grouptivity is about providing publishers with increased traffic through improved and widespread distribution. Social networks (like MySpace and Facebook) are ideal environments that can leverage online content sharing tools and services to help publishers reach a wider audience and allow users to consumer and share “social news”.

A growing number of content publishers, including both media companies and upstarts, are still trying to figure out their social networking strategy as part of their overall social media strategies! One of the things Grouptivity does is help publisher develop and deploy their “social news” strategy.  By providing a real-world gauge of what content users are actually sharing, Grouptivity enables content publishers to get real-time visibility into who is sharing what. Deploying this capability, in the context of a social network like Facebook or MySpace, gives users the ability to actively or passively share news that is interesting to them and it gives publisher a platform for increasing distribution, readership, and traffic!

When Facebook launched its f8 application platform it experienced a 37% increase in growth and the number of available application quickly grew to over 10,000 by the end of year. It is going to be interesting to watch MySpace’s OpenSocial platform roll out as far as the number of applications being developed and if they do indeed bring users back to the site.

Forrester’s Charlene Li recently put out a report with Josh Bernoff titled “Social Technographics” that segments online users into one (or more) of six categories. These segments were derived from studying how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies.

Charlene summarizes the report as follows:

We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.

Social Technographics represents an interesting look at online users. Grouptivity’s target user would probably fall into at least three of the six categories:

• Creators: Creators self-identify themselves as leaders and influencers (52-56% of them share information with friends about products that interest them). Creators actively create and share content online, a quality that would definitely characterize Grouptivity users.
• Critics: These users engage in conversations and discussions. They make comments, post ratings and reviews. Critics would be most likely to engage in the content networking process that Grouptivity enables.
• Collectors: As the name implies, Collectors are “consumers” of information, they use RSS, tag and bookmark pages. Collector may not actively share content via email, but would most likely use Grouptivity to bookmark or “collect” news articles for later use.

There’s a lot to process and analyze in this report and while the report document is not available for free, a PowerPoint presentation the summarizes its findings is available for free on the web. 

According to Nielsen Online’s AdRelevance (November 2007), email sites are by far the number one generator of ad-revenue (followed by general and national news – a distant second and then portals).

This chart really speaks well to the fact that Grouptivity generates revenue for partners (many of whom are national news publishers) by marrying email-based content sharing with their news content.

Publishers increasingly are looking to ad-supported content as their primary revenue driver, adding more content outside their subscription barriers or doing away with premium content entirely to encourage readership and drive traffic. This strategy makes sense. According to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, “Internet advertising revenues in the US set a new record of $16.9 billion in 2006”. That’s a 35% gain over 2005! It hit another record of $4.9 billion for the first quarter of 2007, according to the most recent IAB/PWC report, a 26% increase over Q1 2006!

As publisher’s scramble to bolster traffic, many are turning to services like Grouptivity to help them drive more traffic to their sites! I summarized the benefit Grouptivity offers content publisher in a post I did on publisher-centric content sharing:

Grouptivity is a “publisher-centric” web service that provides content publishers with increased traffic and improved SEO by enabling content sharing and discussion on their sites and transforming the sharing activity into “user-generated” content that is readily exposed to search engines and syndication services.  By leveraging an under-used asset, the “Email this Link” button, Grouptivity captures user interest on a publisher’s site, builds a discussion community around it, and then promotes the content based on its popularity. By providing a real-world gauge of what content users are actually sharing, Grouptivity enables content publishers to get real-time visibility into who is sharing what, in addition to traffic and improved monetization.