New and Improved fbShare.me Button

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:

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

October 26, 2009 | Jonathan | Tags: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

10 Smart Brands using Social Media

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

Suggest to?

February 7, 2009 | Jonathan | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Suggest to Techmeme button for WordPress

As noted in the (several updates to the) original post, the javascript code I wrote for the ‘Suggest to Techmeme’ button won’t work when inserted into posts on self-hosted instances of WordPress (unless you have the Exec-PHP plugin installed, like I do on my personal blog). There is already a very popular plugin for adding sharing calls to action to your blog posts called Sociable, and it happens to be very easily extensible.

So, I just created a custom version of the Sociable plugin that includes ‘Techmeme’ as an option (you can see it in action on my personal blog — it’s under the Share This widget at the bottom of each post). For those of you running self-hosted WordPress blogs, just download my version of the plugin here and install and activate it as you would any normal plugin. Then, go into Settings>Sociable and check ‘Techmeme’. That’s it!

A few requests have been made to include URL shortening functionality into the button, and I’ve got a few ideas I’m going to send to Joost, the guy who maintains the Sociable plugin. Maybe we can come up with something cool together. Stay tuned… ;-)

Again, for those of you who missed it:

DOWNLOAD THE WORDPRESS PLUGIN HERE

If you have no idea what this is all about, read up on Techmeme’s new suggest via Twitter functionality on TechCrunch or the Techmeme blog.

Suggest to?

February 4, 2009 | Jonathan | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Suggest to Techmeme Button

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, the code below will not work for you. Instead, go here to get the plugin.

Techmeme is an essential news discovery tool for me. It replaced my RSS reader and the totally unmanageable list of blog feeds that came with it years ago, and now I’d estimate that at least 95% of the news I consume is discovered via Techmeme or Twitter. For me, more than Digg or Hacker News or anything else, Techmeme is my social news source.

As such, it was big news to me when Techmeme announced this past Wednesday that they’re now accepting “tips” via Twitter. So much so that I was hoping (and even not so subtly suggesting) some of my Twitter “friends” would submit one of the blog posts I wrote since the feature was announced. But, then I realized  most of my friends didn’t know they could do this — and even if they did, the syntax is irregular (why “tip @techmeme” instead of just “@techmeme”?) and the whole process is a bit complicated.

So, it occurred to me we should have a “Digg It” equivalent embeddable call-to-action for Techmeme submission. Since no one else seemed to have made one yet, I took a stab:

Suggest to?

As you can tell, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m just a lowly product monkey, and this isn’t meant to be anything more than my version of a working feature spec.

That said, here’s the code:

<div class="techmeme-suggest-button">
<p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small">
<a style="text-decoration: none" title="Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter" href="javascript:var d=document,f='http://twitter.com/home/',l=d.location,e=encodeURIComponent,p='?status=tip%20@Techmeme%20',q=e(l.href)+'%20'+e(d.title);1;try{if(!/^(.*\.)?twitter\.[^.]*$/.test(l.host))throw(0);share_internal_bookmarklet(p)}catch(z){a=function(){if(!window.open(f+p+q,'twitter'))l.href=f+p+q};if(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else{a()}}void(0)">Suggest to <sub><img src="http://thesnowballfactory.com/images/techmemechicklet_16.png" border="0" alt="" /></sub></a><a style="text-decoration: none" title="What's this?" href="http://news.techmeme.com/090128/twitter-tips" target="_blank"><sup>?</sup></a>
</p>
</div>

If you want to use it, just copy and paste it into the bottom of your blog posts (make sure you’re editing in HTML mode). You can change the size and font of the text  by editing <p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small"> (for example, try font-family: serif or font-size: medium). You can also change the size of the Techmeme favicon by switching out techmemechicklet_16.png for techmemechicklet_24.png (24px) or techmemechicklet_32.png (32px).

Lord knows it’s *ugly* (both the code and the design). So, real developers and designers I invite you to please improve upon it. All I ask is for you to post a link to your better version in the comments below, so we can all use it (and I can stop using my crappy one ;-) ).

Update: This blog is hosted on WordPress.com. And I was pretty surprised when I was originally able to embed the javascript for the buttons and it didn’t get stripped out, because I thought you weren’t allowed to run any scripts on WP.com. Well, it turns out you aren’t but they just don’t check for it when you post. At some point in the last 11hrs, the javascript powering the buttons in this post got stripped out (thereby breaking them, to which Russ alerted me). To make them work again, I’ve now just hardcoded the URL’s for them. The example javascript should still work for you (as long as your blog isn’t on WP.com), and you can see the javascript version in action at the bottom of this post on my (self-hosted) personal blog.

Update 2: The post just made the front page of Techmeme thanks to a mention from Gabe and a tip from Rahmin. If that’s not meta, I don’t know what is ;-) . And, it’s super cool to get some love from Gabe — I’m a huge fan of what he and the team have done over at Techmeme.

Update 3: As my buddy Mark just figured out, even self-hosted WordPress chokes on javascript in the body of the post. The only reason I didn’t notice this on my self-hosted WP blog is because I have the (very handy) Exec-PHP plugin installed, which apparently not only executes php in your posts but also js. The elegant solution (other than you also installing Exec-PHP on your self-hosted WP blog) would be to do a php version or maybe even a WP plug-in or template tag. But, frankly I can’t be bothered ;-) . So, I might just make a bookmarklet that generates static HTML for a ‘Submit to Techmeme’ button based on whatever page you’re on, so you can copy and paste it into any post on any publishing platform that supports HTML.

Update 4: Last one, I swear! Just to say there’s now a ‘Submit to Techmeme’ button plugin for WordPress (self-hosted).

Suggest to?

February 2, 2009 | Jonathan | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »