Sharing is the New Tell-A-Friend

Carie LewisDirector of Emerging Media

The Humane Society of the United States@cariegrls

“I just got a keychain and address labels in the mail from you guys. Now that I see you posting on Facebook and know you're legit, I'll be sending a donation. Thanks for the work you do.”

– Posted to our Facebook Page wall, January 2010

The times… they are a changin’• After you take action….

– Then: Tell a Friend– Now: Share

• Top referrer to our website– Then: Google – Now: Facebook

• Share on Facebook?– Then: Share button– Now: Post, status update, Like, Facebook Connect

Our Constituent Spoke… We Listened

March 2010

“E-mail and social media are the top marketing tactics that will get increased spending in 2010, according to the ‘2010 Marketing Trends Survey’ from StrongMail. The study also found that integrating e-mail and social is one of the most important e-mail marketing initiatives for 2010, just after improving performance, targeting, and growing opt-in lists.”

– Simms Jenkins, ClickZ, Feb 11, 2010

Email, Meet Facebook

Integration is Our #1 Strategy for Success

– Every piece of web content has sharing capabilities

– Every email is shareable– Every page on our website has a link to our social

media presences– Our homepage has a live feed of Twitter and

Facebook– Website content links to related Facebook

Groups, Events, etc.

Tactic #1 – Include Share Links on Emails

Tactic #2 – Include a Link to RSVP on Facebook

Tactic #3 – Make Every Piece of Web Content Shareable

Tactic #4 – Make the Ask Inside the Content

Tactic #5 – Make Sharing the Primary Ask

Tactic #5 – Make Your Forms Shareable

I want it! It looks so easy!Sharing is still a new concept and technology has not caught up yet with user behavior.

• Your technology provider might not be 100% compatible

• You can’t just put a share toolbar on your content and be done

• You have to convince others that this is important and worth investing in

Challenge #1: Implementation

• Where will you put the share toolbar or buttons?

• How will you insert them into your platform?

• Is your site designed on templates or wrappers that you have to edit?

• Do you have access to individual pages’ meta data?

Challenge #2: Customization• It’s not enough to put a toolbar

on your site and walk away.

• You must optimize your share tools so it looks good when a users posts to their page – including the image, title, and text.

• To do this, you must edit the meta data on every page, or template it to pull specific data. (You should be doing this anyway for SEO reasons)

• Think about things like hashtags, “via @” and other ways to make it relevant – many tools have templates

Challenge #3: Buy In• The general rule is the more

fields, links you put on a form, the more it suppresses response.

• Trend = more retweets than clickthroughs on Twitter

• Test! We’re testing putting share tools on our advocacy pages vs. on the thank you pages

• Theory: people are sharing without reading, but that’s okay. The average person has 130 friends and 70 followers

MySalsa Sharing Example: FacebookEvent Landing Page

MySalsa Sharing Example: FacebookPersonal Fundraising Page

MySalsa Sharing Example: TwitterEvent Landing Page

MySalsa Sharing Example: TwitterPersonal Fundraising Page

The Technical Stuff• For our website, we use AddThis in

a template that automatically pulls the title of the page and shortens the URL.

• We’ve also set it to pull a specific image in Facebook Share.

• Twitter has an AddThis template that adds “via @HumaneSociety” on the end

• For our emails, we do custom coding for each one. This is because emails can’t read javascript and we want the ability to customize each (a specific image, hashtag.) The URL that’s shared is the web version of the email.

• If you have no meta data, Facebook pulls the text that’s least embedded (this is what we do for email)

Resources:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share

http://www.addthis.com/help/client-api

http://salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/web/forum/public/topic?topic_KEY=1544

http://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton

Final Thoughts

• To do sharing right, it requires a great deal of customization. • If you can’t make it look good, it’s better not to have it at all.• Never duplicate content on Facebook and Twitter when sharing – different mediums• Know the difference between a status update, post, like, and Facebook

Connect• Watch for secure and custom URLs that pull personal data• When sharing an email, share the web version• Continue to test and stay on top of latest trends (official share buttons)• Put top shared content on your website or even better, use Facebook plugins

to tell people what their friends are sharing – relevance is key• Track your shares and identify trends – keep evolving

Thank you!Carie Lewis

Director of Emerging Media

The Humane Society of the United States

Email: clewis@humanesociety.org

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/carielewis

Twitter: @cariegrls

Sharing Blog Post:

http://cariegrls.blogspot.com/2009/07/sharing-is-new-taf.html

HSUS Social Networks:

http://www.humanesociety.org/connect