Andrew:	In this session we are talking about how tracking social media can get you actionable insights. This session is led by Jonathan Strauss, co-founder of awe.sm. A powerful platform for tracking and proving what happens when you empower audiences to spread the word on your behalf. I'll be facilitating, my name is Andrew Warner. I'm the founder of Mixergy.com. We are proven founders, each.

Jonathan, do you have an example of what our audience is going to be able to do at the end of this session?

Jonathan:	Yes. Hi, Andrew. 

Andrew:	Hey.

Jonathan:	For today's session, I'm really going to focus on Plancast, who are one of our customers who use the data we provide around sharing to help run their business more efficiently. These are some data. It's actually real data. I'm not telling you what time period it is from. Plancast gave me permission to show you some of it. In this case--

Andrew:	Actually, I'm sorry. Before you go into the data, let's take a look at Plancast and just explain to people who don't know what it is, what Plancast does. I think it will help them understand the data. 

Jonathan:	Sure. Plancast is a social event website where people can basically tell their friends about [inaudible]. Sharing is an integral part of their customer acquisition and engagement strategy. 

Andrew:	I'd go, I'd put an event up on Plancast and not only does it make it easy for me to keep track of the RSVPs but makes the event a little bit more social because my attendees get to know who else is going to be at the event. Maybe start chatting before the event, during the event, after, lots of little social components there. That's what it is. Let's take a look at the data now and understand how because they get social, they grow their business.

Jonathan:	Right. In this case, in this indeterminate period, you can see that we are helping Plancast track the results driven from social. The ones that they care about primarily are the number of sign-ups of net new customers, who are signing up to the system. Attendances which is basically an engagement metric of how many people are counting themselves into events. Comments, again, kind of a sub-engagement metric and some [??] which are how many people are subscribing to other people on the site.

These are the levers that they are trying to optimize in their business. In this case, what we are showing you is that through social sharing they were able to drive meaningful results that we are seeing here. They drove through social sharing this period, almost [3,000] page views, almost 500 new users, 1,600 RSVPs, 176 comments and over 2,200 subscription which are valuable to them. They increase the ongoing social engagement of customers within Plancast.

Andrew:	OK. You are using them as an example of a company that really embeds social into their product, doesn't just add a 'tweet me' button or a 'Like this' button. Let's see how that happens. I know that's one of the big points of this session that you want people to make. While you bring up Plancast to show how that happens, I'll say that, the audience keeps telling me, "Hey, Andrew. There is always one idea that makes the time and money I invest in these courses makes the whole thing worthwhile.

I think for me, this is the one thing. As you listen throughout, you're going to find, I hope, many of those little one items. Many of those individual items that alone will make the whole time you spend with us together worthwhile. Here, they do have 'Tweet' button, they do have a 'Like' button, they do have 'Send' button. That's the way most of us would do it. 

But you're saying they get much more traction because they embed even further. So let's see how that happens. This is an event. What is the event?

Jonathan:	This is the after party for the Tech Crunch Capital Event next week.

Andrew:	OK.

Jonathan:	I think that one key take-away that we see when we work with customers around how they can get the most out of social sharing, it's exactly the point you were making. That is not to think of it as a tacked-on after thought but really to think of your social integrations as first class features in your product. 

Here, the biggest call to action on the Plancast page is this 'Count me in' button. It doesn't just in this case, communicate add me to the event, it is also because when I signed up for Plancast they asked me to connect my Twitter account and Facebook post. This is going to auto-tweet on my behalf and tell my friends that I'm going to this event even if those friends aren't on Plancast.

An example of that is, right here, you can see...

Andrew:	I hope the editors can get this in. We have a ton of tabs open here, because we wanted to have every single tab available for this session. That's what people tweet out? 

Jonathan:	Yeah, so you can see these all say, "I've made plans for, I've made plans for, I've made plans for..." These are auto tweets that are coming from Plancasts that you can actually see that the source is Plancast. This is the result of all these people. Every time you count yourself into an event on Plancast, you're basically marketing for them. 

We'll talk about this in more depth in a minute. The reason that that works so well for them is because it's virtuous. They're not just trying to coop their users into being free marketing, they're actually adding value to their users. When I'm counting myself in on Plancast, I want my friends on Twitter to know that I'm going to thing, so that they can be drawn there and they can do it as well. So, it's a win-win integration, which I think is a great showcase. 

The other thing that they do is, if you notice, that "Count me in" button was just replaced by an "Invite Friends" button. They're going one step further beyond just, hey, tell everybody generally what you're doing and encouraging you to invite specific friends. In this case, they pull in friends who aren't just on Plancast, but also people you're connected to on Twitter. That allows you to send things through Twitter directly to them.

Andrew:	I see, so, for example, Andrew Hide is on your list, because you're following Andrew Hide. If you want to invite Andrew to the event, they've now made it dead easy for you. You just click and boom he gets invited. 

Jonathan:	Right. In this case, Joe has a Twitter icon over him. He is not actually a friend on Plancast, he is someone I follow on Twitter and Plancast was very smart about this where, they're basically encouraging me to tweet directly at friends instead of just generally as well. They do the same for me.

Andrew:	So, that's what we're trying to get people to understand, your idea that Social needs to be embedded, not added as a button. I know that's something I need to get better at. I can see that when it's done right, the data supports the power of it. The first step to doing that, as you and I talked before the session started, is that you've got to figure out what your goals are. Do you want to give me an example of a company that knows what its goals are?

Jonathan:	Sure, I'll actually give you three. What's important is it's the right goals for your business, and there's all different types of business. One of our customers is Gilt Groupe, their goals are pretty straight forward. It's selling more merchandise. So, it's driving revenue. When someone tweets about a product from the Gilt Groupe website, we're helping them track, not just what's being tweeted, but who's tweeting it, when it's being tweeted, and the results that are being driven through that. 

Andrew:	If they know what their goals are, beyond those buttons at the top, how is Gilt using Social? Are they embedding any more than that? 

Jonathan:	That's something we can't discuss right now. They've referred to this as their "Sharing Ghetto." They are hard at work, and we're working in conjunction with them on integrating Social more natively into the site. That's a big priority for them because they've realized that just as tacked-on afterthoughts; it's only going to perform so well. When you think about tying more into action, like, "Hey I just purchased this" and we can talk a little more about that going down the line of personal endorsements. Like when I'm saying, "I just counted myself into this event on" or "I've made plans to do this on Plancast," that personal endorsement resonates a lot better than just the, "Hey check out these shoes."

Andrew:	We're going to get into that later, and we're also going to talk about how to make it all more integral. I'm going to shelf the idea of "How can an eCommerce site make Social a more integral part of their business?" I want you to go onto the next example of a company that knows what its goals are, and we're going to come back and talk about how eCommerce can this well.

Jonathan:	This is a music artist site called Jill Andrews. This widget here is provided by a company called Top Spin Media, that is a partner of ours. So, Top Spin is basically helping the music artist go direct to fan and build those relationships. So, of course, this is a little more nuance than just a straight up Ecommerce. Of course, the artist wants to sell things but they're also interested in building their fan base. And so for them, understanding who their most valuable fans are, is an important part of their community management efforts and kind of how they cultivate that community beyond just tracking what sales were driven by.

Andrew:	OK. So when you say that they know what their goals are, they're goals are to get, what are they're goals? We're using them as an example. How are we doing that?

Jonathan:	So a lot of it depends on, most up and coming artists who are using social media are very much like new start up because their primary goal is to acquire fans, and to expand their user base, if you will. And so the best way to do that is really through social channels. If I'm telling my friends I really love this band or I really love this act, that's when you're going to get not only some of the best qualified referrals, but those people are going to come in with, most likely, a better experience because it's going to be able to be a more social experience.

Andrew:	OK. So now that we know what they're goal is, how are they doing it? Are they doing anything with those goals?

Jonathan:	Yeah. So if I'm actually going to say I want to download this. So in this case, the conversion they're trying to drive is actually to get an email address and so if I go through this whole funnel and I put it in, I put my email address in, I'm going to get basically a link emailed to me to download this, but that is also called the action that comes along with that to tell my friends that I just downloaded this and I love it and stuff like that. 

Andrew:	OK. All right. Let's take a look at another company. 

Jonathan:	Sure. And this is basically how sharing would happen from that button to Facebook and ... 

Andrew:	That's how sharing would happen from the button that's within that little video player. Right?

Jonathan:	Exactly.

Andrew:	OK. All right. Cool. So let's see another one.

Jonathan:	So another, third example, which is more of a media example, a customer we work with, which is Ted. Com. And so, Ted's primary goals are very much like bigger brands which is, they're trying to increase awareness and conversation about, not just Ted in general, but the specific talks, and so for them, they're looking at sharing integrations as ways to understand the diaspora really of where these things go and how they're stimulating conversation, and what types of things stimulate conversation. 

Andrew:	I see. So for most of the people that are going to be listening, and frankly for me, the whole goal of social in everything is to just get more. Not more conversation, but more registered users, more customers, more people on the site. They've got a different goal here. I understand it and what you guys are doing with them is you're helping them track that. You're not helping them track how many people are coming in and registering with their email address and then buying Ted, you're helping them understand (?) how far is each tweet going. Where are people clicking and so on. 

Jonathan:	The amplification ...

Andrew:	OK. All right. And I like that, one of the reasons that I wanted us to include Ted in here is because I want to make the point that it's OK to have a different set of goals. Everything that I want, which is registered users and customers, or traffic. Registered users, customers in that order and as much as possible isn't necessarily with the person who's listening to us wants. Whatever the goal is, be aware of it. Let's talk now about how once you discover what your goal is to make social an integral part of your business. So we'll look at a few examples here. We looked at Plan Cast before. How do we look at me? Let's look at my example on my site and you tell me what you think of what I'm doing here. Describe what this page is since you're kind of a part of it. In fact, you're definitely a big part of it. 

Jonathan:	So this is the page that you guys set up for getting people to tweet or access to the live stream of what we're doing right now, and in a lot of ways, it's very well done. It's a very clear call to action. You have a clear over or explicit reward associated with that action, so when I tweet, I'm getting instant access from it. And it's generating, I might actually do it. See, I hadn't done this before. But it actually goes through an (?) flow which can be a little bit intimidating for a lot of users. A lot of implementations think that you need to use (?) to be able to track things authoritatively. That's not always the case, but we'll follow through, and I guess I just tweeted, about a very meta tweet, that just happened.

Andrew:	So, what I did exactly, what we're doing here is saying in order to get something you need to tweet. What we're not doing well is, first of all, the design, we hacked that thing together very quickly. What else would we need to do to make that work better? You're saying you don't have to have, (?) being that little box that says do you give Andrew permission to tweet on your behalf that you're going to be at this event. What should we be doing instead?

Jonathan:	Well, so here's the actual tweet that it generated, which I've been seeing a lot of in the last few days, because it includes my Twitter handle in it. So that shows that there's a pretty good volume of tweets that were happening with that. I would say some of the stuff that could probably be optimized; A is most users when they want to tweet something, whether or not they want to change the default, they often times want to at least be able to see and confirm the text that's going to be sent out. In this case, your default text is whimsical, and probably makes sense for me to tweet something like that, especially about myself. But not everybody necessarily likes to leave their tweets with all [??].

Andrew:	They don't? I thought that's what President Obama did every time, every time he tweets it's "oh, yeah, I just went in to talk to congress and give them a little whip ass." OK. So that's a good point, what else?

Jonathan:	Then, I guess the next step would be, you see what happens when I click through. So, you basically get, this is the end of the funnel, so assume that I'm not me, assume that I'm one of my friends who just saw this and clicked on it. I would basically get dumped into the same page, where I started. So it's kind of a little bit of a circular loop here, this makes no mention of the fact that whoever is clicking on this got here through my tweet, and so that I think, is a lost opportunity to contextualize the inbound.

Some folks have little boxes on their blog that look at refer and say, "Hey you got here from Twitter, maybe you want to follow us on Twitter, you got here from Facebook, become a fan on Facebook. So those types of landing page optimizations, using the context of the entrants, those are important ways to refine your conversion rates, when you think about social sharing as marketing and the result as a funnel. 

Andrew:	Got you. So, what we did right, you and I talked before, you said your tie sharing to an action on the side, I'm looking here at my notes. So that's the first step, tie sharing to some action on the site, and Plancast does that in some of the examples that we'll see here. The next step after that is to find an action that's logically social, and that's something that we did not do. The fact that you're tweeting this out to get access, it's not logically social, with Plancast it is, you click in order to join the event, but you're also clicking to tell your friends that they should join with you because the event gets better the more you get your friends to join. What about Lawntruck? I see that you've got them up, they took it to the next step where they made it where the action that they picked is logically social. Right?

Jonathan:	Actually, I think Lawntruck is very much in line with what you guys are doing, which is more of this explicit incentive, these quick pro quo. So it's kind of this barter with the user, that say's I'll sign up for Lawntruck right now, which is great, so thanks.

I want to get an early invitation, so again, with the explicit incentive of why should you be sharing this. To earn something, you're going to get something in return, or becoming part of our sales force, and I think most users are savvy enough to be OK with that. Frankly, in both your case as well as the Lawntruck case, what's good about the design is it's virtuous rewards. Because if I don't really like Mixergy, if I'm not really interested in this guy Jonathan Strauss's talk, then my reward isn't going to be very valuable.

So, by fact, that my reward is tied to the thing I'm sharing, that works pretty well. The same thing here, if I didn't care about getting early access to Lawntruck, then I wouldn't share it. Where it breaks down is when you start giving people monetary rewards, for example, that are kind of not linked to the goal of the sharing action, where...

Andrew:	What do you mean, what's an example of that not being done well?

Jonathan:	We work with folks like BigDoor and OneTrueFan, who are doing gamification features for websites. They have had to build in rules to prevent people from spamming the system and trying to game the system, because if your just trying to earn points or referral rewards. 

For example, we were talking yesterday with one of the big online ticket website and they're interested in using our system to build in a social referral program, but they're very concerned wit not being gamed by scalpers who are going to try and get a discount on the ticket they're scalping. You have to be careful. 

As soon is money is involved, as soon as something fungible is the reward, that's when you have to be worried about people trying to game the system, and you have to build in anti-spam mechanisms. For your stuff and LaunchRock, what's the point of gaming this? I get earlier access to LaunchRock? That's [??].

Andrew:	One thing that you told me was when you're saying FindActions that logically are social, you and I were talking before about how on Mixergy, we should be saying, 'Tweet this for live access.' The benefit is, that when you Tweet it, your friends will be there to watch live and interact with you as you're watching, so it enhances it. If you go to Tinychat.com/Mixergy. I'm going to pick on my own channel on Tinychat, I think we'll be able to show that they do this really well. They take it to the next step. 

They say to use your Twitter account and we'll talk about services Twitter later, but for now we're just fixating on one to make it easier. They say that if you use your Twitter account to log in, you won't have to create an account here. But also, when you Tweet, you'll be encouraging your friends to come, and the experience becomes better for you and your friends, because now they're there to chat with you. Tinychat is a video and text based chat site. It looks like it's taking a little bit of time to come up. I think on the bottom you'll see the chat room somewhere. Maybe it's loading up right now.

Jonathan:	That's a great example of one of the reasons that social is getting so ingrained into peoples' sites. It started in their applications. It started more, more . . . 

Andrew:	There it is. There's that pop up. If you click on that, I believe what they'll do is Tweet to your friend, 'Hey, I'm at the Mixergy chat room. Come chat with me.'

Jonathan:	That is a really interesting part of the social integration into applications, because it's not just for customer acquisition, even though that's the topic of this talk. This is really about how you can use social to drive low cost customer acquisition and engagement. There you go, invite your friends. Very similar to the invite flow that we saw in Plancast, where they're pulling in, who are my Twitter friends, and allowing me to target them directly. One of the things that we found out . . .

Andrew:	Can you close that tab before we move on from this part of the conversation? I don't want too much sucking up your bandwidth as we're talking. I want to make sure we get as much attention on you as possible.

Jonathan:	I pulled up this Tweet from turntable.fm because it really showcases the potential value of social in improving the product experience, not just as a marketing vehicle. It can be both. In turntable's case, which is one of the hottest start ups around. I think they just raised $7,500,000 on a $37,500,000 valuation. This Tweet actually was from a week or two after they first started launching, their soft launch. 

In order to get in initially, you had to sign in through Facebook and you had to have a friend who was already on it. This goes to show the power of that approach in the fact that just two weeks in, their addressable audience was over 2,500,000 people in the friend to friend network. The benefit of taking that approach wasn't just the exclusivity and virality of it, but was also the fact that everyone that came in was pre-qualified, and their social network had been by default, feeded. 

When I landed in Turntable, I was finding all these people in there who I knew that I could listen to music with. It wasn't just wandering around with a bunch of strangers. I think that has been a huge part of their success. Similarly, Plancast told me that in looking at their sources of new users, the ones who came in from social were in the end, the most valuable and the most engaged. They were coming in with a social contact, with a social graph that existed.

Whereas, the folks who were coming in off of search and other non-social channels were coming in... Most applications today are better with friends. You want to go and use these social channels to get more friends in there and build a strong social network. If I show up and I have no friend, then I don't like the application.

Andrew:	OK. What we have learned is, make it an integral part of user experience, tie the sharing to an action on the site. Tie it to something that already exists, don't just put it in the ghetto, as one customer of yours said. Find actions that are logically social and integrate there. You also said that you don't have to use auauth [SP]. Auauth was that box that popped up that said the site, in this case Mixergy and in another case is was TinyChat, permission to tweet on your behalf. 

What's another way to do that and ensure that people are taking the action that you are requiring?

Jonathan:	This is a little bit geeky. This is where aws.sm can come and adds value for a lot of our customers. If the user is logged into your site, we can help you track the tweet through just a standard tweet button or like button or Facebook share button and attribute it back to that individual. They do need to be authorized to your site in some way. 

It doesn't have to necessarily through auauth or Facebook connect for you to be able to tell whether or not they successfully tweeted. Most importantly, there were results driven through that.

Andrew:	I see. If I'm understanding you right, you're saying auauth will create a unique URL for each sharer and it will see if that unique URL is shared? No?

Jonathan:	Aws.sm will not auauth.

Andrew:	Oh, sorry. I meant to say aws.sm. Aws.sm will create a unique URL and then it will say, "Did this URL get tweeted? If it did, give credit back to the person who did it." 

Jonathan:	Right. Right.

Andrew:	Perfect.

Jonathan:	I can show you an example right here using the tweet button on Plancast. This link that was generated PlancastN1C is actually because I'm logged into Plancast, that is going to be tied to my Plancast user name. Any clicks, page views, sign-ups, whatever they want to track that are driven by that action can be attributed to back to me. 

I can show you an example of that in the data later.

Andrew:	OK. Actually, let's talk about ecommerce. I promised that we'd get into it. How can an ecommerce site make sharing an integral part of the experience and by doing that, get more people to share?

Jonathan:	Sure. One of the main things that we find ecommerce sites like to do, again, the idea of the endorsement rather than the random share. An example of a not as effective way to do it, this tweet that is happening from here today, actually, [chuckles] doesn't say much. It says new balance. It doesn't even say what product.

Andrew:	Yes. That really is a ghetto. Even if they get an endorsement, it's not integral and people aren't going to do it. They might do it, but they don't have to do it, so they are not likely to. 

Jonathan:	Sure. If I added this to my cart or I purchased it, that's where app Zumo code does a very good job...

Andrew:	Ah, perfect. Let's take a look at how app Zumo does it.

Jonathan:	App Zumo does a great job of merchandising to you. I count one, two, three different calls to action basically above the fold to try and drive me to share this. They have also done for certain free promotions the same thing that you guys did with the live view which is say, "You've got to tweet this in order to get access to it. It's free except you have to tweet it." 

I think one of the virtuous ways, very similar to how Plancast does the "I've made plans" auto-tweet. Is to say, when you've bought something as part of that flow, do you want to tell your friends that you bought this and potentially get a discount or whatever. Even that discount can many times be secondary depending on what you're purchasing, the fact that you purchased it is a strong indicator that you're likely to want to share it.

Andrew:	OK. I think we talked before the interview, before this course, about -- I'm an interviewer, sorry I keep using the word "interview" for everything. I'll have dinner with my wife and it'll be the next day, "That interview that we had last night was really good" meanwhile it was dinner, a date with (?). If you click on the "plus invite friends" you can kind of show how this happens, but it is part of the flow you say if you were to buy Shopify at the end of the process, they would say you can now get a discount or earn credit for the future by Tweeting out this link or posting it on Facebook. There it is. There is the app sumo URL that's unique to you that they track it whether you do it on Facebook or Twitter or any where else it doesn't matter. OK. So that's how they're kind of making it integral.

I also interviewed the founder of Living Social and of course they made their reputation, let's see if we can get that part of Living Social on your screen. This is a show and tell so I keep saying, let's bring up the websites. I want people to be able to see all these examples as quickly as we can get to them and include as many as possible in here. What they did was they said, you get our offers for free if you get three people to take them and that's a big encouragement. For a long time it was one of the main calls to action, is what I'm looking for.

Jonathan:	They are in a lot of places.

Andrew:	They really are. They just keep growing and growing.

Jonathan:	Yeah. I think . . . 

Andrew:	I think if you just close down that drop down menu and just click the "skip this I already have an account" that should take you right to it.

Jonathan:	I was going to get my deals in Palermo, Italy.

Andrew:	I think it might even send you to Palermo, Italy and then get you the deals. So can we see that? Is it still up here?

Jonathan:	Yeah. So, want it for free, buy first then share a special link, if three friends buy yours it's free.

Andrew:	Perfect. Right. I see that they are reducing their call to action. I think they're going just for sales right now, but that was an integral part of their message for a long time and it was a main Call to Action. So there's an example of how e-commerce can make social integral and a deep part of the business. All right. You started talking, sorry is there something else you wanted to say on this topic before I shift us?

Jonathan:	I was just going to say that one thing, especially on e-commerce and social in general not to forget is email. A lot of people, especially the daily deal stuff; (?), Groupon, Living Social have grown a ton through building their email subscription list and the way that they do that is, they give you a deal an offer, not only do they split the (?) to share, but a lot of the stuff your implicitly going to want to share. Hey, I know a person who is going to like that. I find myself forwarding daily deals that I'm not interested in. 

Thinking about how to socialize email, putting Tweets and Likes and Calls to Action in email in addition to the inherent forward-ability of emails, is something that we see a lot of cutting edge e-commerce folks looking at as well.

Andrew:	OK. Actually, why don't we talk about that? We're kind of skipping ahead here to another section, but will come back and talk about what's being shared, which was supposed to be our next section. The part that we're talking about now is:	Where to Share. We've been talking a lot about just Twitter and we've kind of been mentioning Facebook, I kind of saw on your screen, Google. Just started talking about e-mail. Do we just put as many of them as possible up there and let people pick? Is there one we want to concentrate our effort on? What do we do?

Jonathan:	The short answer is, it depends. 

Andrew:	Depends on what?

Jonathan:	It depends on your business and really your target audience. Each of these channels has their own advantages and again going back to the (?) data, (?) is primarily Twitter and Facebook. We actually breakout for them, in this table we're breaking out Tweets versus Direct Messages on Twitter. Facebook posts versus Facebook Likes versus Facebook Shares because if you're really trying to fine tune stuff, those show up differently in the Facebook News Feeds. 

At a high level, Twitter is the network of loose ties, which means that the potential amplification effects or the viral (?) can be really high if you hit the right community, but because it's just that easy to re-Tweet, everything's public by default, things spread like wildfire when they hit the right tender. But if your audience isn't a Tweeter-centric audience, PlanCast happens to be, because as you can see from this graph here. 
 
The blue lines are the percentage that Tweeter is contributing. Actually the blue and the yellowish orange are from Tweeter. The three Facebook channels are big [??] there, but when we look at other customers, some customers are in a more less tech savvy demographic. Their audience is much more likely to share on Facebook. 

Facebook is great because as a network of close ties, while my message when shared on Facebook isn't going to necessarily be delivered as broadly. Per Facebook like, or per Facebook share, it's probably going to be seen by less people, but those people have a much closer relationship to me. For example, in one of these tabs...

Andrew:	I know, I was just thinking that myself. Where is that? Because we know that Facebook isn't going to show everything that your user broadcasts. It's only going to select a few people to put into that main feed, and those people are going to b really closely connected do you. 

Jonathan:	Right, and these are people Facebook knows I interact with and a little known fact. You can toggle this here, this most recent. It's actually going to show you the real time feed of new things that are coming through by all my friends. 

But the top news is what everybody sees by default, and that's really tied to people that I'm interacting with closest on Facebook. That means that when I see something from them while I may be part of a smaller audience that seeing that. I'm much more likely to be interested in what they have to say. 

So that's very powerful in itself. LinkedIn is great if you're doing something that's business oriented. Folks like TechCrunch and, Business Insider, see a lot of value from sharing on LinkedIn because it's peoples professional networks, e-mail is still huge. But it doesn't have the potential amplification effect because when you're sending email it's always either one to one or, one to few. 

The user has to explicitly enumerate all the recipients, whereas I Tweet something that's going to everybody. I like it on Facebook that's going to my closer network on Facebook, and so those are different considerations to help you understand what channels are going to do the most for your business. 

Andrew:	All right, what do we Tweet out, what do we post on peoples Facebook pages? What's the message that we encourage them to put out? What kinds of messages first, and then we'll pick one. 

Jonathan:	Going back to PlanCast as the example. I have my generic Tweet, or generic share which is really the, hey look at this. This is that default Tweet, oh, they're smart, or, that's interesting. Because I opted in to this, I think they changed the default text to say that I've made plans. 

But if I haven't opted in... Let's see what happens. Let me refresh it. It's going to say, hey, check out the TechCrunch [??] party. They also have these ones down here. That's not going to get the kind of click through rate. Actually it still says I've made plans. Well, I guess they default it to that. 

You can imagine the difference someone just generally saying, hey, check this out, versus the endorsement which is, hey, I'm doing this, or I just bought this. It's giving you one more level, like you tell your friends about a new product you heard about. 

Well it's one thing to say, hey, I heard someone mention it on the news, or it sounds interesting. It's another thing to say the endorsement of, hey I jut bought this thing it's amazing. And then the third category is really the invitation which is saying, hey, you know, I think this will be great for you."

Andrew:	I see. Come join me at this event. There is either the bland statement; this is an article on this and that. There's the endorsement; check out article, I really like this article. Or this is a great Tech Crunch event, in this case since that's what on your screen. The last one is the invitation; come join me at Tech Crunch, August Capital after-party. 

Jonathan:	Right. To show you kind of a different--

Andrew:	Yes. Let's look at the stats here.

Jonathan:	In the stats, these are the different ways that people are sharing from Plancast. The auto-post has the highest volume, right? People are hooking that up, it's going out automatically. That makes sense. It is also generating the most page views, or it's pretty high up there with the page views per share. They have five page views per share which is pretty good. 

The conversions are relatively low, 10%. For each visit that's generated about 10% actually take one of those four different actions that we are tracking. Which are, signing up, if they're not registered, attending an event, commenting on an event, subscribing to a user. What is interesting is while the manual invite a friend feature basically had half the sharing volume.

Andrew:	At half.

Jonathan:	Right? And had one-tenth of the visits, it was very targeted. Invite-a-friend is, again, more like email because it has to be explicitly enumerated, where you say, "Oh, I really think Andrew is going to be interested in this." Look at that conversion rate. Right? When people are invited and they have that explicit, "Hey, this is for you." They tend to convert at a much higher rate.

Andrew:	I see. We actually see that over 50% that invite a friend even though it has a tenth, just 10% of the number of uses of the auto-post it has 50% just half of the overall number of conversions, 60% actually. It's responsible for a lot of the conversions. What that tells me is this, if I don't have a massive audience, the first thing I should do is figure out how to get my audience to overtly endorse the product.

I should be thinking if I'm tweeting or if I'm getting them to put it on Facebook or whatever it is, I need to come up with ways for the user to endorse the product. I don't need to have as many people. I just need to have more of an endorsement is what I'm picking up from this. What do you think?

Jonathan:	Yes. The strongest conversion comes from the explicit invitations, right? The, "Hey, Andrew, I think you'll really like this." That makes sense, right? Social media is really about real-world social phenomenon just manifested online. A lot of this stuff is just thinking about examples of how you would talk about this stuff in real life with your friends and whatnot. 

When I tell a friend, I think this will be good for you, they're obviously much more likely to check it out and potentially convert, if I know what I'm talking about. I'm only going to tell that to a relatively small percentage of my friends. The point that you're making is that this is kind of the happy medium, the auto-post here which is 11% of the people who visited the endorsement of I've made plans for this. 

The reason it's a higher volume and has a higher number of page views is because I'm broadcasting that out to the world, but I'm broadcasting it with my personal endorsement. It's not just a "Hey, check this out." It's the "Hey, I'm doing this." That converts at a pretty respectable rate of over 10% of the visits turned into a conversion.

Andrew:	Actually, when I had little traffic on my sight, what I probably should have done was created 'tweet' buttons that said, "I recommend Mixergy" or "You should be reading Mixergy", something that has a lot of endorsement power to it. You know what the other thing I'm looking at your stats right here and I really appreciate you sharing real stats. The 'tweet' button is number six on your list there. That's the standard button that I have on my site, that most people do. 

Compare a 129 tweet shares with that button to the auto-post which has 4,000. Many times more. That goes back and just emphasizes what you said earlier which is that, you want to make it an integral part of the process. If it is just a button on the page, you might as well be calling it what build group calls it, the ghetto. 

Jonathan:	The sharing. Yes.

Andrew:	What do they call it?

Jonathan:	The sharing ghetto.

Andrew:	The sharing ghetto. Frankly, that is what I have on my site too much. I wanted to go beyond the ghetto. I want it to be an integral part. 

Jonathan:	You are not alone in that, just so you know. We use Turntable as an example of folks who really harnessed social earlier. But to show you, they have a similar sharing ghetto here. Easy wins for Turntable. What is this going to do, it's probably going to just say... Oh, it says DJ-ing in the awe.sm room, come hang out. I think they have actually optimized that. Originally, the tweets were much more like, "Hey, check out turntable.fm/awesome. 

Why not have an auto-tweet or auto-post? Whenever I go play music, I shouldn't have to go tweet that manually. There should be an option just like Plancast has for Turntable to be able to tell all my friends on Twitter and Facebook, et cetera, I'm DJ-ing now, come check it out. 

Andrew:	Gotcha. I'm broadcasting, come listen live so that it is an integral part and it's logically social because let's all listen to what I'm broadcasting now. It's a social action. You have up on your screen an ever note share page ... [chuckles]

Jonathan:	Yes.

Andrew:	... with a copy/paste from our notes. You wanted to make this point here. You think about sharing as part of a funnel. Take me through this thought process here.

Jonathan:	Sure. If the first point that we were just talking about is really to think about how social integrates into your product as a first class feature. It is something that is adding value to the overall user experience but it's also logically connected. It's an enhancement to the actions that user's are taking in the normal flow of using your product.

Andrew:	OK.

Jonathan:	Once you've gotten them there and you've invested the time and energy to try and get them to share something, now you need to start thinking about what is being shared as an ad unit. Just the same way as you are running AdWords or Facebook ads or whatever it is, even e-mail marketing. You are going to think about the copy, the call to action, the targeting that is all important in terms of deciding whether you want to emphasize Facebook or Twitter or what type of default copy. All that stuff we covered.

But then, you spent all that time, additionally, thinking about that, what happens when someone actually clicks through? You have done all this work to get people to share and then, you spent all the time optimizing to make sure what they're sharing is as effective as possible to get people to click through, how do you go from that click-through to conversion?

You can't just stop at the water's edge. 

Andrew:	I see. We are thinking about the whole funnel. The funnel being, what button do people see when they tweet? The next step is, what text did they see, that encourages them, I guess what button. Then, they tweet. What text goes in the tweet, where they come once they click the tweet and throughout the process we want to keep testing. 

From what I understand about awe.sm and the reason I invited you here, awe.sm helps track that. We will come back to how it tracks it in a moment. You are suggesting we track the text. Maybe it is what I said earlier, that Obama has. What did we have that tweet say? Yee-haw. Oh, yeah.

Jonathan:	Yes, yes. 

Andrew:	Maybe, that's what works or maybe it's something more subtle. We want to test that. The landing page that people come on, you gave me a few ideas for how to test that too. I would instinctively be thinking that landing page maybe needs to have a blue button instead of a red button or different text. You're saying, no. 

Maybe it says, "This is the person who tweeted, put their picture up. Right? Like, there it is. Tell me what else, what else would you, as you were looking at this, what else would you tweak?

Jonathan:	The first thing you know about this is that the person came in through Twitter, right? You could tailor the contact here. Like, "We know you're on Twitter. Get more out of it." There are all kinds of things you can know about that contact. Twitter itself is a great example of how to think about turning visitors into conversions. 

Actually, I'll start by logging out of Twitter. I think a lot of people have seen this sometimes, if you're accidentally logged out of Twitter and you click on someone's tweet...So I'm going to back to Andrew's tweet that was promoting this. Now, you know, Twitter has actually been experimenting with lots of different calls to action here for these signed out for use case[SP]. 

But when you think about it, right, tweets can be indexed. People can arrive at tweets through a whole variety of means, and so it makes sense that you should have something that's optimized not just for a user that signed into Twitter but one who signed out. This is contextualized to, you know, to this page. It's not just, "Sign up for Twitter or it's not just showing me the tweets. Don't miss any updates from Andrew Warner."

Andrew:	So if I'm Plancast or Mixergy, I need to think about what happens when someone just hits the page, not through a link from a friend, but if they just hit a page? If it's from a link from a friend you want to say, just like through Dark Knight, I guess that's who's tweet you just clicked on? Andrew, "Dark Knight is going to be there..."

Jonathan:	Right.

Andrew:	...Do you want to come to this event, too?" That's what would happen if the person clicks on that. If the person just came in from a search engine or found it on the home page, it would just have a list of all the people who are coming and treat the click differently.

Jonathan:	Right.

Andrew:	Gotcha.

Jonathan:	So I just logged out of Plancast to show you this experience.

Andrew:	Oh, I see. It is different here.

Jonathan:	Right, and Plancast actually uses...it's having a little trouble loading right now. But they're using a Facebook social plug-in called the Facepile plug-in, which if I happen to be logged into Facebook, which I am...

Andrew:	Then they're going to show you all your friends on Facebook who are coming.

Jonathan:	Exactly.

Andrew:	Gotcha.

Jonathan:	That's a great context-...and that's a relatively recent addition for them, but I'm not sure why it's not showing up. It normally shows up right here where it's got all the faces of my friends who are already on Plancast. And so that kind of thing is a great way to..., again, you want to think about contextualizing that landing page to try and drive the people to convert as best possible.

Andrew:	OK. It's possible too, that what they're doing is testing. I've actually had founders on here say, "Let me show me you just one cool aspect of my site," and then they say, "Oh, no it's not there. We're testing, we're moving it to see if it still works. We're testing another feature and we want to emphasize that." So, that's another item in that note there you said, "Look for logged in verse not."

Jonathan:	And just as a note, you know, one thing they do really well here is, in addition to having this clear call to action about signing up, they also do, you know, leave the "count me in" call to action the same, right, but just because I'm not signed up right now, or because I'm not signed in right now, that's where they put the sign in, which makes sense, right. It helps you get into the flow where, "I want to sign up because I have an action I want to complete and it's logical that I need to sign up to complete that action."

Andrew:	OK. "Don't squander time and energy on an opportunity. Set the context." I get it. What do you want them to do? "Be very clear." We keep seeing that in call to action. Of course, I'm looking at my notes. Finally, when we take a look at the stats, we keep talking about your company Awesome here but we haven't talked about..., we haven't shown it. You and I have a mutual friend in Mark Schuster. He's probably a closer friend to you because he put money into your business, right?

Jonathan:	He did. He did.

Andrew:	He and his firm are big backers of Awesome. Sorry. What were you going to say?

Jonathan:	Well, no I was going to... We can go to Mark's dashboard in a second. I was actually just going to walk through, finish off with some of the examples of stats for Plancast.

Andrew:	OK.

Jonathan:	Some of the things that...One of the things we built, kind of as a showcase, so we talked about for this context, for this interview, we talked about the types of things that you'd want to optimize when you're designing social integration. So we talked about where it's being shared, Twitter vs. Facebook, direct message vs. like, emails, etc. We talked about how it's being shared. So which tools are driving...which methods are driving the most traffic. 

One thing that's interesting is, you know, it can be used in certain ways. Like I said earlier Ted likes to know who's sharing stuff so they can engage with them through their community management. This is actually showing you for this period the top 15 users on Plancast, in terms of what they've driven.

Andrew:	I see. So we want to know, I see, you're showing us that there's more stats involved in social than just the number of hits and with this we can see for example, that (?) has had just one share with 600 visits, Dave McClure has had four team shares with a 1,000 visits.

Jonathan:	Right. Just in this time period. The (?) that one Tweet drove five new sign-ups since (?). That's pretty good when you're a start-up that you can have one Tweet and we have, actually this is the actual Tweet and so that Tweet, which is re-Tweeted seven times managed to drive five, in addition to all those clicks and page views, it managed to drive five new users for (?). One of the things that we did that was a cool visualization of this was built for the (?) data conference. This is actually showing you the event tree of how people are driving shares.

Here, Dan Martel, shared to Twitter, 82 people clicked on his Tweet and six people were attending so he got these six people to sign up and then (?) here actually he Tweeted, when he signed up that drove 16 clicks and another person to attend. So Dan actually gets credit. If you look, he's got a plus seven because he not only gets the 6 first layer vote, but he got one of those guys drove an additional person.

Andrew:	OK. So if I were now the founder of this business or found of a business that got a report like this, I might email Dan again and say, "Dan, can you Tweet this out?" but gee David only has a plus one, I might leave him alone.

Jonathan:	Right.

Andrew:	I would definitely go back to (?) and say, "Hey (?), you should be Tweeting this out again, and if you do we'll feature you or how about you guys organizing an event so that you Tweet it out and (?)" So this is another example of how deep stats let you understand where to put your effort and what effort is working, but this is custom made for them, right? Using some of the data you showed me. How much can people use right out of the box without any customization? What kind of stats can they get?

Jonathan:	Sure. This is an example to your earlier point, some of this is a work in progress, we're actually in the middle of shipping a whole bunch of new stuff. This is an example of some of our standard reporting. This is Mark's sister's blog, the types of things we're showing out of the box, very easily are the what are the blog posts that are driving the most traffic? What content is being shared? If you're using, he tries different times, different copy, tracking (?) campaign, Twitter versus Facebook versus email. The different buttons on his site and how they're performing.

Andrew:	Take a look here how they're performing. The Twitter button is getting 1,200 Shares, 26,000 clicks, click per share is 21. So for every Share he gets 21 clicks on Twitter.

Jonathan:	Yeah. On average. That's a little bit eschewed though because what you can see is that Mark himself, when you go to the top users, Mark himself is driving 64 clicks per share.

Andrew:	Gotcha. I see. 

Jonathan:	So that's some of the stuff that we can show that for example, let's go look at . . . 

Andrew:	You were also showing me in there and actually let's scroll down, if you don't mind if you haven't clicked away.

Jonathan:	Sure. I did click away but we can go back to that view.

Andrew:	What you showed me that's kind of interesting is I can also see which of my users, which of the Tweeters -- I was looking for the word, is driving the most clicks, right?

Jonathan:	Right. In this case, because Mark doesn't have registered user relationships with the visitors to his site, we track them as anonymous so in 973 individuals drive almost 11,000 clicks. Then these other actions were actually by people who are awesome users that have awesome accounts so this would be more (?) G-members. For example, Zynga has a community management team of over 30 people and so that's how they track which team members are doing what.

Andrew:	I see. If I did have a registration system on my site, which I do and many people in the audience do, they can then tie back each Tweet to the individual member, either give them points for that or give then praise or more emphasis and so on.

Jonathan:	Exactly.

Andrew:	Give them more praise or give them more emphasis and so on.

Jonathan:	That's exactly what Plancast has got. This is showing you that you can query our system to get out the information on any of the users that corresponds to their Plancast user. 

Andrew:	What other data can we take a look at? What else can we use out of the box?

Jonathan:	This is what we call our staff explorer. Part of the interesting thing about social data is that it's very dynamic. Taking that lean startup mentality of how do you use data to learn and optimize? Sometimes it's about validating preconceived hypotheses, but a lot of times in the early stages it's about exploring the data and coming up with hypotheses that are driven by what you see. 

In this case, we're looking at the last month of Mark's sharing, broken down by the top five blog posts. They ym[SP] doubling down on the Twitter ecosystem was the biggest in that period. We can try and zoom in a little bit to do the period in which it's active. See that week there? So, here you have the period in which it was active. You can see very clearly for Justice's[SP] blog post there are 85 shares and 5,400 clicks, the lion's share came from Twitter. This makes sense.

Andrew:	It makes sense because of the topic, but it seems also that Twitter in general is sending him a lot of traffic.

Jonathan:	Mark is much bigger on Twitter than he is on Facebook. So, now we've zoomed in just to Twitter, and we're viewing by the different tools. Tweet button vertical, which is the Tweet button at the top of his blog post. Sociable WordPress is the small Twitter call to action at the bottom of his blog post.

Andrew:	That's interesting. I think I get overall Tweets. What you're saying is that you don't just want to know overall Tweets, but you want to know Tweets from the side versus Tweets from the bottom, because overall Tweets could be big, but that side could be driving a lot of traffic and that bottom could be better used doing something else. We can do that out of the box with Awesome?

Jonathan:	Yes. In this case the Awesome publisher is Mark. We have a lightweight way for you to share directly from Awesome. I will give you a quick look at that. In all honesty, there are a lot of great solutions for this kind stuff, [??], CodeSuite, SuiteDeck[SP]. Our goal is to integrate with that for these types of use cases, but in the meantime we allow people to share directly from here. You can share with Twitter or Facebook, and this can be invoked via a bookmark list as well. 

The more interesting thing is that for this use case, we look at the streams. These are the links that Mark has shared through the publisher. You can see not only how many clicks, but we're pulling in replies and re-tweets. One of the more interesting things we think is what we call the epics key. It's basically a click-through rate. For each host, we're capturing the number of fans or followers at the time of the post. 

This advocacy number is the number of clicks divided by the number of 100 followers or fans. It allows you to normalize. For example, these are two Tweets that are seven hours apart. The same exact content being shared, the only thing that's different was the time it was sent and the copy that he used. 

Andrew:	I see. So, with this, he can figure out whether certain copy gets more clicks, whether certain times of day get better clicks. He's been saying that he gets that kind of data from you guys.

Jonathan:	Advocacy is the way, the snapshot picture of that. Over time, your follower and fan counts are going to change, so looking just at the clicks is actually misleading because it's going to skew towards your most recent actions when you had more followers. By having the (inaudible) allows you to compare apples to apples of hey, how do people on Facebook, where he has much fewer fans, he only has 6,200 fans on Facebook, or 6,300 fans where he's got 40,000 followers on Twitter. You can see that this post was, actually when he posted it at effectively the same time, slightly better received on a proportional basis on Facebook than it was on Twitter.

Andrew:	Oh. For once. It's interesting to see that Facebook wins. What's the most effective post that he has here?

Jonathan:	It only wins in efficacy because it only has 65 clicks, compared to 64. But just showing you that at 8:30 a.m. this is a more effective thing to post to Facebook, relatively, than it is to Twitter. In this case it seems like...

Andrew:	The most effective is?

Jonathan:	In the last few days it was this tweet right here which is "(inaudible) control, why you need to cut out middle men in negotiations." That was posted, I think it was really the timing of the post which was 5:35 a.m. Interestingly, it looks like he has a lot of followers on the East Coast and Europe that kind of got this going with retweets.

Andrew:	Who would have known at 5:30 in the morning that anyone was up but you're right, different time zones. 

Jonathan:	When he posted it, three hours later, and part of this is it's hard to do apples to apples when you're posting the same content. Some people might have seen it before and won't click again. But even here you see in three hours he went from having 40,355 followers to having 40,365 followers. That's always a moving target.

The other thing, just in terms of out of the box, while this spreadsheet here that we're looking at for Plancast is customized in terms of what the various reports are that they want to look at. It actually works kind of straight out of the box pulling data straight from our APIs. It's one of the things that we help our customers do is if they define the metrics that matter for them it's very easy to, once you've explored the data, to define what it is that you want to track on an ongoing basis. If we don't offer the currently we can always build it into the Google spreadsheet. It's a pretty easy process.

Andrew:	Let's take a look at your homepage. As we say goodbye I want people to see your page and remember where you are and where you're from. I'll say it, there it is, it's awe.sm. I know most people are watching this but many will choose to download the MP3. That's awe.sm and, of course, we'll link to it here. Jonathan, thanks so much for doing this. 

Jonathan:	Thank you, Andrew. It was a really good time.

Andrew:	Cool. Is there a call to action that you want to leave at the end of this? Is there something that people need to take a look at?

Jonathan:	I think, in general, my call to action would be trying to help other entrepreneurs. If you think about sharing as a feature, don't just tack it on as an afterthought because it really can drive value for your business and you get what you pay for. If you don't invest in integrating it and you don't invest in making it a logical part of the flow then you're not going to see results from it. It's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But when done right it can be the best thing you can do to grow your business.

Andrew:	I can see that here today. Thanks so much for doing this with me.

Jonathan:	My pleasure.

Andrew:	All right. Thank you all for watching. Go out there and use this and come back and tell both me and Jonathan Strauss of Awe.sm what you did with it.