This Thanksgiving, we would like to express our gratitude to a lot of people across the world. It is because of their support that Tell-a-Friend is able to speak so many local languages. Thank you!

We have introduced Tell-a-Friend in 10 more languages – Albanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Kurdish, and Romanian. We already had support for French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. The whopping 18 international languages we support, makes Tell-a-Friend the world’s local WOMM widget.

In this update, apart from the new languages, we have some more things:

• We added AOL in the Email tab. This enables users to send emails to contacts in their AOL account.
• A steroid boost of the analytics ensures that you can view the analytics for your widget much faster than before. Your analytics data will get refreshed periodically.
• When you post to Twitter, we shorten the URL using bit.ly before making the post. That gives more room for your message since the URL will only take up about 20 characters.

If you are willing to translate Tell-a-Friend into a language you know well, do write in to us. Not only will you see Tell-a-Friend in your language, you’ll get a special gift from us too.

Keep the feedback coming and Happy Thanksgiving!

We analyzed the recent 10 million referrals that happened via Tell-a-Friend and we were quite surprised by some of the findings. We decided to publish this report since it would be very beneficial to marketers.

Our key findings are:

• The top channels of sharing include, email, instant messenger, social networking sites
• Email and IM continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing
• Facebook rules the sharing in the social networking channel
• Twitter is growing in popularity but is still just 5% among social networks.
• Only 2% of shares happen over Bookmarking sites.
• In the Email channel, Yahoo Mail is the most preferred, followed by MSN.
• Google’s services like Google Bookmarking, Google Talk, and Gmail, are lagging in their respective channels when it comes to shared content
• LinkedIn, as a networking site, ranks the lowest when it comes to social media sharing.

You can see the complete report at: http://tellafriend.socialtwist.com/sharing-trends-2009

It has been one year since we introduced SocialTwist Tell-a-Friend and it has been a great journey so far. As we look back, this day last year we launched TAF4Free. Today, we have grown from a single product to a product suite of highly customizable TAF products that combine your marketing message with visitor referrals to dramatically improve click-through rates. These include:

• TAF4Free - A simple, powerful, TRUSTe-certified sharing tool that supports a wide array of channels, including email, social networking sites, IM and bookmarking.
• TAF4Branding - Supports a wide array of channels, including email, social networking sites, IM, bookmarking. Allows you to make customizations to include powerful marketing messages and create a strong brand presence.
• TAF4Commerce - Supports all the features of TAF4Branding plus the ability to include dynamic product-specific content, including product images, pricing, special offers, customer reviews, links to related products and more.
• TAF4Rewards - Takes your referral marketing to the next level by enabling you to develop and deploy integrated, refer-a-friend reward campaigns that dramatically increase web site traffic and sales.
• TAF4Ads – Gives your banner ads the last mile advantage by enhancing their reach through word of mouth.

With over 1.4 billion buttons served, 50,000+ customers and still counting, SocialTwist is today a pioneer in referral marketing products – setting new benchmarks for online referral programs.

On this occasion, we would like to specially thank our users and partners for their overwhelming response.

We are going strong and are looking forward to add innovative features to our products to help you get the maximum from your referral marketing campaigns at reduced costs. As always, your suggestions are important to us. So do keep writing in.

We might just be nearing a time when email is considered slow and delayed. Although email may comprise a lion’s share of the pie in online marketing, the prominence of Blogs, Social Networking and Instant Messengers cast a spell in pronouncing the decline in the ROI that emails may provide to Online Retailers and Marketers.

In her WSJ Article, Jennifer Saranow Schultz says, “Many retail sites have email-a-friend features which make it easy to ask friends what they think of a product by sending a link to the page it is on. But the approach has one big drawback. Shoppers might not get immediate feedback while they are still at a retailer’s site, so their decisions may be delayed, putting sales at risk.” Jennifer’s statement holds water – we live in a generation where instant gratification pays off richer dividends and there is no better time than now to capture your audiences’ attention and get them to act.

Let the Numbers talk
The Pew Internet Study brings out some staggering statistical information on the proliferation of Internet Messaging.

• 53 Million Adults trade instant messages
• 24% of them swap IM’s more frequently than email
• The Demographic is primarily circled around young adults and technology enthusiasts
• More than 250 Million people, or a quarter of the world’s internet population send more than 7 Billion Messages a day!

There is no further need for validation of the buzz on internet messaging - it is the quickest way for the already online market to communicate with each other. Further, this is a vital market that is virtually untapped - people are actively talking and listening - why not get them to talk about your product?

We got you covered

At SocialTwist, we understand the demands and challenges of the market and want to offer you cutting edge technology that provides you the maximum bang for your buck. With that in mind, we become the first to provide you with a Word of Mouth Marketing Widget that includes Instant Messaging. Now, visitors to your website can log into their favorite Instant Messengers (Yahoo!, MSN Live Messenger, Google Talk and AIM) through the Tell-a-Friend widget, without leaving your site and share content with their buddy lists. Find a buddy offline, simply send a message and they will receive it when they are next online. We have incorporated the features of the desktop version of the Instant Messenger in the widget to give your visitors a quick, rich experience in sharing and again all this without leaving your website. Like every other facet on Tell-a-Friend, we give the Publisher control over every aesthetic aspect of the Marketing Message visitors to the website will be IM’ing.

Instant Gratification, Instant Karma, through the Instant Messenger. So go on - Tell your Friends.

Found something interesting on the internet? You should be able to share it with your friends with ease. While many sharing buttons (including scripts, forms, etc.) provide emailing capability, Tell-a-Friend (TAF) was the first to provide on-page address book access from popular email services.

The address book feature is one of the key aspects of TAF, designed keeping in line with both the Publisher and the User’s best interests.

For the User

• Simplicity: Sharing has to be a simple act, a mere click on the web page that is to be shared.
• No need of remembering addresses: Most email clients and services (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) allow for auto-completion of email addresses. While this is extremely convenient it also means that the average user tends not to remember any email addresses.
• Complete privacy assured: While a user may want to use a quick address book access, they need the trust to open that confidentially. Tell-a-Friend has been certified to provide complete confidentiality and implements a completely white-listed service.
• Zero spam: A widely used service like Tell-a-Friend that guarantees that no email addresses are retained, so no misuse or spam can occur, will give users the necessary confidence.

For the Publisher

• More traffic: An access to the TAF address book means the user might end up sharing with more people than he originally intended to; and this converts into more traffic for the publisher.
• No typos: Typos and errors don’t occur. You can be sure that the email will definitely reach the right destination, since there is no chance of typing errors happening with an address book in hand.
  
• Multiple referrals: Users may find and share with more people when they view their address book.
• Stickiness: The user never leaves your page (maybe to find an address or send mail) and continues browsing your site.
  
  

In summary, Tell-a-Friend address book feature makes it convenient and comfortable for users to share more. We find that over 50% of sharing activity on Tell-a-Friend happens through the email channel (after all, everyone is on email, more than any other service or network) and use of Gmail/Yahoo/MSN/Hotmail addresses book is very high.

In continuation of our series of best practices for placement of Tell-a-Friend button, in this post, we’ll cover how Ecommerce and shopping sites can benefit by strategically placing the Tell-a-Friend button next to products in the product listing and product details page.

Product Listing page

Usually the product listing page is where various products of a particular category are shown. Such pages are either double or single column and contain a thumbnail with product highlights. Adding Tell-a-Friend button along with the product highlights would empower users to quickly tell friends on spotting a product of interest. Apart from the personal note which is so important for such word of mouth referrals, the site owner can add to the announcement, details about the product including the product thumbnail. When the receiver clicks the link in the referral, he is taken to the product details page.

Product Details page

A bigger Tell-a-Friend button can be positioned in this page next to the existing Add-to-Cart button. Like the case above, the email referral can be made interesting with the addition of the thumbnail and other details about the product. As a marketer of the shopping site, you can also add the following to the referral email:

• Discounts on this product or related products
• Current promotions
• Coupons

All of these can make it very a compelling word of mouth referral for the recipient to come to your site and transact.

Best Practice Guide for Tell-a-Friend button placement
Successful content sharing starts with good Tell-a-Friend button placement. By reading this series of posts, you can gather tips on placing your button on your Home Page, Ecommerce Product Page, Blog Post, and general content pages.

Why good button placement is important
You need more traffic, more users and more revenue, right?  Start getting more from your users and your content by placing your Tell-a-Friend button in places that will produce successful word of mouth marketing results.  In the first blog post of this series, we’ll discuss Tell-a-Friend button placement for your website’s Home Page.

Home Page button placement
Our usage statistics shows that if you make posting, bookmarking and sharing easy and accessible for your users, they will share and spread your content and help build your community, increase your traffic and produce more leads and sales.  We recommend that you always place a Tell-a-Friend button on your Home Page.  This will serve to promote your brand and introduce your overall products/services. The following illustrations are possible best practice locations for your Tell-a-Friend button on your Home Page. The idea is to be able to have Tell-a-Friend button positioned in such a way that it is not missed and at the same time not overly imposing on your site.

We have a surprise for you! We have a packed release with a number of goodies which will delight you and we just can’t stop talking about it. Before we begin on that, here’s something important. We decided to rename our products and make them more purpose-driven:

• TAF Standard becomes TAF4 Blogs (this is the free one)
• TAF Branded becomes TAF4 Branding
• TAF Context becomes TAF4 Commerce
• TAF Incentive becomes TAF4 Rewards

Ok, now for the really interesting stuff. Here are the big highlights of this release which went live today.

Tell-a-Friend fans from around the world have been waiting for something - an international widget! Tell-a-Friend is multi-lingual now. The widget supports French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish. Soon we’ll also support Armenian. Go local - enable these languages in your widget and let your brand/blog content reach many more people.

Your Tell-a-Friend account now can have more than one widget. Some of our large corporate customers and even some bloggers who have more than one blog wanted to own and manage multiple widgets under a single account. They can do that now. Login and create as many widgets you want. You can see the consolidated statistics on your account dashboard and you can easily switch between widgets to manage them.

The new Tell-a-Friend supports much greater services control than before. You now have the power to fully configure the services of your widget. You can change the order of the tabs in the widget, change the order of the services in each tab, and selectively switch off any service including the numerous Bookmarking services.

With the addition of all the above features, it was only natural that we improved the SocialTwist Admin UI. We have gone for a full revamp with better navigation and a more intuitive user experience. Login and try it out. We are eagerly waiting for you to tell us how you find it.

Premium customers are going to love this new release even more. There are so many reasons for that. First, based on our market research we have gone for a new premium pricing model where you have full control on your word of mouth expenses. The new premium pricing enables you to monitor and cap your expenses. You can find the new pricing under each product of our new website.

Next, as a Premium user, you can fully manage the premium features of the widget. You can do self-branding with our premium designer features - design the widget theme, upload own button, and design email template.

Premium users can also Export to Excel the Share Log and see Top 10 Shared resources of their site. It is a marketer’s dream to get more visibility into the word of mouth campaign.

Upgrading to a Premium widget is now so easy. You can instantly do so from the ‘Upgrade’ page of your widget. Choose a Premium product and pay by credit card. You can then immediately start enjoying the benefits of your Premium product.

We can go on telling you about more features. But we’ll stop now and let you discover some. Do give us plenty of feedback and help us improve things for you. We want this to really undeniably be the best word of mouth marketing widget ever.

In our last update we mentioned that we are working on adding more bookmarks. It’s live now! We have a whopping 56 bookmarks for you to use. Now, if you still find that less, we sure would like to know.

Some of the other things we did include making Bookmarks the first tab. So you launch into the world of bookmarks if you directly click the Tell-a-Friend button. This was done since so many of you see bookmarks as an important way to share content.

For Digg lovers, we also give you the count of Diggs for that site. And just so you don’t get lost in the numerous bookmark icons, we have an alphabetically sorted text view (notice the small view icons on the top right of the bookmark tab) with which you can locate your favorite bookmarking service with ease.

So go ahead, bookmark your favorite sites and spread the word. That’s Tell-a-Friend’s New Year gift to its users!

We have been appreciated for bringing personal referrals to various websites and blogs through Tell-a-Friend. That’s not just known from the emails we receive but also the millions of announcement that happen through Tell-a-Friend.

At the same time, we got many requests to support social bookmarks too. We learnt that users want to be able to provide personal referrals, that are direct and one-to-one in nature, as well as social bookmarks to indirectly influence many. Most of our users prefer to have a single button to address all their word of mouth needs. And that’s what Tell-a-Friend has become now.

Currently we support these bookmarking services: Del.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot, Technorati, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, Google, Blinklist, Facebook, Newsvine, Furl, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Propeller.

Now we are getting requests to add more bookmarks. Pretty soon, in our next update, you would find us have many more bookmarks – giving you enough reason to retire those numerous share buttons on your sites. Tell-a-Friend would empower your users to share your content not just via social bookmarks but also via email, IM, blogs, and lifestreams.

But the world of social bookmarks is only growing and as we support more, more new ones turn up. We hope our new supported list of bookmarking services should satisfy most users. Let us know, if that is not the case.