We just delivered a major upgrade! Among other things (which we shall blog about soon), you can now use Tell-a-Friend to publish to several new providers. Your users have added power to announce your content in many more networks. That should positively impact the viral possibilities of spreading your content. The new providers your users can publish to are:

Blogs/CMS: Joomla, Moveable Type, Xanga, Expression Engine

Social Networks: FriendFeed, Identi.ca

This can’t end here as there are several more networks to reach out to. We would love to hear from you which other Social Networks or Email/IM providers you consider important for us to add.

BTW, do you notice any difference in the speed of the widget?

You already know that Tell-a-Friend is available for WordPress blog platform since so many of you already use it. For those who are not aware, we have provided two ways to enable Tell a Friend for the WordPress platform i.e. those who have the WordPress engine running on their own server:

• Tell-a-Friend plugin for WordPress engine – easy and hassle-free
  Just download the plugin (from the SocialTwist site or from plugins at WordPress.org), install and activate it, just like any other WordPress plugin. Easy! The plugin will attach a Tell-a-Friend button on the bottom left corner of each post in a new line.
• Tell-a-Friend WordPress snippet – for the power blogger
  Some of you would prefer to exercise greater control on the positioning of the button. For example, you may want it in the same line as some other buttons at the end of your blog posts or you may want it on the right hand side instead of the left. For such requirements, pasting the snippet at the right place in your WordPress template will do the job.

Tell-a-Friend specially for WordPress.com
We received a lot of requests from people who have their blog hosted on WordPress.com. Now, WordPress.com allows only adding HTML to the template. Javascript is not allowed. So our usual widget code can’t be embedded in it. We now have a new feature in which we embed an HTML button on the WordPress.com sidebar and have the announcements happen in another window.

Source: http://utmattress.wordpress.com/

The user sees the screen below when he clicks on the Tell-a-Friend button. He can either announce the blog or any one of the specific posts in it. Just clicking one of the posts on the left frame refreshes the widget with the contents of that post and the announcement can be made.

So all you WordPress.com users out there, this could be a really unique way to get your blog posts promoted. Try it and let us know!

SocialTwist plans to deliver a series of widget applications that add social elements to web and enterprise business applications. Tell-a-Friend happens to be the first of such widgets under SocialTwist Web, the widget set targeted at websites and blogs. The next few months will see rapid releases of new features, connectors, multi-lingual support on Tell-a-Friend, before the launch of the next widget in the series.

For over a year, SocialTwist Enterprise product has been under parallel development although it shares with SocialTwist Web, the highly scalable widget engine and SAAS delivery infrastructure. SocialTwist Enterprise brings an entirely unique approach to Enterprise 2.0, with its pluggable widgets. A suite of collaboration and productivity widgets that are Enterprise Ready and carry a Social Design. A separate blog would cover SocialTwist Enterprise and provide early information on this product very soon.

Meanwhile, the coverage at:

Whether you are a big time marketeer or small business owner or simply a blogger, Word of Mouth Marketing must be on your mind.

But, when does real word of mouth happen?

There are 3 important things to focus for making word of mouth happen on your site.

1. Grab the attention of people who can spread

Everyone who walks into your site is a prospect for spreading your content. It is not necessary that this person be a subject expert or an evangelist or even a blogger. It is simply enough, if the visitor thinks that your content is of relevance, need or entertaining for someone known to him/her.

“People who talk about your stuff are closer than you think” - Andy Sernovitz

Positioning Tell-a-Friend button around your content (page, post, news item, product image) helps draw the attention of the site visitor and make them think for a moment about some to talk to. Make this an important Call-to-action, next only to say Add-to-cart (saying, if you are not the buyer, see if you know someone who might buy). Don’t put it at the top of the page, side bar or deep under, as user eye movement on the page is centered around the main content.

That momentary attention before the visitor leaves the page is very important. The reason why we designed a catchy logo. Many different button images are to help to pick the one that suits your site layout and styling.

2. Give them reason to talk

Nothing can help, if the content does not provide a reason why someone should talk to a friend about. The reasons why people may talk about are numerous and sometimes very simple. However, providing enough data and context for the visitor to get motivated is important. Hi-res picture or video, user reviews or nicely presented blog post, will get spread much more.

Word of mouth is all about the REASON why someone is communicating your content. This is not the impersonal saving to a bookmarking site, where there is no chance to communicate this reason.

The opportunity for the user to write about the reason why he/she thinks the friend should look at this content is the key. Attention is scarce otherwise.

3. Make it easy for them

When a user has to remember his friend (contact) or go somewhere else to find that, reduces the chances of WOM. Helping him find contacts of friends on various channel will make it easy.

Next to email (the good old communication channel), Facebook is the second most popular WOM channel. Replace the old Email-this-page link and popup with a widget that gives options for users to communicate.

Tell a friend is useless, unless the friend come back to check your site.

A nicely drafted information about your content/product (potentially with a good image), to which a user simply needs to add the reasoning behind this communication, will be very useful. Sending a link alone, sometimes does not grab the interest of the friend

Analyzing these aspects from your target audience viewpoint can help in getting better results through WOMM.

This post is inspired by Andy Sernovitz’s book WOMM.

We are overwhelmed with the response we have got. Within a few weeks of our official launch, we have already reached a milestone: 10 million widget serves… and counting!

We are exploding the number of registered users. Plus there are so many thousands who are using the Express edition of Tell-a-Friend which requires no sign up. We appear in over a thousand blogs in such a short time. Just the Wordpress plugin of Tell-a-Friend got downloaded over 500 times. Not to forget the growing thousands of users using the Joomla plugin for Tell-a-Friend. All this just tells us that so many people believe in the power of word of mouth marketing.

The Tell-a-Friend team thanks all of you for you support and encouragement. It makes us even more excited when we deliver new features because there are so many who would benefit from it. And that truly feels great.

We are happy to announce some fixes and some new features in our new build that went live today. Check it out!

We support Google Chrome

Yes, the much awaited Tell-a-Friend widget support for the new Google Chrome browser is here. Thanks for being so patient.

TypePad users – you can now use Tell A Friend!

Tell-a-Friend can now be embedded in TypePad Pro and Premium blogs. If TypePad Plus and Basic support template modifications, we willl have Tell-a-Friend for them too.

Fixes done for IE6

Tell-a-Friend widget now works fine on IE6. We thank all our users, especially Steve Bonneau, who mentioned in detail the compatibility issues related to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Those fixes are done. Phew!

Fixed the Rich Text Editor for Firefox 3

The rich text editor of the widget wasn’t working in Firefox 3. That works well now.

Button loads now “zippingly” fast

We already use gzipping of scripts for the widget. Now we also gzip scripts that load with Tell-a-Friend button. This should increase the performance of the page that embeds Tell-a-Friend. Now we only load 6.5KB of Javascript the first time the button loads. And that will reload only if there is a new version of the Javascript.

Configurable providers list

In the Tell-a-Friend wizard, you can now switch off providers that are not relevant for your users. So you can now turn on or off, say AIM from the the list of Instant Messengers that your users see.

We love to hear from you. So try the new version of Tell-a-Friend and keep the feedback coming!!

Here is a small video that explains how Tell-a-Friend could be useful to your site visitors/blog readers.

Word of Mouth is the best Marketing tool. and we strongly believe in making it powerful for websites and blogs to benefit. We intend to make Tell-a-Friend the best-in-class and most widely used WOMM tool.

Joining WOMMA, SocialTwist intends to be part of the community that strongly believes in Word of Mouth.

Few bloggers asked me this question and I thought it is important to clarify the difference between social bookmarking tools like ShareThis or AddThis and Tell-a-Friend. Here are 3 main ones:

1. Tell-a-Friend is for personal, 1-1 communication. As a visitor, if I think the page is interesting to a friend, I send a message on a personal channel like email, IM, twitter. Social bookmarking is more like “I like this so I bookmark, anyone else who uses same tags can see it also”. This would be a broadcast of my interest, rather than telling another friend why he/she might be interested in this content.

2. ShareThis also provides send the link by email, but that is no different from the typical email-the-link form. The biggest problem is, expecting users to remember personal email addresses on yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc. Instead, Tell-a-Friend lets them view their address book on all these providers and pick the friends to send the message. That way, Tell-a-Friend keeps the visitor’s focus on your site while they tell others. Anytime they have to go to a different page, for getting email addresses or to login to Facebook, they are likely to get distracted and something else may take the attention away from your site.

3. Message customization is the other difference. You get to customize the message template for each channel. That way you can help your visitors send the right message describing your content. They can of course modify or add their personal note about why they think their friend should see this content.

Tell-a-Friend and Bookmarking widgets can both be placed together, as they serve different purposes; just like you see on this blog.

Intel launched its Mash Maker product at the Web 2.0 Expo recently. Mash Maker is a great product for creating mashups between websites. For a product launch, what better way to spread the word, than by having a Tell-A-Friend Contest.

SocialTwists’s Tell-A-Friend Widget powers this contest.

A click on the Tell-A-Friend icon on the Mash Maker toolbar brings up the widget.

When you choose to announce about Mash Maker via email, a nicely formatted mail goes out to your friends.

The widget can be used to send IM messages to friends and if they are online, you have an instantaneous chat session starting. Four of the most popular IM clients are supported – Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, Windows Live Messenger and AIM.

It is possible to make blog postings to your personal blog straight from the widget to three of the most popular blog engines – Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad.

Additionally, you can send a Twitter Message or notify your friends on Facebook.