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.

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.

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.

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.

I like the cover page of this book; it markets the book very nicely!
We all know it is true. Most people value on what they hear from someone else (person) than what they hear from a company. Even better, if the person telling is someone we know and trust.

Why not make “Tell A Friend” a very prominent tool on the website, if word of mouth is so powerful.

On most sites where present, Tell-A-Friend is a super simple implementation – a web form asking you to fill 4 items (something like what you see in this picture). On sites where you are logged in as a registered user, it gets reduced down to two things, as site already knows your name and email.

There are a few things that could better enable WOMM.

1. Why would I need to reveal about myself on the site? Maybe small note under ‘Your email address’ saying “won’t be stored or used for sending promotional mails” could help.
2. I don’t remember my friend’s email (that long personal address) because my email client fills in that automatically and shows me nickname when I receive mail from them. How about a quick access to my address book? I could quickly pick up multiple people when I look at my address book.
3. Simple pre-populated message would make it easy. Some sites show it in the textbox.
4. Why only email? Why not Instant Messenger (we chat with friends all the time, may be we could chat on the site or leave an offline message)? Or maybe Twitter or Facebook or some other social network?

SocialTwist Tell-A-Friend Widget can help your site implement a user-friendly way to let them talk to their friend about the product/brand/site. More over you are strongly inviting the user to tell someone, when you replace the simple “Tell A Friend” hyperlink with something that looks like this: