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.

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.

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.

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.

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: