TechAddress

HOW TO: Grow a Startup 300% in 3 Days? SocialMedian Tells All

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:32:34 +0000

SocialMedian was barely a thought for people back in February, but it has gained a solid following in the 9 months

of its existence. Many people would ask why this startup has gained any traction. It is yet another social news site with voting and commenting. Did we really need another? Given the amount of traffic that socialmedian is getting, it is obvious that they are onto something.

With this in mind, I figured it was time to chat with SocialMedian Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg and find out if things were actually as good as they sounded.

A look Back

During the summer, there was rapid growth as SocialMedian added Google Reader and other service integration, as well as replize. These features were added because of user feedback. Goldberg has stated several times, “Our model at SocialMedian has been: small, fast, and listen to users.” You have probably noticed that you do not see any advertising or many press releases plastered all over the major news sites. Essentially, SocialMedian has been built through its user base. The only “press coverage” you tend to see are reviews from various blogs, including here on Mashable.

Almost a month ago, SocialMedian integrated with Facebook and users saw a large amount of traffic coming from the popular social network. Also, in the weeks leading up to the election, socialmedian announced partnerships with the Washington Post and The Guardian. Their election widget was gaining adoption, and Goldberg stated that the few days following the widget release had seen a 300% increase in traffic. Why? It is probably due to the partnerships created through the Election Talk widget.

A chat with SocialMedian

Rob: How big of a traffic boost did the Facebook integration give you?

Jason: We got a nice initial boost when we launched our Facebook integration as our existing members were suddenly easily able to find and follow their Facebook friends and to invite new friends to check out SocialMedian. Since then, Facebook has been a steady boost for us as our users have amplified their SocialMedian activities to their Facebook friends and new users have also taken to our Facebook features. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of overall impact to our growth and engagement, I’d say Facebook integration has been about a 7, but has the potential to be a 10 with some new developments we have planned to even better leverage the Facebook platform.

One thing the Facebook integration launch did though was it really went a long way towards starting to mainstream SocialMedian. I used to measure our growth entirely on new registrations. It taught me that awareness comes first then adoption. The Facebook integration made a whole bunch of new people suddenly aware of SocialMedian via their Facebook friends. After seeing SocialMedian postings on their friends’ Facebook pages for the 5th, 10th, 50th time, you start to see adoption. The second thing it did was really up the engagement level on SocialMedian. Suddenly it was really easy to follow people via Facebook. That hit our currently active users with a slew of new follow messages, which ignited them.

Rob: Obviously, the Washington Post and Guardian partnerships are a big deal. Do you see SocialMedian making several partnerships like this?

Jason: YES! It took us two weeks to put together the micro-site election.socialmedian.com for the Washington Post and then 1 phone call to get The Guardian excited about taking the widget. Now we know how to do it fast and know better to get ahead on working with more partners to include them. We also built this in a way in which we can replicate it again and again and again with only 2 days to get a micro-site up and running for any topical SocialMedian news network.

We’ll do our second one next week for the Monaco Media Forum event in Monaco November 12th, where the Prince of Monaco brings together 300 leaders in the transformation of media. It’s a closed event but SocialMedian will enable people to follow every blog post, video, picture, and tweet from home. You heard that here first. The page for that will be http://mmf.socialmedian.com.

Rob: Do you see any scalability problems with the micro-site idea? Meaning how often can you do these without affecting how much staff you must maintain?

Jason: No. It basically builds right on top of our “news network” concept in which anyone can create a news network to gather and discuss news about a particular topic. For these microsites like election.socialmedian.com or mmf.socialmedian.com, all we really do now is apply a template created for the election site which adds some additional views like “rising fast” in addition to “popular” and “recent” and which enables anyone to grab and embed a widget for the news network. We can do hundreds of these without any negative resource impact.

Rob: At the beginning of November Quantcast showed SocialMedian at just over 160K page views, what is the real traffic? I saw the email regarding the 300% increase over 3 days. Does that give you over 475K pageviews?

Jason: Conservative estimates had socialmedian at 500K pageviews (rolling 30 days). October ended consistently above 20K per day. Overall, there were 225K pageviews in September, 280K in October, and 120K the first week of November with traffic rapidly increasing as we got closer to the election. Quantcast has significantly more conservative numbers.

Rob: So how do you measure user engagement?

Jason: Clips/day is our best measure of engagement. Clips aggregate all user activities: clipping, sharing, like/dislike, and 1st comment a user makes on a story. In the past 60 days we’ve gone from averaging 1500 clips/day to more than 3500. We have seen the same sort of increase in comments as well. We attribute our replize feature, where users reply to other users vs. just leaving comments, as the key to the rapid rise in comment levels. One thing worth noting is that Mixx has probably 4-5x our traffic, but we are far higher than them on clips/story vs. their votes, and comments/story. In other words, we have more quality traffic we think and more engaged users.

Rob: Have you seen a traffic boost due to the election partnerships?

Jason: We see that our user growth has been more about the tech community suddenly all talking about SocialMedian at once vs. being all about the election. Over the past 4 days we’ve added more new registered users than in the previous 4 weeks. We’ve seen our 3 biggest traffic days yesterday (on a Sunday!) and the two prior days. It happened because users started talking publicly about how they seem to be getting value from SocialMedian. Nothing beats positive word of mouth. And we’ve worked really hard to cultivate that, while spending $0 on outbound marketing.

It’s all about satisfying users and getting them engaged in the service. Then, when they recommend the service to their friends or readers, it helps that newbies see a party going on when they get to SocialMedian (a vibrant community) that they can join in on vs. have to create. Notably, our strongest area is still tech news and we still have a very tech-oriented early user base, but at the same time our users have created more than 2000 news networks on all sorts of topics.

Rob: Will end of election season hurt traffic significantly, or are you seeing increased engagement from the new users?

Jason: So far we are holding up very nicely as new people introduced to SocialMedian because of the election and from Twit.tv seem to largely be staying around. This past Sunday was our biggest Sunday in history and Monday was better than the Monday before the election…so far so good. I think it’s fair to say that the election helped draw people in but the discussion continues around the news of the day.

Rob: What is the biggest complaint from users and how are you addressing it?

Jason: The biggest feature request we have is for us to add topical news search. We have none right now. That’s coming in just a couple of weeks. We’re also working on better filters and cleaning up the UI, which have been big user requests/complaints.

Rob: What do you see as the biggest reason for success?

Jason: The biggest reason for success is simple. We listen to users. We have done very little to focus on growth and marketing and instead focused almost entirely on helping one users at a time find value and get more engaged with the service. Our theory is that one happy user will bring 10 over time. That’s our focus.

Looking forward

Obviously, things look to be going very well for Jason and SocialMedian. It is still too early to determine whether the traffic will decrease now that the election is over, but the micro-sites give SocialMedian the ability to have focused coverage on any major event or conference. SocialMedian is maturing nicely, and I would definitely keep an eye on their future.

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Yahoo Buzz Gets More Social and Continues its Assault on Digg’s Mainstream Ambitions

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 01:30:29 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Yahoo Buzz has just added a bunch of new features that make the site more social and more connected with the new Yahoo universal profiles. It also makes it look even more like Digg, but with Yahoo’s mainstream user base.

If you’ve established a contact list on Yahoo, you’ll now see the stories that those people are buzzing up in a new “Y! Updates” section on the Buzz homepage. Additionally, Buzz votes are now a part of user profiles, allowing you to see what stories a user has Buzzed up or down, and also see cumulative stats like how many times someone has been the “first Buzzer” (the original person to submit the article) and the total number of comments they’ve left on the site.

Yahoo has also added a commenting system very similar to that of Digg, allowing you give thumbs up or down to individual comments, along with threaded replies. Clicking on user’s avatar or name lets you click through to their profiles, where you can then advance to see their full Yahoo profile.

These new features are interesting for a couple reasons. First, they show the potential of the Yahoo Open Strategy – users of Buzz essentially become users of Yahoo’s new universal profile, helping create a huge social network behind the scenes. Additionally, it is starting to become increasingly obvious that Yahoo Buzz is going to keep adding the same features as Digg, as it did when it launched its “Up & Coming” section a couple months back.

Yahoo Buzz looks like it might be a bright spot within the flailing Internet company, that just shut down its Yahoo Live experiment earlier this week.

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What’s Your Favorite Social News Site?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:31:35 +0000

Source:Mashable!

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

In the 24 hours since launching The Open Web Awards, we’ve already had more than 2000 nominations, which include hundreds of different sites and services. Keep ‘em coming and don’t forget to promote your favorites!

One of our more hotly contest categories is likely to be social news, where leaders like Digg, NowPublic, and Reddit are continually challenged by new upstarts like Socialmedian, Mixx, and a new heavyweight - Yahoo Buzz. This year, social news even crossed into the mainstream a bit, with Digg being featured in CurrentTV’s election coverage. Whose crowd did the best job of filtering the news? Make your nominations in the widget below and support your candidate in the comments!

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NetVibes Coming to Facebook

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:33:38 +0000

Source:Mashable!

What’s the best way to gain a boatload of users for your web-based application in a short amount of time? If you said “Build a Facebook version,” you win.

Here’s your prize: full NetVibes integration with Facebook Connect. This is going to let you integrate all your NetVibes activity feeds into Facebook and utilize the Facebook features that allow commenting, interaction and sharing.

The integration will allow NetVibes users on Facebook to also share widgets, photos, videos and news with friends across Facebook.

Perhaps more significant is the effect on the startpage and feed reader arms race that this might mean. NetVibes is a significant player and already poses strong competition to start page providers like Google and Yahoo. The one thing it lacks is a major, multi-billion dollar brand behind it. The viral nature of Facebook should be more than enough to make up for this fact, since even the cheesiest of the social network’s casual games spread like wildfire (zombie bite, anyone?).

Something that provides actual functionality and usefulness should see rampant growth, and give the big boys a run for their money.

All the new features will be live and viewable on October 23rd.

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Yahoo Buzz Looks More Like Digg Every Day; Adds “Up & Coming” Section

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:30:55 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Yahoo Buzz, the search giant’s foray into social news, has added an “Up & Coming” section that makes the site even more similar to Digg. The new tab features stories that are gaining momentum – in the form of votes (“Buzz Up” in Yahoo terms) and other factors like search volume and how many times the story has been emailed to people.

From there, just like on Digg’s strikingly similarly named “Upcoming” section, you can filter by “most recent” or “most votes.” You can also drill down into specific categories like Entertainment or Politics to see emerging stories in topics of interest. Of course, the big deal with Buzz is that if a post gets enough momentum, it can end up on the Yahoo homepage, in turn sending a ton of traffic to the publisher.

In short, adding an “Up & Coming” section shows off more content to Buzz users, hence, increasing the odds of a story making it all the way to the most traffic webpage in the world. Given Yahoo’s extremely large and diverse userbase, it also may provide a better representation than Digg and other social news site of what stories are actually gaining mindshare on the Web.

While Buzz might not yet have the featureset of some of the more established social news sites, it’s quickly moving to add the necessities like widgets, rss feeds, and now an up & coming section. That might be all it needs to be a huge success and squash the mainstream ambitions of its rivals.

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Swarrm Dishes Social News Recommendations (The Startup Review)

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:35:06 +0000

Source:Mashable!

While Bloomberg News takes a good amount of flack for yapping about a stone-cold Steve Jobs when it’s well known that the man’s blood is still rich and warm, another bigwig of the tech realm, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked with the publication’s reporters Peter Cook and Crayton Harrison about his company’s fascination with Yahoo and the movements the two will make in the next 60 days. As Schmidt explains, Google “will proceed with the agreement by early October.”

The company’s reasoning is stated equally simply. In reference to the U.S. Justice Department’s interest in peering into the proposed Google-Yahoo search advertisement deal, which the two tested to the DOJ’s very vocal irritation, Schmidt said, “We are in the process of talking to the government. They’ve not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us.” Indeed, the logic is very elementary. “Hey DOJ, while you’re there giving what we see as your silent treatment, we’re going to go ahead and start making more money, m’kay? Kay.”

Naturally, Schmidt isn’t totally gung-ho with an eye on its October non-surprise. “We always worry a little bit, but we think our arguments are pretty strong,” is his response to judicial qualms over what some consider possibly imperialist tendencies by the “Mad Men” of Mountain View.

My take on this refresh of the dispute? Business is business, and if Google manages to pass go, well, who’s to say no. Chances are DOJ won’t remain silent ‘til the autumn push, though. If anything, this is a straight reminder sent the way of regulators to recall that the matter has yet to be resolved completely. In a manner of speaking: Get to it, guv’nors.

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Swarrm

20-word Description: Swarrm is a social news site that gives users content from around the Web based upon their interests.

CEO’s Pitch: Swarrm is based on the idea that rather than sifting through thousands of stories submitted by strangers to find something you like, Swarrm users could have news presented to them aesthetically and efficiently as it’s published based upon interest.

What Pandora did for music discovery, we hope Swarrm will do for news and blog content. Swarrm has several pieces of intelligence running behind the scenes. The system looks at things like user preference and behavior in addition to interaction with friends and ascertains what a particular user may like to see. Swarrm also extracts stories from several thousand sources and serves them up based upon keywords of interest designated by the user. The same methodology works inversely to diminish content frequency if it seems there is no interest.

Other features include the ability to see all current content from a specific site rather than cherry picked stories. Users can submit articles to 3rd party sites including Digg, Reddit, Newsvine. Features like auto-tagging, micro-blogging and more, create a unique experience news junkies are sure to like.

Mashable’s Take: How many of you read multiple blogs on a given day? How do you choose which ones to read? A bunch of services have set out to answer this question, and have created products that address the recommendation system a number of different ways, from personalized feed readers to curated memes to group interaction with a given set of search results.

Swarrm, currently in private beta, is the latest to take on this particular feat in a way that may not be the most useful right away, but has caught enough of my attention to point out its system. What Swarrm does is ask you your news topic preferences and presents an activity feed of sorts with news items listed according to their time stamp and date.

You can see where items come from based on the icons that appear for each, along with the article’s title (meaning there is no summary paragraph or two-sentence snippets, Google-news style). From there, you can choose to view the whole article, share the item with your Swarrm friends, submit it to a flurry of other social and bookmarking networks, or save it to your Swarrm account. The sharing option obviously presents itself as an internal “trusted” recommendation system allowing for direct suggestions amongst users.

What’s missing, however, is an ongoing direct feedback system in Swarrm for indicating what type of content you’d rather not see. This limits the amount of true filtering and recommending Swarrm can offer its end users. What I find interesting about Swarrm is its news delivery format, which looks a lot like a FriendFeed activity stream. (To that end, it wouldn’t hurt Swarrm to offer an RSS export capability for its recommendations and search results.)

So while on one hand Swarrm appears to be very similar to services like FriendFeed, there is the ever-growing problem of content overload coming from activity feeds like FriendFeed that don’t readily offer the most practical filtering and recommendations. Whether this is re-hashing of content in a filtered way or a useful tactic for finding good content will depend on Swarrm’s execution.

Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social News

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:59:35 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Socialmedian, a social news site that we’ve tracked the progress of over the past few months, is now open to everyone.

While a lot of the bases have been covered in our previous coverage, give Socialmedian credit for a nicely paced launch and responsiveness to its alpha users. Today’s public launch includes 350 “user-generated features” as founder Jason Goldberg likes to call them, and the site already has more than 1,000 daily active users – not too shabby considering that until now the service has been invite-only in the hyper-competitive social news space.

The ongoing enhancements and relatively active community were very visible in a tour of the site that Goldberg gave me yesterday. A lot of the ideas behind the service are very familiar if you use products like Digg, Friendfeed, and Google Reader.

You can follow different topical news groups – which are a collection of activities from people interested in the same topic (called News Networks) - or subscribe to updates from other users (called Newsmakers). On your homepage, you can then filter between the activities in your News Networks and the activities among the Newsmakers you’re tracking. Activities tracked include “Clipping” a story (akin to Digg with bookmarklet and all) or commenting on something on Socialmedian.

Looking beyond those features – which on the surface seem like a hybrid of Digg and Friendfeed – is where Socialmedian potentially gets very interesting for news junkies, and it comes in the form of providing feedback to the service. You can vote on each story’s relevance, rank topics in the order of importance to you, and upgrade the frequency at which you’d like to see stories from specific sources. So, hypothetically, if you want to customize Socialmedian to show you more stories about social networking, from Mashable, you can do just that

Beyond these features are where I draw the analogy to Google Reader. The “sharing” options associated with each item on Socialmedian allow you to either email it, Tweet it, or perhaps most interestingly – share it with one of your News Networks. Additionally, you can send a “Snip” (akin to a Note in Google Reader) to your networks.

If that’s not exhaustive enough, Socialmedian also acts as a profile aggregator, using the Google Social Graph API to pull in your profiles from various networks. While right now, this only leads to your profile displaying links, eventually it will turn Socialmedian profiles into yet another lifestreaming aggregator, but with a focus squarely on news according to Goldberg.

In addition to opening up its door to everyone, Socialmedian – which to-date has consisted of Goldberg and a team of programmers in India - is also for the first time disclosing its list of investors. Among the high profile people and organizations backing the company to the tune of $600,000 so far are WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.

Clearly, Socialmedian has been paying attention to a lot of the trends in social news and aggregation in readying its public launch. It’s an impressive effort, but if there is one big drawback, it’s that the site does require a big investment from the user. Versus sites like Digg where you can passively browse the top content in your preferred high-level categories, to really get the most out of Socialmedian, you need to be active in the form of following other users, joining different News Networks, and continually using the feedback loops that the service provides. On the other hand, that investment might be well worth it for those that are drowning in information overload.

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