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.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SocialMedian is Raising $500,000 … In 140 Characters or LessSocialmedian Releases Replize to Start Conversationssocialmedian: The Latest Social News Aggregator [Invites]Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social NewsSocialMedian Adds News Streaming and Opens its Walled GardenPick a Startup to Get Funded: The VenCorps Mashable ShowdownSocialMedian Tweaks Site with New Beta Features [Invites]

With the presidential election soon upon us, politics are at the forefront of many discussions. Given that “brand management” is such a hot topic, should these political discussions be avoided? Many people that use social media sites like FriendFeed are consultants in some form. Brand or reputation management is a major concern for these people. Is it possible that someone’s political views could affect the way people view their professional credibility?

I do not believe this will occur frequently, but there are a few interesting cases that we need to think about. About a month ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog regarding how Reem Abeidoh had received an email that questioned her abilities due to her political views.

Are you out of your mind. [Reem Abeidoh] is a left wing loon. No way am I attending this event. Her praise of Olbermann is enough to tell me she is way out in left field. How can I trust anyone’s expertise who is so misguided?

Ignoring the comment itself, the problem is that someone made an assumption about Reem’s professional capabilities due to her political beliefs. I am not sure if there are several other situations like this, but I was surprised when I read about it.

Another example of politics and technology is Jason Goldberg’s use of the socialmedian twitter account. Jason is the CEO of socialmedian, so technically he can use the account however he wants. He has previously used the account to voice his political opinions. This is where the combination of tech and politics gets interesting.

Will people not use socialmedian because of Jason’s political views? I have not seen any real mention of this as an issue, except for a blog post from Kyle Lacy who brings up some good questions:

Should personal politics be brought into the company communication medium? When you are trying to set an image of a company into a market is it best to keep neutral and just share information with your followers?

There has always been the conflict of personal opinion and official company viewpoint. Typically, bloggers will have a disclaimer stating that the views expressed in the blog are personal and in no way reflect the opinion of their employer. With Jason the problem changes because he is the employer.

In most cases, if the CEO has a blog it is considered to be “official opinion” of the company. Because of this predicament, these blogs tend to stick to the topic of the company and their industry. Highly volatile topics like politics and religion are typically avoided. Personally, I tend to ignore the political commentary when I am working with the person’s application. So, in the case of socialmedian, I really do not care about Jason’s political opinions when taken in the context of the application itself. I tend to separate the two, but I know a lot of people will not. Jason has stated that he uses politics as a conversation starter:

People crave thoughtful discussions and dialogues not just links on a page.  socialmedian’s external voice intentionally pushes and prods and has an authentic human voice and set of opinions behind it.

So do you think Jason Goldberg is harming the adoption of socialmedian by stating his political opinion on Twitter and FriendFeed? As I stated above, I do not care. More importantly, neither should you. There will be a lot of political commentary in the next few months. Jason’s views have no bearing on whether socialmedian is a useful application. Reem’s opinions give no indication on whether she has any expertise in social media.

Going back to the brand management perspective, is it a good idea to share your political opinion? Sites like FriendFeed encourage discussion and community. For an individual like Reem or myself, it makes a lot of sense for us to share our political views. Sharing opinions is what makes FriendFeed a community. Obviously, given the divisive nature of political discussions it probably makes sense to be careful with your words, but an individual opinion is likely reasonable.

For a website or company like socialmedian, I would take the conservative approach and not state any political opinions. My reasoning is that you do not want to hamper adoption of your application due to the political views of one person in the organization. So, am I telling Jason to stop with the political opinion? No, it is his site and Twitter account to do with as he pleases. For his sake, I hope it does not harm people’s opinion of socialmedian.

What do you think? Should people that control a brand be mixing tech and politics?

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Social news aggregator socialmedian has released a new feature called Replize that allows users to interact with one another very easily by using the @username format. It’s a smart move because it’s similar to what we’ve seen on other social sites like Twitter and Utterli, and therefor familiar.

The Replize tab manages all replies sent to you by other members. In order to send something to another member, simply include @username in the comments field and it will get sent to that user instantly. Every reply is highlighted in the user’s homepage news feed. You can choose to be notifed via email if that’s what you want. You can also just click the reply link next to a comment and their username will be auto-populated.

You can reply to several members at one time by adding all of ther usernames, i.e. @JohnDoe, @GIJane, @Rizzn, etc. In addition, soon there will be an auto-complete feature for any @username you are following or vice versa. This will ultimately allow users to send replize as tweets on twitter.

The other new feature announced is the ability for users to connect their Flickr account to socialmedian. Obviously, this will be beneficial for mobile users who want to upload their photos and use them within socialmedian. When connecting your Flickr account you will have the option to add all of your photos and favorites or filter them according to keywords (tags).

socialmedian has been very active recently in regards to adding new social features which bodes well for its user base. Allowing them to communicate with one another within their own platform means they don’t have to leave the site as much. It also helps them cultivate a sense of community within socialmedian itself.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SocialMedian is Raising $500,000 … In 140 Characters or Lesssocialmedian: The Latest Social News Aggregator [Invites]Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social NewsSocialMedian Adds News Streaming and Opens its Walled GardenSocialMedian Tweaks Site with New Beta Features [Invites]Alpha: When Beta Is Not Good Enough

We covered SocialMedian’s Beta launch earlier this summer, and since then they’ve been listening to their members. After several weeks of feedback and hundreds of suggestions, they’ve just announced their first major release with several major changes to the service. Here are the four new core features:

News-Streaming

SocialMedian calls this feature News-Streaming because it allows you to create a News-specific form of content streaming and connects your social networking feeds to SocialMedian to get just the right content shared to the right people and pages. For example, you can share specific news-related tweets or photos from Flickr, but not your Pownce messages. To add links and feeds there’s a new SITE option next to the Snip and News tabs.

The key to this feature is a powerful filtering system that can help you share only the content that you want to share based on the keywords that you specify. The options are plentiful and can be as granular as you want them to be. The same process works with many popular sites such as Digg, Delicious, Google Reader, etc.

Reverse-Blog Widget

This feature allows users to promote their own blogs on SocialMedian through the use of a new widget. After setting up the feed to their blog, the widget is displayed whenever anyone is reading or commenting on a story from that blog on SocialMedian. This will also be the case if they are reading about someone’s blog via a share from Google Reader or Delicious, etc. This is a good idea because it gives credit not just to the person who shared the content, but also to the original source of the content. In the future, this widget will be customizable so bloggers can change the way it looks, the colors, add their logo, etc.

Better ways to find hot discussions and popular stories

There’s a new option menu for finding all of the most popular stories and hot discussions. There’s Popular Today, Popular Week, Popular Month, Rising Fast and Hot Discussions.

Make the socialmedian site more publicly available

SocialMedian has opened up just about every page so that they can be crawled by search engines. They also listened to their users who wanted to be able to expose links to their own pages on SocialMedian, which enables anyone to have their own version of the Drudge Report.

Other changes and future plans

They’ve made the site more publicly available by removing registration walls on SocialMedian pages. People will now be able to navigate throughout the entire site and all external links without having to register on the site unless they want to take advantage of personalization features, clip a story, add a comment, etc.

Conclusion

SocialMedian might not be everyone’s cup of tea because it does require more input and just plain work than most sites these days. However, these new changes will make SocialMedian very attractive to those who love sharing news and information, especially bloggers. It’s like Digg, Google Reader and FriendFeed all mashed up together.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social NewsSocialMedian is Raising $500,000 … In 140 Characters or Lesssocialmedian: The Latest Social News Aggregator [Invites]SocialMedian Tweaks Site with New Beta Features [Invites]Alpha: When Beta Is Not Good EnoughGeoTwitterous: Personalized Twitter on a MapBrabblr Updates Your Twitter, et al.

Today marks DreamIt Ventures’ first Funding Day, during which the new startup incubator will introduce a dozen new companies to a collection of founders and venture capitalists. DreamIt is a program in the same vein as Y Combinator and TechStars, offering startups seed funding, guidance, and connections in exchange for equity. We’ve written brief introductions to each of the startups, which you can view below:
Source:TechCrunch
socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception.
First off, the […]

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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