Beginning this week, the Social Media Week home site will begin running profiles on the global sponsors and partners that are helping to make things come together for us.
Today, we begin with a profile by correspondent Ben Popper on returning Social Media Week partner Meebo, the global gold sponsor of Social Media Week September 2010.
Future profiles will follow on partners like the Financial Times, Porter Novelli, Fast Company and others.
Share and Share Alike:
How Meebo Helps Publishers
by Ben Popper
Meebo have always been about helping people communicate across the web. When it launched back in 2005, the company was the first to offer users a way to chat on all the major instant messaging platforms from a single place.
“Publishers started coming to us and asking for a way to offer what we had at Meebo.com,” says CEO Seth Sternberg. “They wanted their existing users to be able to connect with their friends, no matter what service they were on.” The company introduced the Meebo bar, which let publishers embed this versatile chat function directly onto their sites.
With the rise of social networks, the landscape of interaction was changing. But Meebo continued to play the matchmaker, bringing Web 2.0’s smorgasbord of sharing together in one simple place, just as it did for chat services. “We see ourselves as uniting communication tools, and social networks were just the new form of communication,” says Sternberg.
Publishers were eager to have readers share their stories across these social networks, but many were experiencing the “Nascar Problem”: the ugly sight of a homepage plastered with the logos from dozens of different services. Meebo offered an elegant solution that saved publishers from clutter.
The Meebo bar now sits at the bottom of big name sites like Maxim, Entertainment Weekly and The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. It enables a click and drag interface, so users can grab their favorite stories and post them to sites like Myspace, Twitter and Digg with a simple mouseclick.
Through this toolbar, Meebo reaches over 150 million viewers a month on hundreds of different sites. Sternberg notes that users share twice as much content with friends on sites that have installed the Meebo bar.
Talk is cheap, but Meebo can also add to the bottom line. Sternberg says users click through their toolbar ad about ten times as often as typical ads, with revenue shared between Meebo and the site’s publisher.
A big company made its presence felt recently, when Facebook deployed its “Like” button across the web. But Sternberg isn’t worried. “Publishers are embedding Meebo to get a social layer on their site. The Facebook “Like” button is great, which is why we added it to the Meebo bar,” he says. “But that’s just one piece of a much larger set of tools we provide.”
Meebo has the same advantage it always has: diversity. With Meebo users can talk and share easily, not just to Facebook, but to the entire ecosystem of social services growing across the web.
Five Things Meebo Can Do For Your Website:
- Dig Deeper: Build additional verticals like videos and hot news into your Meebo bar to deepen user experience without ever leaving the landing page.
- Boost Sharing: The Meebo bar is a great way to get users sharing your content with friends across a wide range of sites.
- Save Space: Avoid cluttering your site with dozens of logos. The Meebo bar puts everything in one place, saving valuable real estate for ads.
- Adapt to Audience: With rich analytics, Meebo helps publishers to see what social services appeal to their audience and gives them the freedom to adapt their toolbar on the fly.
- Bottom Line: Publishers share in the revenue from the Meebo bar’s advertising, which is targeted with a powerful snapshot of user activity from hundreds of partner sites.
Please visit Meebo.com to learn more about Meebo and how they can help you or your organization!
Ben Popper is a media and technology writer whose work has appeared in the NY Times, Atlantic, Slate and many others. You can follow his thoughts on culture and technology @benpopper.
