It’s always exciting to see a big company like Google launch a new product, such as today’s blast-off of Google Buzz. While it’s always nice to have another toy in the social sandbox to play with, today’s announcement sent the ShareThis offices atwitter for a different reason – it had the word “share” all over it. We’ve been like a broken record on this – sharing is the center of the social Web. It’s the crucial act in people’s online interactions, the way that conversations starts and where 90 percent of the value for businesses is. Today’s announcement was validation of all that we’ve been saying.

Look at the dominant media narrative’s coming out of today’s announcement: War! Google vs. Facebook vs. Twitter! And at the center of that war? Sharing. It truly is the connective tissue of the Web. We’re delighted that the big guys have finally figured this out.

Another encouraging element of Google’s announcement today is the company’s focus on cutting the signal-to-noise ratio of online content through sharing, something else we’ve long advocated. A person’s social graph is as effective of a filter for finding the good stuff as any tool or service can be and as applications move away from simply curating and aggregating content, they need to provide effective filtering. Sharing does this automatically.

Google Buzz is an amazing validation for both the act of sharing and the sharing economy, which we believe is huge. Apparently, so do Google, Facebook and Twitter, and we can’t be anything but ecstatic about that.

Tim
@schigel

Every day many new sites sign up with ShareThis. We are grateful to help their users share and it was a big honor to be the sharing choice for the 52nd Grammy Awards’ official site, especially in a year when social media was such a big part of its success in boosting its audience to a six year high.

At its peak, the Grammy’s website was among the top 5 publishers throughout the ShareThis network and stayed in the top 10 for a while after the event. It’s great to see an event with such long-standing traditions embrace social media so successfully.

On another note, we would like to welcome a few new publishers to the ShareThis network: Break, Travelocity, and Share Some Sugar.

Steve
@steversb

We’ve talked before about how sharing is the heart of the social Web, a concept that I immediately thought of when watching a recent webinar from Altimeter Group entitled “Understanding Your Customers’ Social Behavior.” The webinar – presented by analysts Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang – introduces a concept called “socialgraphics” to help companies understand the social behavior of their customers in order to better understand and engage with them through social channels. The analysts broke social Web use down in to five levels of activity (in ascending order): watching, sharing, commenting, producing and curating.

Each level is a more engaged Web user, with producing and curating comprising just 10 percent of all people online, while the other 90 percent fall in to watching, sharing and commenting. This is a great illustration of how important sharing on the Web is, and why brands should understand how and why people share things – it is a base activity for Web users. As is referenced in the presentation, ShareThis reported that sharing through our button increased 200 percent in 2009, and another study referenced in the webinar found that 60 percent of American Web users engaged in some type of sharing.

So why exactly is sharing so important to marketers? Let’s go back to what we wrote a few months ago:

“Think about it, the act of sharing initiates each one of those social activities. Sharing helps you monitor what your friends, those close to you, and even the outliers in your social graph care about – the good stuff. It’s obviously an act that happens among friends. Sharing is the top way we start conversations online – think about all the e-mail conversations you’ve started with people in reaction to a link that’s been sent around – and it’s a great way to listen to the pulse of what’s going on among the people you’re close to.”

Now, imagine if “the good stuff” is content about your brand – a blog post, an ad, a viral video, an insightful Tweet. Any of those things put your brand directly in front of several sets of eyes that probably wouldn’t have seen it, referred by a trusted source. Exactly why sharing is at the heart of the social Web, and vitally important for marketers to understand.

Steve R
@steversb