Don’t Discount Email as a Word of Mouth Marketing Tool
David Bradley, a longtime science writer and editor, and the blogger behind Sciencebase authored a fantastic piece on his site’s experience with SiphsMail. Thank you David for this post!
Siphs and Science
I have been testing out the Siphs system for social bookmarking and email sharing of my Sciencebase Science Blog posts since the end of February. As a freelance science writer getting my words in front of eyeballs is crucial to my business.
Siphs is working very well so far, with a growing number of share events overall. Over the course of March I switched the share graphic associated with each post several times to see whether any particular type worked best. I started with a small chicklet type button, moved up to a big bold banner, and then settled on the standard “share this” icon but with a twist (I added the word share to the icon).
I’ve noticed over the last couple of months, since installing Siphs, that the vast majority of shares are one-to-one emails of particular popular posts. Fewer people are bookmarking articles on social media sites using the system. Now, this could be down to several factors. Every web visitor is familiar with email and so it’s a simple task to share a post with a contact using that method.
In contrast, despite media hype and mainstream media adoption of sharing tools, I suspect that there are many visitors who are still either unfamiliar with the likes of Mixx and Reddit or else are reluctant to expend time and energy signing up for accounts. This may be particularly true among the Sciencebase readership which tends to be educated and interested in cutting edge science, but not necessarily interested in the bells and whistles of web 2.0 technologies. That said, Sciencebase has over 3000 RSS subscribers as well as 1000 newsletter opt-ins, so I would’ve thought that a few more of those would be interested enough to bookmark posts.
It could simply be that I need to create yet another, more enticing and persuasive share icon…
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