ShareThis and the Democratization of Influence

Cincinnati Social Media Breakfast Four attendees heard ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel cover topics including how the web, using tools like ShareThis, is democratizing influence.

Are You Hungry For Social Media?

“People Share What Matters”
ShareThis eliminates the need to cut and paste a URL into an email. Analytics show that sharing goes up eight times with this distributed sharing widget on a site. Perhaps that’s because it also allows you to publish the URL to a variety of social networking sites and send it via email or text message to your personal contact list.

As your RSS feeds turn to noise and overwhelm you, ShareThis helps users more easily discern the value of content through their own network. These friend-curated information flows are a prime example of the democratization of influence. As information and viewers of information grow exponentially, our attention is finite, luckily Forrester research shows that 81 percent of people share to help someone else as opposed to simply broadcasting or promoting themselves. This means sharing is as powerful as it is spontaneous and tools like ShareThis will help us sort through the information glut.

The Future of Sharing
Cincinnati Social Media Breakfast attendees previewed the next iteration of ShareThis as well as some future plans. Perhaps the most exciting news is that, as ShareThis ties into analytic providers like Overture and Google Analytics, a metric for influence can be developed.