In the January of 2008, I was visiting my family in Iowa for the holidays. It was smack in the middle of the presidential election, and Iowa was the frontline of the political battleground as candidates jockeyed for position in the first primary. I attended a few rallies, and observed how the various campaigns organized their grassroots teams. At one rally, a campaign representative took the stage and asked that the thousands of people in attendance text a shortcode to a specified number in order to subscribe to a mailing list. In seconds, they had just turned a one time meeting into a recurring conversation.

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More and more people are talking about “Social Media Optimization,” which is the idea of making your website more “social friendly.” On the surface, it just sounds like adding “tweet this” and “like buttons” to your web pages. And yes, that’s all important.

But it’s also about how to use the networks between friends, and the power of friends’ recommendations, to make your website more user friendly, or even more trustworthy. For skeptics (like me) who also hate shopping for jeans (like me) this idea takes a while to sink in. So I just thought I’d post this simple screenshot from Levi’s website:

If you haven’t tried this for your website yet (especially e-commerce sites), now’s a good time. And don’t forget to optimize your emails, too.

On September 1st, 2009 we announced that MailChimp was going freemium. On that day, we had 85,000 users. Now, slightly more than a year later, we have more than 450,000 users. We grew our user base five times in one year.

Earlier this month, we actually doubled our freemium plan from 500 subscribers to 1,000 subscribers. So now, even more people can take advantage of MailChimp’s powerful email marketing and social features. We had been averaging around 30,000 new users per month (about 1,000 per day), but since we increased the freemium plan this month, we’re seeing +2,000 new user days.

Another thing that’s increased dramatically since going freemium is the number of lunches I’m invited to; seems entrepreneurs and VCs really want to “pick my brain” about how freemium is doing for us. Usually, it’s because they think freemium might be that silver bullet they’ve been searching for. It can be, but you’ve really gotta be careful not to point that bullet at yourself…

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Earlier this week, we discussed how Gmail’s new “Priority” feature tracks engagement to judge what emails are most important, and then prioritizes them.

We also discussed how MailChimp is using engagement to decide which emails to clean from our senders’ lists.

Yesterday, we learned that Hotmail is also tracking user interaction within their inbox in order to determine which emails to throw away, and which to keep:

Hotmail Using New Metrics to Consider Inbox Placement by George Bilbrey on MediaPost

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Chris Sietsema, from Teach To Fish Digital, discusses the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what content to suggest to users:

Deconstructing Facebook’s EdgeRank

Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm, from Teach to Fish Digital

It’s an extremely interesting look behind the scenes of how Facebook “ranks” content for the purposes of sharing. Hint: the Facebook “Like” button is kind of important in this equation…

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