We recently released a cool little WordPress plugin called Social that pulls the conversations on Twitter and Facebook about your blog into each post and makes it easy to broadcast to social channels when you publish. We were scratching our own itch. We’ve pined for a better way to handle comments on our blog, so we teamed up with our friends at Crowd Favorite to make a tailor-made solution. It turns out that we’re not alone. Ten thousand people have tried Social on their blogs too. After months of usage, we discovered a few things we could do better. Today we’re releasing Social 2.0 with a whole bunch of improvements:

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For those of you familiar with Soccer (or Fútbol for the rest of the world), there are few things as satisfying as hearing this: Goooooooooooal! (source: YouTube). It means we scored. Something good happened! Well, we want you to feel the same when you send an email and your subscribers show that they’re interested in your stuff. Today, we introduce to you Goooal, a new app from MailChimp Labs.

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As an email marketer, it’s important to speak your audience’s language. It may seem obvious, but I can tell you as the resident international chimp of mystery, there’s a difference between obvious and easy to do. This is usually where the gurus pontificate about globalization this or international commerce that—but the fact of the matter is that the more people you can talk to, the more potential business you have. The internet, in all its multilingual glory, affords you the capacity to sell your goods or services to anyone, anywhere. This is all fine and dandy, but what happens when you don’t speak Icelandic or Guarani? What happens when your business grows to levels of internationalness that you certainly weren’t counting (or even planning) on? After a while, it feels like there are barbarians at the gate howlin’ for either something you can’t provide, or your head on a virtual spike.
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Every once in a while we get complaints from customers who want to run really complex segmentation criteria in MailChimp, but they keep bumping into our segmentation limitations. Truth is, we put those limits in place to keep a handful of customers from destroying our servers for the 900k other users on the system. Some of their queries could really turn our databases into a hairball of a mess. To get around those limitations, we’ve seen customers create multiple MailChimp accounts, open up separate tabs to run more segments, and all kinds of crazy hairbally stuff that would make our servers choke.

So we created Hairball. It’s an Air app that you install on your computer, and it syncs with your MailChimp list. Then, you can GO NUTS building all kinds of segments with your list. When you’re done, you sync it back up to MailChimp.

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With an active blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page conversations with customers can become a bit fragmented. Like most bloggers, we tweet and post to Facebook when we publish new posts. In a write-once-publish-many-times kind of web, commenting happens outside blogs even more than on the posts themselves. That’s why we worked with the fine folks at Crowd Favorite to create a plugin for WordPress called Social.

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