• A better interface to display retweets
• Shows Facebook Likes
• Post to Facebook pages
• Import Facebook Likes
• Improved threading of replies from social networks
• Improved Facebook open graph search for responses
• Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
• Complete re-architecture and rewrite to make platform more extensible (easier to add Google+ support, when their API is released)
• Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
• Set which accounts (including pages) are checked by default
• New queue system for checking for social comments on posts
• Better support for shortened URLs
• Delay broadcasting comments to social networks until they have been approved
• Delay broadcasting future posts to social networks until they have been published
• New authentication scheme for improved security
• Smart detection of retweets as understood by humans (where possible)
• Check for social comments via admin bar
• Check for social comments via posts list screen
• Added “time until next check” (in a human friendly format) to the social comments box for each post
• Allow editing of social broadcast messages for scheduled posts
• Directly imported tweets (by URL) are approved immediately (not held for moderation)
• Don’t import private tweets as comments
• Refactored personal vs. global broadcasting accounts, with defaults available for each
• Improved admin UI

We’re pretty excited about this update as it makes a plugin that we already loved even better. Oh, and Social is open source. You can fork it on Github and make your own contributions.

download Social 2.0 for WordPress

Fork Social 2.0 on Github

Goooal is a new way to segment your MailChimp list based on what people do on your website when they visit from an email campaign. Goooal works by installing a tracking pixel on your site, and then adding “Goooals” to the campaign that you want to track. A Goooal could be something like: “If a visitor from my campaign goes to the www.mailchimp.com/party page, then add them to the Party RSVP segment.”

Once a subscriber to your list lands on a page associated with a Goooal, the tracking code sees it and records the hit in our super-duper database. We’ve made a cool results page where you can view the hits to each of your Goooals in real time, so that you can witness the action play by play. Just as a note, the actual process that adds the users to a segment takes a bit longer, since we don’t want to melt down the API each time there’s a new match. Once you’re subscribers have surfed your site a bit and you’ve got some good segments built, you can send targeted content that’s more relevant to their interests.

The thought behind the app is to take something that’s traditionally pretty complicated (Think of Google Analytics funnels and goals) and simplify it enough so that it’s still useful, but within the reach of most mortal humans to operate. We built this app so that you can get some better insight as to what people are looking at on your site, and hopefully figure out what they are interested in. People like hearing about stuff they are interested in.

Goooal works with your existing MailChimp account login, so you won’t have to create yet another account and remember yet another password. It’s free to use, so go give it a try and learn something new about your crowd! If you want to learn more about it, check out the FAQs.

We’re releasing this app as Beta. It should not eat your small pets or your MailChimp data, but please make sure you test your campaigns thoroughly if you plan on using Goooal. As always, get in touch if you see anything funky.

PS: The only thing missing from this is some audio each time you score a Goooal. Don’t worry, we’re on it!

Check out Goooal

I’ve been at MailChimp for a while, so I still have memories of foreign-language help requests being about as frequent as Halley’s comet (and usually treated with equal fanfare). Some of these requests were so remote and isolated, it was hard to see how it all fit in with the overall MailChimp application. Fast forward a few years. We’re at a point where not only do we have to tailor our content to a growing global audience, but we have to accept unforeseen consequences like being big in Turkmenistan. Even our CEO Ben’s shameful lack of a passport hasn’t stopped MailChimp from spreading the message of easy email newsletters worldwide.

So how do we overcome the language barrier? Stick our head in the sand and hope that everyone learns English in the next six months? Frankly, that’s not our ethos at MailChimp. We don’t ignore difficult issues.

The webinar team is here to help. We’ve been working on a full barrage of educational materials for our international users. We’ve spent a lot of time lately on Getting Started videos in a few different languages, to help you cross the language divide. German, French, and Portuguese tutorials are coming soon, in addition to the Spanish videos that are already available. These videos will cover the same topics as the videos and live webinars from the Getting Started program that’s already available in English.

These videos may sound easy-peasy, but in the name of all things simian, believe me when I say that they’re quite complex to put together. The intricacies of internet-speak across different languages and cultures are very delicate. The creation process for these videos has to be somewhat meticulous. We have to be careful when we’re trying to say “click here” in a foreign language, because we might accidentally say something we regret. And it’s not just the politeness factor—the big idea behind these videos is to give our international users the same level of training that our anglophone users get. Which means that beyond just being understandable, these videos have to have the same usefulness and level of instruction as our English presentations.

To make these educational videos in another language, we start off with our English recordings as a template. With this template, we painstakingly translate the content in a script style. This is usually the longest part. Eventually, we stop correcting every little detail and move on to the sound track portion, which is where the fun begins. We lock ourselves in the recording studio  and start speaking in all kinds of foreign languages. Once the sound track is laid (and our office mates thoroughly confused), the last bit is adding the video and post production. Once we say the magic words and tap with the magic wand, Presto! Brand new recordings for everyone.

While working on this linguistic challenge for our training videos, we realized that some of you may be experiencing a similar process. You may remember that we recently announced an integration with Straker . This integration allows you to translate the content of your emails on the go, so that you don’t even have to think about it. I don’t say this lightly: This integration borders on miraculous. If your audience is growing ever more multilingual, accept no substitute. We’re working on a video with the good folks at Straker to show you the ins and outs of the integration,how to make it all work for your campaigns, and other ways MailChimp can help you connect with your international audience. Whether you’re selling chimp-themed snuggies in Lithuania or organizing submarine tours off the Falkland islands, the idea here is to help you sort out how to make your content speak to your target audience—even if you don’t actually speak their language. Consider us your very own email babel fish.

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.

Hairball is currently in beta. If you’re interested in giving it a try, here’s where you can download:

• Mac: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.air
• Windows: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.exe
• Linux: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.linux.air

Some Quick Tips

1. First, go to “Connect Account” (it’s the link in the top right of the screen) and tell it which MailChimp account to connect to:

2. Next, you’ll see all your MailChimp Lists:

3. For each list, you’ll need to click the “fetch” buttons to sync their data down. Depending on the size of your lists, downloading their data can take a while (now you know how our servers feel).

4. After the data is downloaded, you can build unlimited segments. Get whacky!

You can even build a segment that’s based on fields with empty data:

5. After you’ve saved your segment, upload it to MailChimp:

6. You can even generate random percentage segments (what’s more random than 17?):

7. You can view the members of your segments in Hairball, or export them for a spreadsheet app or something:

Static Segments 

After building your segments in Hairball, they’re uploaded to MailChimp as “static segments.” That means we don’t have to build them dynamically for you, because you already did the hard work in Hairball (which makes our database servers purr  happily).

Whenever you log in to MailChimp and create your next campaign, you’ll see an option in the segmentation screen for static segment:

That’ll show the segments you built in Hairball. Pick your segment, and it’ll zap into place and you’re on your way. Power tip: use this to build a big static segment of “proof readers” that can test all your campaigns before you send to the full list.

If you’re one of our users with ginormous lists and MailChimp just feels a little sluggish when you build out your segments, give Hairball a try. Post your comments below, or in our Jungle discussion.

Social is a lightweight plugin for WordPress that handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with Facebook and Twitter. Through the use of a proxy application, you can associate your Twitter and Facebook accounts with your blog and its users. Once you publish a new post, you can then choose to automatically broadcast a message to any accounts authenticated with the overall blog or your current logged-in user.

Through Social, you can aggregate the various mentions, retweets, @replies, comments and responses and republish them as WordPress comments. Social polls Twitter and Facebook periodically for new comments about your posts, and adds them as comments when it finds a URL reference.

Lots of people use Facebook or Twitter as their primary identity(ies) on the web. Social lets commenters log in and leave a comment using their preferred social identity. They can also publish their response directly to their Twitter or Facebook account from your blog.

Social intentionally has a broad name. It handles a lot of socially bits in your blog from broadcasting to content aggregating. There are a bunch of other nice things about the plugin, though:

• Automatically adds Twitter hover cards to any Twitter username you drop into posts or that show up in comments
• Let’s you filter between blog comments, tweets, Facebook comments, and trackbacks
• Handles comment thread layout intelligently so you don’t get microscopic widths after four or five replies
• Let’s you manually check for social comments from each blog post edit page, or paste in a tweet URL for a comment if you like
• Easily customizable design by creating your own templates for the plugin

Want to take Social for a spin? Hey, Madge. You’re soaking in it. We’ve got it installed right here in the MailChimp blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point of Social. We tried lots of other plugins that do similar things, but none of them quite fit the bill. So we made our own, and we’re releasing it free for everyone else to enjoy.

UPDATE: Alex King of Crowd Favorite, the development mastermind behind Social, has addressed a lot of the technical details and the roadmap for the plugin over on his blog.

Download Social for WordPress

It turns out that a lot of their customers were asking for an easy way to add a MailChimp signup to their WordPress blogs that looked as great as the themes that WooThemes creates. As always, we’re glad to help!

The Canvas Theme settings has a “Subscribe and Connect” section that allows you to select MailChimp as a subscribe option. It’s super easy to use and doesn’t require hacking up WordPress theme files like some previous MailChimp integrations.

WooThemes has said to expect more of their themes to support MailChimp as a newsletter option in the coming future. We are looking forward to it!

Check out the Canvas theme at WooThemes

Starting with Mail Designer 1.1, you can now export the emails that you author to a MailChimp template with just a couple of clicks!

We are really excited that Mail Designer now works with MailChimp. It looks to be a great option for our customers that don’t enjoy coding HTML or would like an alternative to the MailChimp campaign editor.

The best part of this integration is that the text from the campaigns you export from Mail Designer are fully editable in the MailChimp campaign editor. Just in case you need to make last-minute changes.

Learn more about Mail Designer

This module allows developers to integrate a slew of MailChimp stuff into Drupal applications with minimal effort. For example, you can quickly create signup forms and synchronize your registered users in your app to a MailChimp list.

One of the features that make this redesign so cool is the new integration with our STS Service. This means that you can contain all of your Drupal App’s email (both transactional email and your bulk email) to MailChimp. It also provides delivery reporting so that you can have some insight as to where your transactional email is ending up.

You can get the module from the Connect Directory. Also, Lev’s blog post on the new module has the full scoop on what’s new, so go and check it out!

Everyone and their mother knows that Tumblr is where all the "cool" people hang out. It’s also growing in popularity in leaps and bounds. We recently built a small integration to get you Tumblr folk a much cleaner and easier way for your readers to sign up for your email list.

The integration works by using a tool we created called Chimplr that generates some JavaScript and HTML that you paste into your Tumblr Theme’s "HTML Widget" section. The code puts a "Newsletter" button next to the other Tumblr controls. Don’t worry, it’s really easy to use!

One of the biggest problems our users face is how difficult it can be to edit the MailChimp signup form styling to match their own site. We understand that you are not all HTML5 gurus, so we came up with a solution that fits all Tumblr themes.

The inserted HTML creates a button that mimics the other Tumblr buttons. It looks at home in the Tumbleverse but is also recognizable enough for non-Tumblr people to see, and it launches a "lightbox" that appears over your blog that lets readers sign up to your email list.

The "lightbox" that your users sign up through looks like this:

In order to use Chimplr, you’ll need to have your MailChimp API key handy. You’ll also need to be able to log in to your Tumblr to make the changes (duh). Chimplr will walk you through the process of getting your Newsletter button set up with screenshots and a detailed tutorial.

To get the most out of your Tumblr posts, you can use MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email campaigns to automatically generate an email newsletter based on your Tumblr posts. You can read more about this feature in our RSS-to-Email tutorial.

As always, let us know how you fare with it. We love your feedback!

P.S. We are working on getting custom fields other than the “email” field to display in the popup. Hang tight!

Go to Chimplr

It’s an incredibly powerful Gmail plugin that turns your inbox into a mini social CRM.

For example, let’s say I work for “The Big Agency” and I’m reading a message from a very important client (her name’s Amanda) inside my Gmail inbox. With Rapportive installed, I can click or hover my mouse over her name, and the Rapportive panel displays information about Amanda from the social graph, like this…

Rapportive gives me:

• Her photo (pulled from twitter)
• a brief bio
• her recent tweets
• links to her profiles on other social networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Plancast, and more.

Cool, huh?

As you can see, she’s the Head of Community at some company called “mailchimp” (heh. that’s a funny name for a company).

Hmm, looking at her latest tweets, I can see that she frequents the dribbble website (do I detect a little designerd in Amanda?), and she’s also thinking about getting an Android smartphone. If she were my client, I might reply to her tweet and send her this video review from an Engadget staffer. If I didn’t have that kind of rapport with her yet, I’d probably just get up to speed on Android phones, because the next time we meet, I could bring it up in conversation: “Whoah, is that the new X? How’re you liking it so far?” And if I had an extremely high level of rapport with her (I’m talking like — off the charts), I’d send her this very NSFW but hilarious video link about the iPhone4.

It gets cooler.

The MailChimp Raplet

Rapportive recently opened up their platform to allow developers to add “raplets.” So basically, any company can build a little plugin that, um, plugs in to the Rapportive plugin.

And you know the nerds in MailChimp Labs had to give this a try.

So now let’s say I sent this email to my entire customer list:

It showcases some new free guide our agency just published. Since it’s about social media, maybe Amanda would be interested.

With the MailChimp Raplet installed, the next time I email Amanda from Gmail (say, to give her an update on her project), some really handy MailChimp information will appear inside the Rapportive panel:

As you can see above, it contains her latest MailChimp activity:

• It tells me if Amanda is subscribed to any of my lists (indeed she is)
• It’ll show me her list engagement level (hey, 4-stars. She really likes our content!)
• I can see that she opened my last email newsletter
• And I know she downloaded our “Let’s Get Social” PDF guide.

There’s also a link that’ll take me to her profile page in MailChimp:

Amanda's profile page in MailChimp

Where I can get:

• Even more information from MailChimp’s new SocialPro add-on,
• her preferred email program (if she’s a big spender, I’d be sure to check my campaign’s renderability in Thunderbird with inbox inspector), and
• her previous email open and click activity with other emails we’ve sent.

And since my campaign had MailChimp’s integrated Facebook Like button feature, I get stats that tell me if Amanda actually Liked my guide:

I can see if Amanda, and any friends in her network, liked my email newsletter

Looks as though she did indeed “Like” the guide, along with 2 others in her network. Ka-ching!

If she re-tweeted my campaign, I’d see that as well, thanks to MailChimp’s built-in twitter tracking:

Getting the MailChimp raplet installed to Gmail

First of all, you’ll need to install Rapportive to your Gmail account.

Then, within Gmail, look for the Rapportive link at the top of the screen:

Now stare at that image a while, and burn it into the long term memory portion of your brain. You’ll be going back to that little “r” Rapportive link a lot. Notice that this is where you log in to Rapportive. Occasionally, you’ll need to log back in there (if you get logged out). It’s also where you add raplets to Rapportive.

Click on “add/remove raplets” then on the next screen, add the MailChimp raplet:

Bam. You just made Gmail even more awesome.

While you were there, did you notice the Raplets for Batchbook, and Pearl CRM? They integrate with MailChimp too. So while I’m in Gmail, getting all this wonderful data from social networks and from MailChimp, I can also click into my Batchbook Raplet and see if my teammates might’ve made any recent comments about Amanda:

Oh crud. I better not mention that Android phone afterall. And I *definitely* better not send her that iPhone video. Hmm, looks like the Batchbook raplet actually lets you enter comments from inside Gmail.

So I can post a comment back into Batchbook, for all my teammates to see:

Depending on how that lunch with Amanda goes, I might try to work this video (iPhone vs. Blendtec) into my next email newsletter as sort of an inside joke. Wink wink.

Social Graph + Email Graph

The MailChimp Raplet uses Rapportive’s social graph data and blends it with MailChimp’s “email graph” to give you information you need to get to know your clients better.

In real life.

Loosely related:

• MailChimp launches major social integration features in v5.2
• MailChimp’s integration with Google Forms
• MailChimp integrates with Google Analytics to help you target recipients by purchase activity
• Put your business infrastructure in the Cloud with Google Apps Marketplace