• 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

But it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing…

I remember a while back, when we were going through some server growing pains, people were tweeting all kinds of angry stuff at us. To be honest, a few of the tweets kinda made me want to pull the plug on our twitter account. I remember thinking, “we spend gobs of money on our infrastructure, and some guy 20 gazillion miles away, using some tiny coffee shop’s wifi, tweets that we’re slow and hash-tags us with a ‘fail’?” (By the way, we still listened to that guy, and kept on investing more in our infrastructure.)

And we actually had one guy (who accidentally purchased twice, for a grand total of something like $30) DM us with the following:

Slander threats? Really? And all I have is 140 characters to defend myself?

STFU is a horrible name for a product

So I reacted like any guy would. I asked our developers to come up with a tool that would let me reply to meanies, but with more than 140 characters. If some angry dude wants to tell the public that our software sucks, I should be able to apologize to him in public, then explain to him that we shut his account down because he got too many abuse complaints, because his list was poorly maintained and full of spam traps. See, there are two sides to every story, and it’s only fair to be able to tell mine too. You know, if we’re getting all public about it. Oh yeah, I also asked my developers to call this tool “S.T.F.U.”

Thankfully, as I always expect from my employees, they ignored that last suggestion and focused on building a simple, useful tool (probably to make me stfu). They worked on it in their spare time, and decided to just codename it “LongReply.”

Meanwhile, I went back to using a variety of different tools: twitter, tweetdeck, cotweet, hootsuite, seesmic, etc. All great tools. And this gave me some time to cool down and reflect on how to use twitter for public customer service.

We all need a little more human

Fortunately, by the time we got an early prototype of LongReply working, I had forgotten (mostly) about the negative stuff, and just used LongReply to give customers really thorough explanations. I noticed that people seemed to be surprised that a) not only were we so willing to help on twitter, but that b) we were actually very thorough in our replies. When you’re not limited to 140 characters, it’s really liberating. You can answer a question, then go on and teach users about other ways we can help:

And that’s when I really started to get excited about all this. It’s simple, really. People just want to talk to humans. That used to mean telephone support. But nowadays, even that’s not instant enough. The wait times, the “dial 1 for English” and the outsourced call center drones who aren’t really helpful at all have become the norm.

It’s why websites like gethuman.com exist.

So where’s the last place we can go, that hasn’t been automated yet, to find a real human being who can just help?

Twitter.

And remember, this is all public. Anybody monitoring the “mailchimp” keyword on twitter sees how we answer our customers. So in a way, help becomes marketing.

So what exactly is LongReply?

Okay, enough back story behind LongReply. Let’s talk about what it does.

It’s a new product we’re launching to the public soon. I think we’re talking about a few weeks.

It’s for listening, and helping. It’s not a “marketing hub” where you can post stuff, and see your message get distributed to all social media networks. It’s actually a bunch of really simple concepts (definitely nothing revolutionary), but when you apply all these simple tools to the problem of customer service, it’s quite handy (imho).

We’ll explain it more as we get closer to launching, but here’s a rough outline of functionality:

Chrome extension and Firefox plugin

You install a browser plugin that automatically adds a link to all tweets like this:

So imagine watching Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, and you see a tweet that you need to respond to. You click to open that tweet in your browser, and voila — there’s a handy LongReply link.

Write more than 140 Characters

After you click the LongReply link in twitter, it’ll pull up your LongReply account where you can just start writing a good, helpful answer. We’ll preview what the 140-char version looks like, and provide a shortened link back to this longer explanation:

As you can see, your long replies can include links, images, and a little formatting. You can also save drafts for later.

Reply as…

Another nice little feature is that if your company has multiple twitter accounts, you can link them all to your LongReply account. Our company has a main twitter account, but we also have one for our Compliance Team, our Webinar team, our API team, and so on. So the little pulldown makes it easy to “reply as…” any of those twitter profiles.

Saved Keyword Search with Sentiment Analysis

My favorite feature is the sentiment analysis. You can setup saved searches (like you can in Tweetdeck, etc), but it doesn’t require real-time monitoring. See, we’re getting to the point where the twitter volume is too much to try to follow. If we stop to take a coffee break, we miss important tweets. So we designed LongReply to have keyword searches, but you’ll notice we don’t do a row of extremely tight columns in order to cram as many tweets as we can (like you’d typically see in most realtime twitter monitoring solutions):

That’s because we’re using some of the sentiment analysis code we tinkered with back when we released our Facebook Comments feature. Instead of having to sit at my desk and watch the twitter stream 24/7, like that scene from Clockwork Orange, LongReply simply alerts us when there are angry (or happy) tweets that we should respond to.

Every hour, LongReply checks to see if there are any “non-neutral” tweets, and sends an email:

We plan to add push alerts to mobile devices (and, obviously some native iPhone and Android apps).

Multiple users

You can setup multiple users on your LongReply account, too. That way, a bunch of people on your staff can help your customers, and we’ll show you which tweets have already been replied to. Whenever we started giving more team members access to twitter, we had a bunch of situations where different people gave customers duplicate tweets. This will help prevent that. You can also specify which twitter accounts employees are allowed to talk through:

This is particularly useful if you have an unfortunate circumstance when an employee (who had access to your twitter account) leaves your company. You just remove them from LongReply, instead of worrying about changing all your twitter and facebook passwords. In the screenshot above, you can see we’re setting up a group for our Compliance Team to talk via the @mailchimpabuse twitter account.

What’s Ahead for LongReply?

We have no idea. It’s partly why we want to open this up to everyone, for free, and just get feedback. We mainly built it for us, but we think there are other companies out there who are struggling to deliver good customer service through social channels, and don’t quite need some of the bigger “enterprisey” solutions on the market (we don’t all have kick-ass mission control rooms like this).

Another thing that’s going to influence where this goes: I’ve always believed we should try to help customers no matter where they are. Have you ever commented on a company’s blog, and noticed messages like, “please don’t ask tech support questions here on our blog”? Yuck. If customers ask for help on the blog, you should try to help there.

Problem is, our blog articles get syndicated over to our Facebook Fan Page. So we’ve got comments over there to answer, too. Makes it hard to keep up with. And our company and functionality is growing, and I honestly can’t keep track of everything MailChimp does anymore. I’m frequently asking other people here “Um, do we actually have that feature? Cool! How’s it work?” So we want to pull in streams from multiple sources: your blog, facebook, twitter — even your help team’s inbox. And we’d love to end up with one place, where anybody in our company can log in and just answer people — no matter where the question was posted.

We also don’t believe this is a replacement for a full-featured help system. I frequently get tweets and blog comments that I need to pass over to a real help desk (Zendesk does this beautifully, I hear). So we hope to be exploring integrations with solutions like that, too. Finally, we think that integrating this app and layering some of your social interactions with your customer database in MailChimp would make a whole lot of sense.

After we get a little feedback from our users. If you’d like to be notified when LongReply launches, sign up for our list.

Here’s what’s in v5.3…

• Social Pro Add-on is free until March of 2011. Yes, you heard that right. Normally, SocialPro costs an additional 20% of whatever you’re paying for MailChimp. But for 6 months, we’ll cover that cost. This is a huge investment for us, but we’re committed to helping our customers get more social and be more human with their email marketing. Learn more about Social Pro here.
• AIM Reports are free – We silently rolled this out a couple weeks ago, but now it’s official. Our AIM reports add-on is being absorbed into our default feature set, and is therefore now free (yay!). The data’s found in your campaign reports under “subscriber activity.” For those of you who don’t know, AIM reports was an add-on that cost $49, and basically gave “who did what” stats. We made AIM free so that we can make the upcoming Golden Monkeys app (which requires AIM), free. Double yay!
• Freemium Plan expanded – One year ago, we launched our freemium plan, allowing businesses with less than 500 subscribers to use MailChimp free of charge. We grew from 85,000 users to more than 440,000 users. So yeah, that worked. Now, we’re expanding our freemium plan to allow customers with lists up to 1,000 members to use MailChimp free. Spread the monkey love!
• MailChimp Faces – If you have the Social Pro add-on enabled for your list (ahem, which is free until March), you’ll be greeted by your subscribers’ avatars every time you sign in to the MailChimp Dashboard. Learn more about MailChimp Faces.
• Add Facebook Comments to Emails – The discussion doesn’t have to end when you click “send.” Add the Facebook comments button, and your subscribers can keep the conversation going. See how it works.
• Klout Scores added to member profiles – Klout analyzes your twitter and facebook accounts and rank your influence (here’s a report on @MailChimp). It’s sorta become the standard for measuring influence. So we’ve added Klout scores into all MailChimp member profiles.
• Like Button enhancements – Back in July, we introduced the Like button to email marketing. Some of you told us you wanted more flexibility with it. So we added the ability for you to insert the URL that you want “liked.” Your subscribers can like a product inside your campaigns, an item inside your RSS-to-email, or even your Facebook page. Basically, it’ll work like this: * |FACEBOOK:LIKE:URL| *
• Tweet Button – Campaign archives will include the “Tweet this” button, and you can insert a tweet this merge tag into your campaigns. RSS campaigns will get a tweet merge tag for each item, such as * |RSSITEM:TWITTER| *  (we’ll post more details, don’t worry)
• Buzz Button – We’ve added a merge tag for Google’s Buzz button, as well as one for items in an RSS campaign.
• Facelift & Botox Treatment – Over the years, we’ve been innovating like hell — adding features on top of features on top of features. We decided it was time to sit down, take stock of our UI, and optimize like hell. Our interface elements are more consistent, fonts are refined, icons are more elegant, CSS files were reduced by nearly 80k and things are just — well, more “aaaaaaaaaah.”
  
• Signup forms redesigned – We’ve redesigned the entire signup process. Signup forms, thank you pages, and welcome emails are more elegant and simple, and with a little sprinkling of CSS3. There’s a new button in the signup form creator that will automatically design your signup form for you (it pulls in CSS and color settings from your website). Finally, signup forms are now optimized for mobile display (they’ll auto-zoom on iPhone and Android). Existing signup forms are not changing. This is for signup forms moving forward (and you’ll have the option to use “old” forms vs. “new” forms).

We’ll be posting details about all the new features (especially all the new social merge tags) shortly after we launch.

Plus, we’ll have even more exciting news for our customers to announce tomorrow, so stay tuned! Weeeeeeeee!

[UPDATE: 9-16-2010, 12:19PM ET]

• We launched on schedule last night, but experienced a backlog in campaigns within a few hours. The backlog is slowing down test sends, and all email delivery in general. We’re seeing test sends take around 30 minutes. This should improve soon, as our delivery queue clears out. Yes, this is a complete p.i.t.a. when you’ve got to test something for a campaign that’s due now. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
• Around 10am, some users experienced an outage for roughly 20 minutes. That was due to a process that started (good), but never stopped (bad), which just overloaded the system. We’re back online and normalized now, but are still working through the delivery queue to speed things up. If your campaign was affected, contact our support team for make-goods. If you’re a competing ESP who serves the “mid market” and who is desperately calling on our clientele to switch away from MailChimp, they’ve asked me to tell you to stop, because it’s annoying and kinda needy. Just send us a box of your company brochures, and we’ll happily ship them out to our larger customers for you (it’s less spammy that way).
• Some customers are asking where the new Facebook Comments feature is. Sometime yesterday, Facebook broke the interwebs with that. Here’s their bug report. It’s sort of a simple little issue they’re experiencing (if I understand correctly, an “onFocus” UI sorta thing), and we suspect they’ll resolve it soon. But until then, we’re leaving the feature turned off.
• As always, stay tuned to our twitter account: @mailchimpstatus for the critical updates, or @mailchimp for general updates.

[UPDATE: 9-16-2010, 7:42PM ET]

• The queue is finally getting back to normal. It’s okay to send emails, but you still may see some delays. Just not as drastic as earlier today.
• During the day, we also had a brief outage that rebooted one of our delivery servers. That caused it to send duplicate emails for some of our customers. We’ve stopped the duplicate sending, but if your account was affected, please contact our support team so we can make it up to you.
• Our latest tweet was that things would be calming down by 8pm ET. We’re on track. Earlier, we had a lot of “jobs” waiting to be picked up by a heavily backlogged queue. Now, there are no more jobs waiting. We’ve still got a heavy queue of emails to go out, but we’re churning through them at faster than normal (but not fast enough to hurt deliverability) speeds. Our staff will be monitoring servers throughout the night.

[UPDATE: 9-16-2010, 9:14PM ET]

• Today’s been an extremely high volume day. Lots of peakiness. At around 8:30pm, just when we expected things to calm down, we had another surge of email volume that caused another brief outage. On the bright side, that was the last big surge for today, and now that we’re through it, things are calming down. Sending is still a little slow, but we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks for your patience, and we just can’t apologize enough for this inconvenience. Very, very sorry. We’ll continue to monitor things throughout the night.

[UPDATE: 9-17-2010, 8:40AM ET]

As of 6:47am ET, things appear to be back to normal. The RSS-to-email and autoresponder campaigns that we trickled out overnight have all been sent. Our delivery queues are back down to normal levels.  If you have a campaign that did not get sent, please contact support, and we’ll look into its status for you. Thanks for your patience throughout all this.

Summary of what happened yesterday…

For example, whenever I send our MailChimp newsletters, I usually get a couple dozen replies and I reply back to every single one of them. Sometimes, the conversation gets really interesting and it’s a shame that all our subscribers can’t join in.

So in our upcoming v5.3 upgrade, we’re adding Facebook Comments functionality to MailChimp campaigns. This way, you can keep the conversation going with your subscribers after you’ve hit the send button.

Here’s how it works…

Let’s say you’re an artist (the awesome Chet Phillips, to be exact). You could sign in to MailChimp and use our AutoConnect template for Etsy, to automagically¹ pull in your latest work.

In your campaign setup screen, make sure you check “allow comments:”

Then, just insert our new Facebook Comments merge tag into your campaign like this:

When your subscribers get your newsletter, it looks like this…

And when they click the comments button, we take them to your campaign archive page with the Facebook comments window open:

From here, your subscribers can log in to Facebook and comment.

What’s nice is the checkbox option to post their comment to their Facebook profile:

which is an excellent way for them to spread the word about your newsletter to the friends in their network.

They can also see comments from other subscribers within this window, and if they want, comment to each other:

As people comment on your newsletter, you’ll receive email notifications from MailChimp.

Comment Stats

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could track all those comments inside MailChimp? Boosh. Open up your campaign’s social stats in MailChimp, scroll down to the Facebook stats section, and you’ll see all comments about your campaign:

The nerds in the lab also wanted to tinker with sentiment analysis, so you’ll see little frowny or smiley icons next to each comment, plus the overall sentiment.  Note that if you don’t like a comment, you can delete it from this screen, and your other subscribers won’t see it on your campaign archive.

If you want, you can try sending a campaign with the comments merge tag only to your recipients who are on Facebook. Just use our Social Pro add-on like this:

Or, you could create a small “round table” of your highly engaged customers. Just build a segment using our influence, engagement, and social criteria:

Turn your newsletters into conversation starters

If you’ve ever ended your newsletters with a request for feedback, like “Let me know what you think” or “what do you guys recommend for…” you’ll love this feature. Your subscribers can share their expertise and opinion with the rest of your community, instead of just your inbox. It’s also a great way to answer common questions. How many times have you sent an email to people, and had to reply back with the same answer over and over to a bunch of recipients? I’ve received great questions from customers, and knew that others on my list would benefit from the answer too. By adding Facebook comments to your emails, hitting the “send” button doesn’t mean the discussion is over. For your community, it’s just beginning.

Facebook comments, along with MailChimp Faces, are coming to MailChimp when we launch v5.3 in just a few days.

Related:

• Add a MailChimp newsletter signup form to your Facebook page
• MailChimp brings the Facebook “Like” button to email marketing
• MailChimp Launches Social Pro addon

MailChimp Dashboard with subscriber avatars

When we launched Social Pro, it gave our customers fascinating insight into their subscriber lists. Suddenly, their databases were no longer full of “prospects” or “records.” We could drill down into member profiles to learn more about them and actually see what they look like (“gasp! these are humans!”).

Seeing those social avatars and gravatars is so profoundly fun, we decided to make that aspect of Social Pro a lot more front and center. In a few days, we’ll be launching MailChimp Faces. When Social Pro is activated, a random sample of your subscribers will be there to greet you whenever you log in to the MailChimp Dashboard. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder that these are real live people you’re sending to, and they deserve useful, relevant emails…

You’ll also be able to sort these faces to see your most active subscribers and your most recent subscribers:

Warning: Highly Addictive

Having access to a beta of MailChimp Faces for the last couple weeks, I’ve found myself spending hours just clicking through profiles and learning about the people who subscribe to my lists. Avatars can reveal a lot about people. For example…

I’ve got dog lovers on my list:

and plenty of cat lovers too:

I noticed some cheerful beer lovers:

and some serious bier lovers:

Um, freakishly weird alien creatures with lasers on their forehead:

Amish Lego fanatics from Portugal:

And I even learned that SANTA CLAUS is on my list:

Yes, I had to check that twice. Think he’s on my list to see if I’m naughty or nice?

And before you tell me that I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, note that you can click on any face to get their hover card, which links you to their twitter, facebook, and linkedin accounts (if they made them public), shows you their approximate geolocation (if available), plus you can click to view their full member profile in MailChimp:

Click an avatar to display their hovercard

Now Email is Good With Faces

Mention email, and marketers think about pie charts, targeting and ROI. Email marketing is all business.  Social networks are where the personal stuff happens. But there’s no reason your email marketing shouldn’t be personal too. In fact, the way things are going with gmail and hotmail, it may become a requirement. We’ve been talking a lot lately about using email to be more social, using the Social Web to be more human, and how machines are developing a taste for “human-ity” when filtering our emails. MailChimp Faces and Social Pro reveal the human side of our lists. Chad, our lead engineer, puts it this way: “Empathy, damn it!” He was being snarky, but it’s true. Email marketing is not about just constantly marketing to your contacts. It’s about getting to know them better, so you can have more useful, engaging conversations.

MailChimp Faces, along with some other exciting new features, will be launching in a few days with our v5.3 release. Stay tuned for details, plus some exciting announcements.

the opens and clicks are still trickling in, but so far it’s received a total of 65 likes on Facebook:

63 of my subscribers clicked “Like” and shared my campaign on Facebook, and 2 of their friends subsequently liked it.

Now what?

The first thing I’m curious about is who the “influencers” are, and what they liked so much about my newsletter.

So I look for the subscribers with 4 or 5 blue stars:

A typical “influencer” member profile looked sorta like this:

And here’s what I learned about them.

• They’re twitter savvy, and have really great avatars (cool, goofy, slick)
• They have tons of friends and connections (in the thousands)
• They have cool job titles like “brand evangelist” and “community manager” and “change agent”
• They click absolutely nothing. Well, nothing but my reference to this Double Rainbow + Autotune + Kermit Remix link.

Sorta makes sense. They’re part of the cool crowd, and want more funny. Here’s what their email activity typically looked like:

Engaged, but not really.

So then I looked through all my “Likers” who have a lower influence rating. These are the people with 3 or fewer blue stars:

In general, all subscribers who liked my email are engaged (they’re 4 or 5 stars). But the ones who have a lower influence rating seemed to always be extremely engaged (Learn how MailChimp measures engagement and how it can affect your deliverability). This is the typical activity I saw for those with low(er) social influence:

They seemed to click links to tutorials, articles that demonstrate our company ethos, staff photos, and all the silly stuff.

Demographically, they were more diverse than the influential likers. I saw people of all ages, from all walks of life, and who work in completely different industries.  The only thing they seemed to have in common was that they really, really cared about MailChimp, and what I had to say (thanks!).

I checked our system to see if “non-influential super clickers” were more long term customers who’ve paid us more money. Nah, it was all random. The influencers are great customers too. They just don’t click much. Maybe they just don’t want to be influenced?

Granted, this is a very small sample, and we’re still in the early stages of all this Email+Facebook Like business. We only just launched the feature on July 13th (see what else we launched). As of July 30th, just under 11 million emails were sent by our customers with the new Like button in place.

We’re still analyzing and learning. Even though the sample is small (or maybe because of it), it’s really fascinating and useful to get data like this. It’s like my own little focus group of subscribers who like my content. Not just people who opened. But people who liked it enough to “Like” it on Facebook (heh). Being able to open their member profiles in MailChimp and see their gravatars, social activity, geolocation and demographic information is almost like meeting my customers face-to-face.

What would you ask your most loyal, engaged customers if you could get them in a room with you?

But today I changed all that, because of an email newsletter I got from Jon Swanson. I subscribed to his blog updates a long time ago, because he was one of the first people to try our RSS-to-email tool.

All I wanted to know is whether or not our tool was working properly for people. But I ended up staying on his list, because I like his writing and his content. Heck, I’ve ended up purchasing books he’s recommended (that’s what’s so interesting about influence, and the social web).

Anyway, in Gmail, since I have Rapportive installed, I saw Jon’s face right next to his newsletter (that’s him over to the right). I can also see some of his recent tweets, which  include links to more photos.

This makes his email newsletter really personal, and really human. So if you have Rapportive installed in your Gmail, and you got my most recent newsletter, there’s me:

When I first wrote about MailChimp’s integration with Rapportive, I was only thinking about how you could use it to learn more about your customers. Never even thought about using it so that customers could learn more about you(r brand).

Speaking of learning, when I was looking at his Rapportive information, my MailChimp Raplet showed me that Jon is also subscribed to my email newsletter:

And he has a 4-star (very engaged) member rating.

Small world.

P.S.

Switching the email address that your company uses for your newsletter’s reply-to is NOT something you can just do on a whim (unless you own your company, and you love experimenting). That’s because if you’ve been using a role address for years, it’s likely your subscribers’ address books and spam filters have been trained to trust and accept emails from the email address you started with. Switching your reply-to could result in spam filter blocking.

But it’s something worth considering if you’d like to form a more personal, human bond with your loyal subscribers. Dan, my co-founder who runs our MailChimp Webinars, is building up a “social profile” for the webinar department so that their emails to customers can be accompanied by some fun bio information and avatar (pulled from this twitter account).

If this is all something you just can’t risk, no worries. It does look like Rapportive is working on a way to get corporate information included whenever it detects certain role addresses. A very “corporate” email promotion that I got from Network Solutions gave me this in Rapportive:

And come to think of it, you could always integrate your social profile information right next to your email newsletter by using MailChimp’s built-in twitter template (here’s a blog post about that from 2009), or any of our other socially integrated AutoConnect templates.

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…

Here’s a sample from the article explaining affinity (u):

Those who comment and like your personal updates have a higher affinity (the relationship between object creator and recipient) than those that do not.

on how weight (w) is determined:

Each object is assigned a score based on the number of comments and likes it earns. An object with 15 comments and 20 likes has a much greater weight than an object with 0 comments and likes.

Mr. Sietsema also discusses what all this means to your company, and offers up some content strategy. It’s definitely worth reading, so here’s the link again: Deconstructing Facebook’s EdgeRank

What this means for MailChimp customers

Now I realize that it’s tempting to say, “Bah-humbug! It’s too early to care about all this Facebook Likey stuff, so let’s see how all this plays out before I start changing the way I do my email marketing.”

Fundamentally though, this shouldn’t change the way you do your email marketing that much. It’s all about creating useful content (that people like to share) on a regular basis. In fact, you’re probably already placing “share with your network” links in all your campaigns.

But the Like button is different from the social sharing icons that you’re probably already including in your emails. This is all about Facebook learning what people Like, then Facebook suggesting new content to others (see: Facebook Seeks to Build the Semantic Search Engine).

What’s changing now is whether or not your emails help people “like” your content, and whether or not you want to track all that liking (to learn more about your customers, in order to create even better content).

Here’s how to put the Like button in your emails, and track your total Facebook likes, with MailChimp.  We made it as easy as pasting this merge tag: *| FACEBOOK:LIKE |*

Still want to wait and see if this is all just a fad? Nothing wrong with that. But be sure to check out the “d” in that equation above:

d = time decay factor

MailChimp's Social Pro Addon

You want to know as much as you can about your email subscribers so you can send them stuff that’s actually useful.

But how do you learn more about them without overloading your signup forms or sending surveys with tons of questions about age, location, etc?

Well, you do what business people have been doing forever. You talk to your customers. Go to events. Get to know them. Ask them how the kids are doing, how’s the weather, and how’s their health. You know: you get social.

Only now, all that “socializing” is happening on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. You could go to every social network and plug each one of your subscribers into their search boxes over and over until you find them all.

But that would take forever. Which is why, as part of our ginormous v5.2 “Let’s get social” release, we’ve created the Social Pro add-on:

Social Pro is a powerful tool that automatically syncs your MailChimp list with social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr, and Myspace to give you more insight about your subscribers.

All this social data is extremely cool all by itself, but when you combine it with some of MailChimp’s powerful email marketing features, it gets even better.

See how social your email subscribers are

Are you trying to make the case for doing more social media marketing at your company or client? Knowing the percentage of your subscribers who are actually out there on social networks might tell you if it’s worth it (tip: it’s worth it). You can even send all your “more social” members a targeted campaign to get them to follow your company on Twitter and Facebook (tip: you’ll have to make it worth it for them). Perhaps you can show them some of the funny/useful/interesting conversations happening on your fan page, or use our built-in twitter merge tags and twitter template to get jump started.

Learn which social networks your subscribers are on

But each social network has its own unique characteristics. So you’ll want to know exactly how your list breaks down by network.

Also, stuff gets shared differently on Twitter vs. Facebook. Facebook users share more on weekends, and respond better to certain writing styles and certain types of content. For example, Facebook users click and share videos more than Twitter users (probably because Facebook gives you an automatic thumbnail preview, while Twitter only presents a short URL). I got that from: The Science of Facebook Marketing by Dan Zarrella and Sharing on Facebook vs. Sharing on Twitter.

Just as people sign up to receive different kinds of content from different email accounts, people want different experiences, depending on which social network they’re on:

With fragmentation will come focus. Inboxes are everywhere! From Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and the Web, more inboxes will increase competition. But this will also create opportunity for marketers to create targeted experiences as subscribers delegate certain functions and habits to different inboxes. – Stephanie Miller, on Clickz

With Social Pro, you can send specialized content to segments of your list based on which social network they’re on:

MailChimp shows you which social network your subscribers are using

Know which subscribers follow you on twitter

Think about that. There are customers who signed up for your emails, and they want to hear what you have to say on twitter. These are some seriously loyal people:

See the subscribers who follow you on twitter

You should send them something awesome, just for being so loyal. At MailChimp, we send plushies:

And yes, that’s exactly why we added the “send to” button there (I actually wanted to call it the “send plushy” button). Oh yeah, back to Social Pro.

Loyalty + Email Engagement

You can combine this criteria with MailChimp’s built-in engagement scoring to create a new group of ultra-loyal, ultra-engaged subscribers:

The screenshot above shows a segment of my list who follow us on twitter, and open and click my newsletters a lot.

I could use the geo-targeting functionality that we introduced back in our v5.0 release to narrow it down to local ultra-loyal fans:

then use our Eventbrite integration to send them an invitation to a meetup (ahem, or “tweetup” as the kids say now).

Please note that this particular data point relies heavily on twitter’s API. When you activate Social Pro, the data may not immediately display. Give it some time.

Get to know your most influential subscribers

We’ll show you the members on your list who are the most-connected (aka the “influencers”):

So if you’ve got a stack of tickets for great seats at some event to give away (in a hurry), maybe you send these people a private email so that they can pass the awesomeness on to their followers.

Influence + Geolocation

Maybe you’re throwing a grand opening party in a new city, and you want to use our built-in geo-targeting to send them an invitation.

Why not scan that segment of your list for the VIPs…

…then check out some of their profiles in MailChimp and memorize some faces in case you meet them IRL:

Member profiles updated w/avatars, social data

In their profile page, mouse over their twitter handle to see their hover card.

The hover card will show you their Twitter profile info, plus some of their latest tweets. Using the example above, now I know Aarron likes artisan coffee. If he were a super VIP client, I’d be checking up on the coffee my caterer is supplying for the event, and maybe even get some Blue Bottle myself.

Now, before you start thinking about sending targeted campaigns to the influencers in order to get their endorsement for something, you should reconsider. The funny thing about influencers is they really don’t want to be influenced. Instead, use this tool to learn everything you can about them. What makes them so influential? What inspires them to inspire others? What, about you, inspired them to subscribe to your list? Know who they are, and what makes them so special.

Generate reports on age and gender of your subscribers

Social Pro even gives you a breakdown of your list by gender:

and see how your list breaks down by age group:

Are you writing age-appropriate content?

If you sell advertising in your emails, now you can show your advertisers some basic demographics of your subscribers. While we’re on this topic, you could include your list’s overall engagement level and A/B testing stats, too.

Demographics + Purchase Activity

If you’re an e-retailer, you can combine previous purchase history from your store with our e-commerce360 feature to target “expensive purse buyers” like this:

How it works, how to get it

Again, all of the social data that’s synced with your list is data that you could obtain yourself, for free, by manually typing in every email address on your list and searching through twitter, facebook, etc. But there’s a service called Rapleaf that’s already aggregated all that data. They’re sort of a behind-the-scenes data warehouse that powers a lot of the social integrations that you see out there, and we’re using their service at MailChimp for Social Pro. By integrating with them, we’re able to sync this data up with your list more automagically.

Activating the Social Pro Add-on

Because some of our customers manage different lists for different clients who have different privacy policies, we didn’t want to make this a “one-click, and it’s activated for all lists” kinda thing. We made this an optional add-on that you install on a per-list basis. Under the add-ons screen in MailChimp, activate Social Pro for each list that you want social data on:

Pricing

The price is 20% above whatever you currently pay every month to manage that many subscribers in a list. If you’re a pay-as-you-go customer, then the price is 20% above whatever you would pay every month to manage that size list on MailChimp. Yeah, even I don’t fully understand what I just typed. But basically, if you currently pay $100 per month for MailChimp, and you turn on Social Pro for all your members, your new monthly bill will be $120. One reason we called this “Social Pro” is because it’s a power tool that’s integrated with your MailChimp list, and it’s always on. If you see yourself as more of a casual user, then you might be more interested in Flowtown’s integration with MailChimp. They offer pay-as-you-go and monthly plan options plus very deep integration with MailChimp’s segmentation functionality (here’s another review of Flowtown used in conjunction with MailChimp).

This is just scratching the surface

We all know that social is here to stay. It’s powerful stuff. And it’s even more powerful when paired with email marketing, because — in a nutshell — it can help you form even deeper connections with your customers. But I think that SocialPro, and all the other social features we’re launching with v5.2, are just the beginning.

I highly recommend reading about the “Social Web” in this presentation from a Google researcher Paul Adams: The Real Life Social Network v2.  It’s huge, so just read slides #17-32 if you’re short on time:

Social is fundamentally changing the way we all use the web, and it’s changing the way we build websites and interactions.

Like it or not, the Social Web is here to stay.

Tectonic Shifts

TechCrunch describes these  “tectonic shifts we’re seeing in mobile platforms, the social graph, and online commerce“ as the “3rd Disruptive Wave” (yet another article I highly recommend, because we’ll be addressing mobile’s disruptive impact soon). Some even say there’s a war brewing between Facebook and Google, and that Facebook’s Like button is their “shot across the bow.” Others say that’s just crazy talk.

Whatever the case, this is only the beginning, so we’re not going to pretend to know where these changes are going to take us.

It’s not our style to speculate anyway.

We’re just here to make sure our customers don’t miss this wave.

We’d love to hear your feedback. We’re listening on Facebook, and taking suggestions in the Jungle.

Social Integrations:

1. As was picked up by AllFacebook and Mashable last week, we’re making it easy to integrate the Facebook Like button into your email campaigns, then track your total Likes and subsequent “re-likes” in your MailChimp stats. Email marketers may indeed be tracking our “Like rates” soon. This is not the same as the “share on your social network” links (which we launched back in January of 2009). The Facebook Like button has much more significance for website owners.
2. We’ve created a Facebook App that allows you to collect email subscribers from your Facebook wall.
3. We’re launching an add-on called Social Pro that syncs your email list with the social graph. We’ll show you what social networks your subscribers are on, who’s following you on twitter, rank subscribers by influence, and more. We’ll be posting more details very soon, but you can check out the video here.
4. MailChimp Raplet for the Rapportive Gmail plugin: Users of the popular Rapportive can now see if a contact has opened or clicked any of their recent MailChimp campaigns, too.
5. AutoConnect Templates – If you have an Etsy, Yelp, iTunes, eBay or Amazon profile page, MailChimp can automagically design an email template for you to send to your followers.

New Features:

1. User-agent tracking: We’ll show you what email apps your subscribers use, and even break down mobile vs. desktop apps.
2. Gravatar integration: If a Gravatar exists for any of your subscribers, their photo will appear in their member profile on MailChimp (see: Gravatar Has Just Become a 22 Million+ Strong Social Network). It’s so cool to see actual pictures of your subscribers.

Refinements:

1. Autosave added to more places in the campaign builder process to reduce the “I lost my content, you #$@% monkey!” tweets
2. Campaign content editor window is no longer a tiny sliver of a textarea, but uses a lot more of the screen
3. Pre-built fields for your signup forms: gender, days of the week, months of the year, US stats, and world countries

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. More features and details will be posted soon. The upgrade is a live rollout, so we won’t be turning off and rebooting the servers or anything (so tracking, signups, etc should not be affected).  Stay tuned!