It’s common advice in the tech startup world that entrepreneurs should focus on developing solutions to problems that they’d like to see fixed, rather than look to innovating in more obscure areas. Needham, MA-based Grasshopper Group definitely follows this ethic.
The startup has a suite of technology answers to basic entrepreneurial business problems, such as choosing and installing phone systems, deciding on recurring payment methods, and now, how to do online marketing. Earlier this month, I was given a demo of the beta version of its newest product release, the Web marketing and analytics tool Spreadable.
“We developed what we think works for other people,” says Jonathan Kay, Grasshopper Group’s “ambassador of buzz” (the company’s title for marketing guy). He says there are plenty of tools out there for forwarding individual articles and posts to friends on the Web, but that spreading entire brands or non-editorial pages via your social network isn’t as seamless.
It’s a worthy point. As you can see from this page, all Xconomy stories have “share” sections where readers can pass the content along via e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook, but there’s plenty of real estate on our site that’s missing the sharing tool—like our national homepage, regional homepage, jobs sites, About page, and so on—because they aren’t themselves individual stories. Similarly, other sites without editorial content, like retailers, lack a sharing tool at the brand level, Kay says. “There are no tools out there that allow you to spread your brand; this saves a step,” he says.
Spreadable’s aim is to enable viewers to tell their friends about a website, brand, or product they like without ever leaving the page to open up, say, Twitter, to tweet a recommendation to their friends. The service comes both as a standalone referral page, and as a line of code that companies can use to embed a Spreadable sharing button and interface directly on their sites. The button automatically updates when companies make changes to its messages or appearance on their user dashboards, so marketers will be able to test different strategies for their Spreadable interfaces, Kay says.
Readers just click on the button, and out pops a menu with options for sharing the site with friends via e-mail and a number of social networking sites. (For an idea of how this works, check out the “refer an entrepreneur” button at the top of Grasshopper’s own page.)
Kay says the button could enable users to really spread buzz about a page or product they like, because they won’t get distracted with or deterred by having to open up a separate site and paste in a link. Users don’t even have to type in a message about whatever they’re looking to tell friends about. That’s because companies can
