Later today at the ad:tech event in San Francisco, SocialTwist / Tell-a-Friend will be debuting a new type of social ad unit, which it claims is the first ‘word-of-mouth widget for ads’, in private beta. We covered the company’s forray into the content sharing widget space in September 2008, and indicated at the time that the startup was thinking of clever ways to monetize the service by working closely with advertisers.
Since then Sunnyvale, CA-based Pramati Technologies, the company behind SocialTwist, claims to have grown its customer list from 0 to 35,000+ advertisers from across the globe, including some heavyweights like P&G, Intel and Greenpeace. It’s been working to translate the service into a multitude of European languages and served up to half a billion word of mouth marketing and advertising widgets in the last 4 months alone.
And now the company is introducing advertising widgets – dubbed TAF4 Ads – that come with the ability for visitors to share the ads with their friends by e-mailing them a template e-mail and link to a destination chosen by the advertiser. The widget makes a clickable Tell-a-Friend link appear at the top right of an ad unit, which pops up a box where surfers get to e-mail a template message along with the original ad and a link to the website where the ad originally appeared to their Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail contacts, or alternatively send it out to a specific e-mail address.
To see it in action, go to this demo page and click the ‘Tell-a-Friend’ link in the top right ad unit. The rest is fairly straightforward.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t for the life of me imagine this gaining a lot of traction among web users. How many times have you seriously enjoyed an online ad so much you were dying to e-mail the experience to all your friends and relatives?
Call me old-fashioned, but I thought word-of-mouth revolved around recommending products and brands, not advertising units that promote them.
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Am I missing something here?
This is basically a glorified “mailto:” link in the top right of a ad, right?
I cant imagine ever linking to a advert (unless it was a video ad, and funny)
No, it’s better because you’re handing your username and password to an advertiser.
“Sure, I want to let you spam my friends in my name!”
This article needs a spell-checker.
I agree.
If I see a compelling product or service, I will be much more likely to link the landing page in an email, not go through this service.
The biggest thing that is forgotten here is that for Word of Mouth to work, the SENDER needs to feel useful, valuable, ahead of the curve…
Sending an advertisement does not make you feel this way.
Did I get this? They want me to enter MY email password into THEIR website??????
Out of their minds
euh.. fail.
If I wanted my clients ads to have share features in them, why wouldn’t I just build them in myself?
No way. They are trying to turn us all into spammers of our own contacts.
That, and you (the friend) doesn’t get a cut? Whats the point of sharing the ad, unless you LOVE the product or service.
This is where the growth is http://iamned.com/blog/ Social Twit could be worth $2 billion dollar.s
Very funny indeed !
Based on your valuations i fear for the future of US$. Is it going to be devalued million percent ?
OMG, I knew something is wrong with US economy, you just reinforcing my bad feelings.
Ha!
This is one of the greatest ideas I’ve ever heard!
hell no I am not going to do this this will not work I might consider sending news articles and funny videos from youtube but there is no way I am going to spam anyone with ads I hate ad emails as it is.
Don’t want to be the prototypical TechCrunch hater here, but I have to agree with @Dan Blake. How is this any different than the standard mailto function that almost all widgets have today?
Nefarious methods should never be confused with innovation. I’m with Robin on this one. This has fail written all over it.
this is exactly what i want to do .. spam my friends with ads. We should get right on this
Old fashioned.
This is one step closer to Advertising as Self Expression: http://www.mich...self-expression . . . but not quite there yet.
ok just send Alerts
Wow, a shitty widget just managed to get shittier!
We know this space…
If an ad is actually good and has the budget, there are plenty of BETTER tools out there to help the ad go viral (AddToAny, Gigya for Flash ad units, and Dan is right… use a “mailto”!)
You can’t make users send an ad to a friend, especially with this sad sad popup widget, which is obviously not the first.
Tell-A-Friend might as well be Spam-A-Friend because that’s the exact idea they are selling.
They also use Comic Sans in their graphic.
Death penalty
oh la la. they must have changed their font to helvetica today.
i was able to get a screenshot of them using the comic sizzle.
http://lh6.ggph...Picture%201.png
The idea is missing an economic model — what’s the incentive to forward the ad. There should be an incentive — reputational benefit or financial benefit for forwarding useful advertisements to others in one’s social graph. Otherwise, the risk-reward trade-off is not compelling to the sender.
The other (potentially) useful application here is to request more information about the ad without having to click through on the ad. It is a license to the advertiser to send more information rather than having to click through to a lead capture form.
FYI, I own the domain name ClickItForward.com — it is available for development for anyone interested in it.
I heard AdTech is garbage. Dunno how true it is..LOL
this is right what i want to do spam my friends with ads. We should get right on this How is this any different than the standard mail to function that almost all widgets have today?
All your ads are belong to us!
I just got a copy of ePostMailer from http://Spryka.com and I would recommend to anyone who needs to send out an opt-in email mailshot. Its the best free desktop based email marketing software I have used so far.
http://www.yout...h?v=hKWcoA2ZUoA
check out the new Aquafina video. my friend made it. it’s great!