When was the last time you shared an article with a friend? How did you do it? There are lots of potential answers here… Did you tweet it? Share it on Facebook? Digg it? Maybe you found it absolutely delic.io.us with a social bookmark? All of these tools have made broadcasting articles to new audiences as easy as a few clicks of a mouse.
But what about the last time you wanted to share just a snippet of an article. Maybe a really interesting paragraph or quote. Chances are we’re all in the same boat here – using a command as old as the Macintosh – good ol’ copy & paste.
Making copy/paste more sticky
In terms of duplicating content, copy and paste gets the job done just fine. But when compared with the true “social sharing” methods mentioned earlier, it fails in one respect: context. As soon as a piece of text has been clipped from a web page and pasted into an email or instant message window, there is no guarantee that the recipient will ever know the original source; drastically limiting their ability to read more about the topic that might be of interest to them. From a content provider standpoint this naturally translates into fewer clickthroughs on interesting “shared” content, fewer page views, fewer ads served and taken to the extreme, less revenue.
On a visit to Sports Illustrated today, I stumbled upon evidence that through the magic of Javascript, copy & paste has evolved.
If a selection of text (interestingly, 6 words or more) is copied and subsequently pasted into another window, not only does the user get the text they wanted, but also an unexpected Easter egg.
Look closely at what’s happening here! The developers at SI are hijacking your copy and paste command, and inserting not only a link to the source content, but also an offer about subscribing to the magazine.
But they didn’t stop there. Upon clicking through to the site, the user is greeted with the original source text conveniently highlighted in order to provide context of that quote within the article.
It’s cute, but does it convert?
Any user experience that deviates from the expected is risky – coming with both benefits and drawbacks. How does this new sharing functionality translate in terms of real world user testing. Hopefully, the developers who implemented this are tracking analytics of the feature’s use.
- How many of the URLs generated by this functionality actually deliver visitors to the site? (copy and paste clickthrough rate!)
- How much revenue is generated by the advertising offer contained within the link? (copy and paste ROI!)
- Does the clickthrough rate increase when the ad is removed? (copy and paste A/B testing!)
- What percentage of users copy and paste again after seeing the new style in action? (return copy and paste visitors!)
- Does the percent of users copying and pasting increase or decrease compared to average using this new technology? (copy and paste visitor trending!)
So what if you don’t sell content
Not everyone is Sports Illustrated, in the business of attracting eyeballs to look at flashy banners. Some of us have real products to sell, or leads to generate, or public service information to convey. How can the rest of us use this type of JS technology to improve the experience for our users?
Here are a few ideas:
- Learn what quotes drive traffic – Its fairly straightforward to learn what words on your pages are driving organic search traffic, but this technology has the potential to provide insight into what words on your pages are driving social shared traffic.
- Make your quotes tweetable – What if every time someone copied content that was 120 characters or less, and pasted it into a tweet, the source URL was appended to the end. One quick trip through a URL shortener and your content is instantly sourced and syndicated. Content longer than 120 characters could be spared this treatment, as it would only create a hassle for the user.
- Remove the need to copy at all – What if you tweaked the javascript so that instead of appending a link to the information, it instead triggered a javascript event in your web analytics? I can see huge impacts here for B2B, higher ed and anyone else with potential information gatherers on their sites. Do you see people copying and pasting a particular page of product specs? Or maybe some pre-requisites for an academic course. Or maybe instructions about self-service support for a product.
Can you provide that information in a downloadable PDF? Maybe this is a place to put a call-to-action where someone could contact a sales team member. Users are indicating an area of interest, how can you make this information as readily usable as possible.
What are your thoughts on what Sports Illustrated is doing? Does it disrupt your typical copy/paste pattern? What other applications are possible using this technology?