MailChimp today announced the launch of Social, a WordPress plugin. Social manages the conversation on WordPress.org blogs, extending and tracking the discussion across social media outlets. Blog owners can now bring together all of the discussion about their content in their regular comment stream, including Tweets, ReTweets and Facebook comments.
The concept stemmed from necessity as MailChimp wanted a better way to handle the discussion surrounding the MailChimp blog. MailChimp would publish a post, but the responses were often scattered between comments on the site and a combination of tweets, comments, retweets, and likes across social networks. Social makes it easy to track the social discussion collecting external mentions and displaying them below the post in one stream of conversation.
Social supersedes WordPress' comment system, and supplements it with social media integration. Posts can be set to automatically broadcast on linked Facebook and Twitter accounts, while visitors to the site can easily add to the on site comments by logging in with their respective Twitter or Facebook identities, all within WordPress. Social keeps track of mentions outside of the blog by aggregating these external conversations when it sees a URL reference, and displaying them within the site's comment-stream. And just as Social allows the site owner to broadcast across social channels when they publish, commenters can automatically share their responses across Facebook and Twitter. Responses to these are automatically broadcast back into the blog (where they can be responded to), continuing the colloquial cycle.
What results is an easy blog comment system, where users can participate with their existing Twitter and Facebook identities, and where the entire discussion is on display, rather than fragmented across social media. Site owners' accounts are setup to post across platforms when posts are published, leading to a publish once model, rather than a write once, publish many times setup we all currently live with. Replies are simply aggregated on-site, where the community can see it all.
To see Social in action, head over to the MailChimp blog and comment away. blog.mailchimp.com
The Social plugin was developed for WordPress with the people at Crowd Favorite.
Links
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social/
http://crowdfavorite.com/
http://alexking.org/blog/2011/08/11/wordpress-social-plugin
http://blog.mailchimp.com/introducing-social-a-wordpress-plugin/
http://mailchimp.com/social-plugin-for-wordpress/
About MailChimp
MailChimp supports more than 1 million subscribers worldwide, sending 2 billion emails per month. MailChimp is designed for the do-it-yourself power user -- someone looking for all of the power of the enterprise application, but built for anyone to use. MailChimp integrates with many third party applications including Facebook, Twitter, Eventbrite, Salesforce, Wordpress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal and Google Analytics. And best of all, prices start at free.
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