It’s time for affiliates and publishers (same thing, ideally) to become better at using social media on our sites.

Most everyone, from clothing affiliates to schools, have the ubiquitous “Tweet This!” or “Share on Facebook!” buttons under each post (as I do here on PPT). However, as I was reviewing the site last night, I began to wonder how we can do this more efficiently and productively.

The leader in the space of trying to reach out to both publishers and advertisers and give them a wake up call about how/why we should be thinking harder on social sharing is ShareThis, both in my opinion and based on these comScore numbers from June:

I admit that I have been relatively skeptical about social sharing links on sites, especially affiliate sites. For a long while, I viewed them as close to unsolicited begging for free word of mouth advertising and of very little use to actual publishers who were interested in establishing long-term relationships with users or having users move through the chain of purchase/subscription.

However, the more I’ve thought about social sharing, the more utility I see in utilities such as ShareThis. Primarily, there’s a major shift occurring on the web that has to do with something I’ve been preaching about for a while… the slow death of the link.

I wrote in 2006 on CostPerNews:

However, as online marketing continues to mature, we have to confront this question about the long term establishment of links as the primary tool for connecting advertiser to publisher or merchant to affiliate or network to partner because links, by their nature, do not offer enough flexibility and data gathering for developing trends (RSS, social web adoption, social networking, more intelligent web users, uses of the internet outside of World Wide Web).

In my App-Development Exploratory (ie Club) last week, an 8th grader remarked to me that our school website is a mess and we needed to develop an app to allow him and his peers to figure out what is for lunch everyday or if our book has a library or if soccer practice is still on for the afternoon. I remarked that they could find all of that on the site and his direct quotation was:

Yes, Mr H. But we have to click for or five times just to get basic information. My generation doesn’t like links. We want to get our info quickly and move on.

That was a revelation that immediately connected me back to my own feelings writing that post five years ago (!!) on CostPerNews and has caused me to revisit the idea of what the social-motor driven web will look like and on what type of trail or road we will travel down. In my hindsight and foresight, I think that is social sharing a la ShareThis.

What I didn’t see then, even with tools like BUMPzee or MyBlogLog (R.I.P. to both trailblazers) is that the replacement mechanism for the future of a “social motor” driven web (rather than “search engines”) is the social gesturing feature of ShareThis or similar apps (which I’ve not found).

Reminiscing on another student remark in 2007, I wrote this:

My college students don’t use Google near as much as I do, or I would expect them to do. In fact, they don’t seem to use (or know how to use) many search engines at all.

They do know how to use Wikipedia, though. The idea of going to a specific “search engine” or “search site” in a few years will seem as stupid as dialing in to an AOL server to get on the internets. We’re going to be talking about “the good old Google days” soon enough.

Google is our generation’s AOL, I fear.

So what does this all mean for ShareThis?

My mistake in the past has been to think of the tool as mostly a way to drive traffic on Facebook based on recommendations from readers/users/consumers. However, the real beauty of ShareThis lies in the analytics suite and API that allow for some pretty interesting implementations of data analysis.

A major benefit is the ability to use free analytics to understand which articles/topics drive the most social traffic on top of what you can get via Google Analytics or in comparison to one of the many paid analytics solutions.

What ShareThis does so well is that they have taken sharing beyond a button at the end of an article or their new implementations that allow for a hover button that floats flush to the side of the page as well as top or bottom share bars.

Leveraging free analytics to understand which articles/topics drive the most social traffic is insanely valuable for affiliates. However, being able to provide a home-brewed search motor that doesn’t rely on drilling down through deeplinked categories but instead getting a segment or group of people where they want to be quickly (like my student). Sites such as ThinkGeek do this so well.

So how does this all play out?

Tools like ShareThis are taking us towards a realized version of the web that still operates on the foundation of links (as it does in the HTML I’m writing this post in or the RSS pipes that you probably used to find out about and/or read this post) and even search but puts a layer on top that advances the discovery of relevant information, products or services.

ShareThis functions very much as a link, or vehicle, to get web users/interested buyers from one place to another in much the same way Google has been our chauffeur for years. Those places include the traditional Facebook and Twitter malls but increasingly Google+ is making an interesting stab at becoming what the search engine could not (which is why Google is throwing the mass of its own juggernaut behind the project).

Google+ could very well become the key to save the company from a Microsoft-ian future. The vehicle that will get you to Google+ will be ShareThis. That’s fascinating.

Affiliates would do well to ponder the coming years as we hurtle towards that eventuality of the hyperlink being unseen plumbing rather than exposed pipes.