Month: November 2010

How e-commerce sites use Twingly

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After having written about how the Swedish retailers Halens and Hemtex are leveraging the power of the blogosphere with Twingly technology we thought the timing is right to highlight some other examples of e-commerce sites and how they have implemented Twingly to enhance their content and product information. Hopefully you get some inspiration about what’s possible with Twingly.

Brandos
Brandos is an online shop for footwear available in Sweden and Norway. On each profile page for a specific item they have integrated the Twingly widget for showing which blogs have written about the specific shoe. As you can imagine that’s especially useful for all fashion bloggers who want to offer their visitors a chance to order the items they blog about (example).

 

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Yomoy
Yomoy is a German web store targeting Gadget addicts (belonging to the Swedish Coolstuff). They as well as their Swedish, Danish and Norwegian sister sites have integrated the Twingly widget because they know that Gadget blogs are very popular, read by many, and so it was a logical step to pull blog content into the item pages (example).

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Lindex
Lindex is one of Sweden’s most well known fashion chains. To encourage fashion bloggers to link to the items in their online store they placed the Twingly widget below the product details on each item page. They also adjusted the layout to fit their needs (example).

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Stadium
 Stadium, a popular Swedish chain for fashion and sports equipment, also has implemented Twingly on product pages and adjusted the look and feel to the websites own design (example).

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Ving & Fritidsresor
Even two of Sweden’s leading online travel sites, Ving and Fritidsresor, decided a while ago to join the increasing number of Twingly partners. Both have integrated the Twingly widget and enhance information about the trips offered with content from the blogosphere (example Ving, example Fritidsresor)

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Of course this was only a selection of e-commerce sites that have opened up to the blogosphere with the help of Twingly. There are many more, and hopefully even more to come in the future. If you have ideas how else online shops could implement Twingly, let us know in the comments.

Swedish retailer Hemtex embraces the blogosphere with Twingly

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In our article from a few days ago about how a lot of our Twingly partners were voted into Internetworld’s top 100 ranking of Sweden’s best websites 2010 we explained how this year’s winner Halens is using the Twingly Blogstream widget to highlight what bloggers are saying about the products sold on its website (we also explained the integration in detail a few months ago).

Now another leading retailer from Sweden is implementing such as solution to encourage web users to blog feedback and opinions in regards to furnishings and textiles offered on its web-shop: Hemtex!

What Hemtex has done is straight forward: On each item profile in their store you find the tabs “Start” with the main order information about a product, “Info” with some specific details and “Bloggat” which is Swedish and means “blogged”. By clicking on that tab users are welcomed by the Twingly widget linking to blogs that had something to say about the specific item.

So while the integration of Twingly is great for Hemtex to increase awareness and engagement within the Swedish blogosphere, it will help online shoppers to evaluate whether a specific product is worth buying or not by having access to reviews and comments from blogs.

If you want to see the Twingly integration in action you can for instance go to this page.

We say welcome Hemtex, we are happy to have you with us and to see more and more leading e-commerce services opening up to the social web!

Congratulations to our partners among Sweden’s 100 best websites

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Every year, the renown Swedish industry magazine Internetworld publishes a list of the 100 best websites from Sweden. The ranking gets a lot of attention not only within the digital sphere but also in the Swedish mainstream press, offering indicators for the hottest trends within web development, online marketing, design and usability.

Yesterday Internetworld presented this year’s ranking, and we at Twingly were delighted to find a lot of sites and companies on the list that are using our Twingly enterprise solutions to enhance their web content with social context from the blogosphere.

In fact, the first four sites in the ranking all are using our Twingly widgets: The online shop Halens, the website of Swedish Public Radio Sveriges Radio, the travel site Ving and the destination of Swedish Public TV svt.se.

Halens, this year’s winner of the Internetworld ranking, for example shows reactions from the blogosphere regarding products sold on the site through our Twingly Blogstream widget (there is an article on that on Internetworld as well, although Swedish only, however we blogged about their strategy earlier). Pretty cool!

Even Fritidsresor, ranked 7, and DN.se, ranked 9, have integrated the Twingly widget! So out of the 10 best websites in Sweden in 2010, 6 are using Twingly!

Let’s not forget SvD.se on position 15, Sydsvenskan on 16, IKEA on 23, Lindex on 36, MyNewsDesk on 56, SvenskaSpel on 76, Brandos.se on 86 and Coolstuff on 96 – even those websites are Twingly clients and do now rank among the 100 best online destinations in Sweden!

We would like to take the chance and give our congratulations to all our partners belonging to Sweden’s web elite! We are happy for you and hope to see you in the ranking next year again!

Sweden’s 100 best websites 2010 (in Swedish)

Swedish National Encyclopedia enhancing their website with Twingly

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We’re happy to announce that the Swedish Encyclopedia Nationalencyklopedin is launching Twingly on their site NE.se today! From now on blogs can link to their content and get links back, which we think are a great way to get the Encyclopedias content to live longer, get relevant comments and to embrace their situation as a trustworthy reference also in the era of social media.

For us, this is thrilling. To enable bloggers to show up with their blog posts on an Encyclopedias articles gives a whole new dimension to what’s possible with our product Blogstream. Nationalencyklopedin isn’t just a great customer to work with, they represent that good content always deserves the blogospheres attention.

How the Blogstream Widget looks on NE.se with blog links. Taken from the article about Nobel Prize Winner in Literature 2009 Herta Müller.

From the bloggers side, it’s a fantastic opportunity to get attention from the visitors of one of Sweden’s most trustworthy sites. Traffic from highly relevant articles on Nationalencyklopedin can also create streams of visitors to the blog in the future. The long-term value of a link in the Twingly widget on NE.se is hard to estimate but it gives definitely a longer lifetime to the blog post.

For Nationalencyklopedin the Blogstream Widget creates a context to their articles. Blog posts that gives the articles more life and trustworthiness. One of the things our customers see most value of with Blogstream are also the SEO aspect, which aren’t that strange since a often double increase of incoming blog links to their site thanks to widget of course creates better rankings in Google. For a site like NE.se with thousands of pages with great unique content, every link means more traffic from Google. But the most important aspect of the Blogstream widget is the links to highly relevant blog posts covering and discussing the topic of the NE.se article. Nationalencyklopedin have the possibility to moderate and decide to not show blog links in the widgets on their site, to make sure no spam or irrelevant blog posts will be shown.

NE.se also contains a lot more than the Encyclopedias articles. Last year they created a quiz called “Historiska figurer” (historical persons) that went really viral thanks to the virality in itself, of course people wanted to share their results on Facebook, Twitter etc, but also thanks to the simplicity in the quiz. Everyone can relate to our most loved historical persons – and over 250 000 people did the quiz!

This year they wanted to make a new quiz that also could be that viral and decided to launch “Fiktiva figurer” (fictitious persons). It have just been launched but over 200 000 people have already taken the quiz! Go check it out and try yourself, it just takes one minute. We’re also happy about the fact that they have the Twingly widget on the quizzes as well 😉

You can find the Twingly Blogstream widget of nearly all content on NE.se: the articles, the news stories and the quizzes. Make sure to try to link to them from your blog and encourage others to do the same. It’s a win-win-win for everyone if Sweden’s most loved and trustworthy Encyclopedia also have blog links on their site!

We would also like to grab the opportunity to congratulate Nationalencyklopedin to one of the best corporate blogs in Swedish, Kunskapsbloggen.se. It’s a great resource of knowledge and current discussion topics highly relevant to Nationalencyklopedin’s visitors and customers.

30 Startups And The Buzz They Are Getting From the Blogosphere

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On Tuesday TechCrunch published a list of “30 Startups People Care About The Most”. It was based on a new service called StartupFollower which allows people to signup for email notifications if the popular (and recently acquired blog) covers a specific startup. After StartupFollower itself got covered on TechCrunch the day earlier, the founder sent the distribution list of startups people have signed up for on the new service to TechCrunch, which created a ranking of the most requested tech startups from it.

Now obviously the TechCrunch ranking is far from official, since it is only based on readers of the blog who opted to signup for notifications on StartupFollower. We decided to do a little reality check and to compare the TechCrunch ranking based on StartupFollower subscriptions with the buzz in the blogosphere.

So we checked the 30 startups from the list with our Twingly Blog Search and compiled a new ranking based on the number of mentions the different web companies got within the past 30 days. As you can imagine the result looks a bit different, even though there are some similarities and some key players which are leading the pack in both lists.

Let’s have a look at the Top 30 Startups and at how many people in the blogosphere mentioned each of them. You find the rank from the TechCrunch list in brackets:

1. Google (5)
2. Amazon (29)
3. Facebook (1)
4. YouTube (17)
5. Twitter (2)
6. Apple (7)
7. Yahoo (27)
8. Digg (15)
9. LinkedIn (11)
10. Evernote (24)
11. Scribd (28)
12. TechCrunch (10)
13. Spotify (26)
14. Foursquare (3)
15. Groupon (6)
16. Zynga (9)
17. Dropbox (21)
18. Yelp (16)
19. Zazzle (25)
20. Gowalla (12)
21. SCVNGR (19)
22. Tumblr (20)
23. Square (23)
24. Quora (4)
25. Yammer (18)
26. OpenTable (30)
27. Qwiki (14)
28. LivingSocial (13)
29. RockMelt (8)
30. Gilt Group (22)

Anything that especially surprised you?

/Martin Weigert

Our latest Twingly Partner in Sweden

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We are always happy to see new websites deciding to integrate our Twingly Enterprise tools to enhance their content with feedback from the blogosphere (which as we explained recently might even help websites to generate more money from ads). One of our most recent partners is Startaeget.se, a site dedicated to everyone in Sweden who plans to start a company or who already has made this step. The site offers new and existing founders and self-employed persons a lot of useful information and resources about how to start, maintain, develop and grow a company.

Twingly Blogstream Widget

And as of now, each article in the news section of Startaeget.se will include the Twingly Blogstream widget, which shows blogs that have commented on and linked to the specific piece at Startaeget.se. The goal of including the Twingly widget is of course to encourage bloggers within related topics to link to Startaeget.se and to discuss the information being published there. In return, bloggers have their postings shown and linked next to the article they have mentioned, getting new visitors.

If you are a blogger, try it by linking to one of the articles from Startaeget.se to have your blog shown next to it (make sure before that your blog pings Twingly). And if you are a publisher and would like to add the Twingly Blogstream Widget to your site, use this form to get in touch with us!