You may have heard of Meebo, the folks who provide a service that lets you access all of your different instant messaging (IM) services from one place. This service helps people work in real time by removing the barrier of having to be on the same service in order to be able to instant message.
Meebo Bar is their newest product (still in beta) that makes it incredibly easy for people who visit your blog (or web site) to share information they find there with their friends and people in their social circles.
Once installed, the Meebo bar sits on the bottom of your web page. You have the ability to customize the buttons that show up on the bar. Here is what mine looks like:
(you can also see it on the bottom of this page)
One of the ways to share information is to click on the “Share a Page” button. In the picture above, this is the left most button. When you click on this button, you see a toolbar like this one:
As you can see, I have the option to share this page with my Facebook friends, my Twitter followers, as well as via Yahoo! updates, email, and instant messaging.
On the right hand side of the Meebo bar, there are options to begin chatting with my friends right from the current web page.
The Meebo bar even detects items on the page that people may want to share. If you are viewing this post on the home page of my blog (if not, here is the post http://blog.rebarbusinessbuilders.com/rebar/2009/12/setting-expectations-with-price.html), the post below this one has an embedded video. If you hover your mouse above the video, you will see a tab labelled “drag to share” on the top left of the video. Dragging will make the menu described above appear, so you can share it with your friends.
The Meebo bar was a cinch to set up on this site (this is a Typepad blog). I just copied some javascript from the Meebo site and copied it to an HTML module in the Design section of my blog. My description may sound vague, but Meebo provides excellent, step by step instructions.
To summarize, the Meebo bar gives your site visitors the ability to share information via drag-and-drop and it won’t take you more than 10 minutes to set it up. Give it a try. If you do, leave me a comment so I can check out your site.
Bill Brelsford Small Business Marketing Consultant
