LOS ANGELES, CA — (Marketwire) — 08/09/11 —
SendLove.to today announced the launch of its service, a people-rating platform that lets anyone rate and share their opinions about people in the news.
SendLove.to-s mission is to harness the opinions of the social web into a consumable format to foster awareness and increase accountability between the public and our public figures.
To accomplish this, SendLove.to has developed a plugin for online publishers and bloggers that enables web visitors to vote up (“Love”) or vote down (“Not”) public figures (politicians, athletes, celebrities, business leaders, etc.) and participate in highly engaging conversations about them on a publisher-s website.
Toward the bottom of each article, alongside comments, SendLove.to creates an interactive feed for each person in the article that shows their community score, highlights the most interesting opinions to encourage controversial conversations, and automatically promotes relevant content.
The plugin also offers publishers advanced features such as social sharing and authentication, real-time moderation, an analytics dashboard with deep demographics, and the ability to customize the look and feel.
SendLove.to-s plugin is available immediately for WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, MoveableType, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace and other CMS at . It is free for publishers and installs within minutes.
SendLove.to recently raised a $500K round of angel financing from a group of highly accomplished Southern California entrepreneurs including Jeff Stibel, CEO and Chairman of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp.; John Zdanowski, CFO/co-founder at PixelFish; Alex Kazerani, CEO of EdgeCast; and James Segil, president of EdgeCast.
After reading an article that mentions a public figure, a reader can use the SendLove.to buttons to vote that person up (send a “Love”) or down (send a “Not”) with a single click, and share their opinions on issues related to that person.
Every vote impacts the person-s score, just like a real-time polling service for your site.
As visitors vote up or down, their opinions accumulate in an interactive feed at the bottom of every article — past, present, and future — that mentions that person, creating highly visible, highly engaging, site-wide discussions that span both old and new content.
Each opinion in the feed links back to the article that inspired it, so visitors also discover and read more articles through the voice of their peers, increasing time on site and page views (Content Rediscovery).
According to Pew Research, 21 percent of online news consumers use only one website to read their news. Publishers need to offer differentiated services that build community to keep visitors coming back and to increase loyalty.
Pew also states that 72 percent of people follow news because “they enjoy talking with others about what is happening in the world.” Until now, publishers only had comments to meet this need, but comments are arbitrarily tied to articles and conversations die when those articles become stale.
SendLove.to is an important tool for online publishers because it:
Increases page views, advertising inventory and top line revenue.
Creates controversial conversations that live forever, across both old and new content, about the people already being written about.
Dramatically increases engagement by combining the addictiveness of online polling with the community of comments.
Encourages Content Rediscovery; as visitors read each other-s opinions, they discover and read more articles through the voice of their peers.
Provides analytics that offer insight into the community and its demographics, while assisting publishers in making smarter editorial decisions.
Publishers using the SendLove.to plugin have seen dramatic increases in site metrics such as time on site (40 – 50 percent) and page views per session (70 – 100 percent).
The Moderate Voice (TMV), a domestic and international news hub for moderates, centrists, and independents, added SendLove.to-s functionality to their site.
TMV visitors enjoy the ability to vote and express their opinions about politicians on a range of political issues as they read articles. The same visitor may vote Obama up one day for dealing with Osama but down the next for the current unemployment situation.
Since installation, TMV has seen a 41 percent increase in time on site and a 72 percent increase in page views per session.
Attributable to Chris Lyman – co-founder and CEO of SendLove.to
We all love to read the news and engage with the content via commenting or pressing the “like” button. Now, we are taking this engagement to a new level by allowing readers to participate in a scored conversation about that content. Our instant plugin allows both bloggers and publishers to harness this engagement while dramatically enriching their own site.
Attributable to Tyrone Steels II – site administrator of The Moderate Voice
Our readers get a kick out of changing the public score of the figures they love, or love to hate. SendLove.to gives us a fun new way to engage our community while we maximize content and increase readership. Since installing SendLove.to, we-ve seen a 172 percent increase in page views, which has been more effective and gratifying than anything we-ve tried before.
SendLove.to is a people-rating platform enabling users to rate people in the news and share opinions about them. As users send “love” (or “not”) to a public figure, they impact that person-s public score in real-time. Through their ratings and opinions, they participate in discussions and discover new content, as part of a community that forms around a person. Online publishers use our free plug-in to embed SendLove.to into their own sites to maximize content, increase readers, improve engagement and benefit from actionable feedback and detailed audience demographics. Based in Los Angeles, SendLove.to was founded in 2010 by Chris Lyman and Corey Brundage. To express your own opinions, check out public scores, or get the free SendLove.to plug-in for your site, visit .
Contact:
Paige Thelen
(415)684-9404
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