Full Disclosure Alert: Captico created GoPromoIt. Yup. Our brain trust came up with it, our coders coded it, our designers are designing it, and I am talking about it. That said, I do hope you read on, if for nothing else than my thorough explanations and witty commentary. ….Ok, so maybe just read the walk through and give the thing a try…

What is GoPromoIt?

For sellers: GoPromoIt is a magic button that sits wherever you paste it on your website and encourages visitors to post about your company, your service, or your product to their friends.

For buyers: GoPromoIt is an awesome coupon code generator that gives you discounts for sharing a link with either your Twitter network or your Facebook network.

How does GoPromoIt work?

For sellers: After you sign up (which is free right now, by the way), you will be guided through creating your first promotion. Don’t worry – you can make lots of them and delete them and edit them. You have ultimate control over what you offer, where the button goes, and how long its available. After you create your first promotion, the code for your button will be automatically generated. Just copy it and paste it wherever you want it on your website (the checkout process is a good place to start). Users will see the GoPromo button, click it, share the link, and then receive the coupon code to apply to their purchase.

For buyers: Click. Share. Save.

Why should I use GoPromoIt?

For sellers: Viral advertising. Like a ripple effect, your link and name will be spread through out people’s social networks as well as promoted on GoPromoIt.com – increasing sales, SEO, brand awareness, new customers, and a new way to connect with those customers on Twitter and Facebook directly.

For buyers: Discounts. Yeah, baby. Discounts. Its like foursquare… for your wallet.

How do I get a GoPromo Button?

For sellers:

• Create an account (quick an painless – just a username and email address).
• Create a promotion (very simple – we guide you through)
• Copy & Paste the html code onto your website (we will help you with this as well – just contact us if you need to)
• Let us know what you think! How can we improve it?

For buyers: Um… sorry… become a seller and see above!

Whats next for GoPromoIt.com?

We will continue to develop and tweak the site. Your feedback is crucial which is why it is free. This is a beta testing period which means everything works, but it may not have certain options or features that you may think up, the design may change, development packages may be added, etc. GoPromoIt might eventually move to having paid price plans (but it might not), but rest assured, if you are a company that participates in this beta testing period GoPromoIt (at least this version of it) will ALWAYS be free to you.

You can find GoPromoIt on Twitter and Facebook.

Watch a Video Walk-Through of Getting Started!

• Like Button - The Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the button can display personalized content whether or not the user has logged into your site. For logged-in Facebook users, the button is personalized to highlight friends who have also liked the page.
• Like Box - The Like Box enables Facebook Page owners to attract and gain Likes from their own website. The Like Box enables users to: see how many users already like this page, and which of their friends like it too; Read recent posts from the page; Like the page with one click, without needing to visit the page.
• Log-In with Faces - The Login with Faces plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site in addition to a login button.
• Facepile - The Facepile plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site.
• Comments - The Comments Box easily enables your users to comment on your site’s content — whether it’s for a web page, article, photo, or other piece of content. Then the user can share the comment on Facebook on their Wall and in their friends’ streams.
• Activity Feed - The Activity Feed plugin displays recent activity taking place on your site. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the plugin can display personalized content whether or not the user has logged into your site. The activity feed displays stories both when users like content on your site and when users share content from your site back to Facebook. If a user is logged into Facebook, the plugin will be personalized to highlight content from their friends. If the user is logged out, the activity feed will show recommendations from your site, and give the user the option to log in to Facebook.
• Live Stream - The Live Stream plugin lets users visiting your site or application share activity and comments in real time. The Live Stream Box works best when you are running a real-time event, like live streaming video for concerts, speeches, or webcasts, live Web chats, webinars, massively multiplayer games.
• Recommendations - The Recommendations plugin shows personalized recommendations to your users. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the plugin can display personalized recommendations whether or not the user has logged into your site. To generate the recommendations, the plugin considers all the social interactions with URLs from your site. For a logged in Facebook user, the plugin will give preference to and highlight objects her friends have interacted with.
• SHARE – For those who don’t want quite as much intrusiveness, Share may be a good option.

Here is a good article from Mashable on How To Add Facebook Like Buttons to your WordPress Blog. They give you a few lines of code to edit your theme files as well as some suggestions for plugins for those who don’t want to mess with coding.

• Like – This plugin supports multiple languages, gives a number of display options and can be shown at the top or bottom of a post, on pages and on the front page, all based on what settings you select.
• Facebook Like Button – This plugin has a nice settings panel that makes it easy to see and adjust how you want buttons to appear.
• Facebook Like Button Plugin – This plugin supports a shortcode, which means that you can indicate what posts to include a button on or not, in the post itself. You can also set default global options.
• Facebook Social Plugins – It has the standard Facebook “Like” button options similar to the other plugins, but it also includes widgets that support other Facebook social plugins.

Blogger Will Francis provides this step-by-step guide for adding the Facebook Like button code to your Tumblr blog.

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People are motivated by what they can do rather than what they can do better.  While this statement isn’t a universal truth for all workforces, it is a common impediment to innovation. When software becomes so deeply engraved in the workflow of an individual, old software and outdated systems become necessary evils.  Thus, the process of updating not only includes technical hurdles, but also political log jams.

In the long run, politics and contracts become more a factor of the implementation of a new content management system than any technical problems.  Keep in mind that this situation only exists when an aging system, regardless of how painful and inefficient, becomes part of the work flow.

I’ve personally witnessed this in several organizations all resulting in different attempts in providing potential solutions including hiring outside constants and ninjaing.

Preparing to get rid of the fossil often begins with a planning phase. This pre-solution measure often occurs in the form of a technological audit.  A consulting company comes in and makes recommendations that have no chance of actually implementing because they fail to recognize the inner politics of an organization.  Consultants often don’t or can’t spend the time learning about the employees their changes affect the most.  After all, in many cases, consultants are working on providing their own recommendations rather than implementing their own recommendations.  The result is inevitable failure. I’ve also spoke with consultants who try to learn the internal processes of organizations only to be slowed down by politics.  In many situations, people do not want to be interviewed about their workflow and what they do during the day.  I can only surmise that many people do not want to be outed or tracked in what they actually accomplish.  So…. it becomes extremely hard to pre-plan for problems you can not account for without actually know what the workforce is doing.

The other phenomenon of dealing with Fossils I call Ninjaing.  It generally manifests as an internal uprising within a company or organization to eliminate the fossil secretively.  The end goal is to prevent politics from entering any part of their solution.  Small groups get together and attempt to implement their own systems while hiding their progress.  This development is often secretive because it relies on other parties not knowing about any potential changes.   If all goes well, a ninja team will have a fully working product before someone finds out what the group is actually working on.  This product then turns into an ultimatum.  Take this product or lose all the work we’ve done to fix the issues with the Fossil.

Fossils are difficult to deal with and sometimes eliminating fossils from the record can be downright impossible.  Getting consensus on change is never an easy thing to do. I would love to hear about potential solutions to digital paleontology. My initial gut feeling is that solving problems of entrenchment requires strong leadership from a single individual who can cut through all the BS.  I’ll end this note by stating Fossils are a combination of technical and political problems within an organization.  One of the biggest problems is accounting for all the technical issues without consideration for the politics of the environment.