I remember reading once that “If you can make it their mission to share it, you win.” And it’s very true — the only problem for most marketers is making that wonderful content easy to share.

Without a uniform way of doing so on every site, viewers tend to spend no more than three seconds looking for an easy way to share your content; if you can’t make it easy enough to find in that timeframe, you’d better hope your content is RickRoll’d good.

Some people use ShareThis, some use Socialtwist, and others more recently use bars like Wibiya. The Meebo Bar, similar to Wibiya, takes the functionality of a sharing bar and adds features such as widgets to the mix.

Here are some of the pros and cons of this particular bar (the Meebo Bar, which has already been in use on sites like TechCrunch, which I should mention has now stopped using it).

Pros

1. Great interface, makes it extremely easy to share content and quickly decide where to post it.
2. Includes widgets, such as displaying feeds from Twitter or Facebook (helps promote a brand’s social presence), or even more impressive — a YouTube widget allowing you to view and watch videos from a user.
3. Includes Meebo chat (meaning anyone can chat with friends from AIM, Google Talk, Facebook, etc. while still on your site)
4.  Ability for customized widgets (ex: publishers using it as an ad placement a la Mashable).

Cons

1. Some debate over whether these bars are obtrusive and no better than ad bars (I tend to disagree, not painfully noticeable)
2. Also debate about whether chat needs to be there as it’s unlikely someone will chat with friends while on, say, Burger King’s site.
3.  Pretty terrible ability to pull meta information or any relevant images/text from the site while sharing (still beta).

The next step in the evolution of Web sites

Regardless of whether you’re for or against these bars, I think they’re one of the next steps in the evolution of Web sites.

We can all agree that sharing and social media have already changed the way a lot of sites are structured and operate. We can also all agree that the operating system is dead and the browser is king — adding bars like these are yet another step in the evolution of the browser as an operating system.

For publishers

For news sites, this will be tremendously helpful: finally you can actually call your news site a “portal.” It’s where you can chat with your friends and share news and content instantly and easily with them. It, too, is the next step in the evolution of news sites — finally connecting your personal network with the content that matters to you, and having conversations easily around it.

Certainly it has ways to go to truly fit that vision, but this is a step in that direction.

For brands

For brands big and small, it allows the opportunity to easily showcase their social media presence, and allows users to get the most recent news, videos, etc. while on any page, and, of course, easily share any information easily and instantly with their networks.

And the more brands/publishers who start to adopt this “sharing bar” idea, the more that people will share — if they know where it’s going to be every time and how easy it’s going to be to do it, that consistency will turn into more content sharers.

Having a consistent location across the Web for sites to place their social media content/links will also train users to know where to look for that information rather than scroll around looking in footers and headers, getting frustrated and ultimately moving on.

The concept is solid, the execution is getting there and the need for this sort of consistency is essential. There’s no doubt in my mind that an increase in activities like social media, sharing and bringing networks with you wherever you go on the Web will ultimately lead to this critical evolutionary step for Web sites.

So when will your site adopt a sharing bar?