I never thought I’d type the following sentence: I’m excited about a webapp that manages tasks and projects.

Yep. I just wrote that.

I’ve seen a million web apps that do slick, fancy things, and have dismissed them with a jaded “meh.” But today I was introduced to something that manages day to day tasks and lists. And I loved it. It’s called springpad, and here’s why.

What’s a springpad?

So, here’s the short description:

“Springpads are free online notebooks that help you manage your life. Use your springpad to keep track of notes, photos, maps, to-do’s, contacts, appointments & more.”

As someone that makes lists of everything (seriously, I have a list on my refrigerator right now with the first item “Find Full Time Gig” followed by “Get Oil Change”) a web based application that can manage all the lists I make for completing tasks and can tie-in to other web APIs makes all the sense in the world. So let’s take a look:

That’s the springpad homepage. You’ll notice that they’re focused on holiday and seasonally themed notebooks right now like:

• Weekly Meal Planner
• Thanksgiving Menu Planner
• Gift Planner
• Trip Planner
• Job Planner

There are dozens of possible springpads:

Here’s a video that explains how to use springpad:

What’s Different

On the surface, an online notebook isn’t all that sexy, but springpad has several underlying features that sets it apart from competitors that simply stop at creating a list-based application.

1. Bloggers as experts- To help users get started and to help them make lists, springpad is looking to bloggers as experts. For instance, let’s pretend for a second that I’m an expert chef (I said let’s pretend, ok??). If I have a blog with a great recipe, people might want to be able to import my recipe into a springpad. Right now, this is a manual process, but down the line, there will be automatic springpad integration in blogs. With one click, a springpad user can “spring it”, which will copy the recipe using standard microformats into a springpad.

Here’s what that will look like (currently available on thesimpleme):

Clicking “Spring The Task List” will copy the list and will redirect me to:

Then:

2. Traffic to Blogs- Again, if I were a subject matter expert, I’d love to get new traffic from springpad instead of just sending my traffic there. Well, they’ve got that. In its current incarnation, spring pad’s SpringAdvice is a site that scours the internet for smes (subject matter experts), and links to their content:

Of course, this is a win-win. Bloggers are able to get new traffic and are seen as experts in a topic, and springpad users are able to easily import lists. And springpartners (the company behind springpad) is able to increase their visibility by having multiple links to the service from blogs across the web.

One of the other things I like about the springpartners strategy is their focus on end users. While most web notebooks are focused on the technology and turn to early adopters for user acquisition, springpartners has made the decision to go after specific user groups. Because there are so many uses for springpads, the company is able to target usergroups based on the problems they’re solving. For instance, there’s a springpad for Pregnancy Health Notes and Nursery Planning. This allows springpartners to approach bloggers writing about pregnancy, helping them reach out to expectant moms looking to organize information in one place. In addition, springpartners can approach mainstream media sources on a topic-level basis. It’s a great strategy.

The best part of springpartners in my opinion is that they’re actually solving a problem that people have, and their solution is based on an approach everyone is familiar with: making lists.

Keep an eye on this one, as there’s a lot still to come. They just opened their beta, but in the coming months, you’ll really start to see how the list-making component can play with existing APIs. Sure, it integrates with Yelp and Google Maps now, but with the APIs now available, you’ll see topic-level integration with relevant web services. Write a shopping list? Maybe it can integrate with an API that will look at the items on your list and give discounts or price comparisons. The opportunities here are massive.

We’ve mentioned the details here before, but I want to make sure to promote this as much as humanly possible. This Saturday, we’ll be having the second Blogstring.com Boston Pub Crawl. But this one will be something else……

Blogstring’s own @sarahwurrey has accepted a new gig in Washington D.C.. So, the pubcrawl will also serve as her going away party. Those of you that know Sarah from the Boston social media scene are encouraged to come to the festivities to wish her well.

The Details:

First Stop:

The Time: 6:00 PM, Saturday, October 25th
The Place: Hong Kong Faneuil Hall Boston

Join us here for scorpion bowls, cheap teriyaki, and awful karaoke.

Second Stop:

The Time: 8:00 PM
The Place: Trinity (directly next to Hong Kong)

Bring your darts and your humility.

Third Stop:

The time: 10:00 PM
The Place: The Black Rose

Fourth Stop:

The Time: Midnight
The Place: Good Bar (aka Dockside)

So make sure to come to this, the second and (maybe) final blogstring.com pub crawl. The last one was incredibly fun, and this one will be as well.

The Upcoming.org RSVP Page

The Facebook RSVP Page

The Going.com Widget Thing:

Blogstring Fall Pub Crawl Tweetup

Saturday, October 25 at Hong Kong Cafe

1 person interested:

All new social networks and community-focused services face the same challenge: attracting a loyal user base. Having the latest and greatest facebook+twitter+flickr+whatever is great, but worthless without an active community of users. While there are many different ways to run a user acquisition campaign, this article will focus specifically on using a contest to attract new users. We’ll look at one example of a contest created to drive user acquisition, and we’ll examine the social media tools used to promote the campaign. Though we’ll focus on a contest, the promotional methods described here can easily be used for any user acquisition campaign.

The Contest

As one of several user acquisition campaigns, my employer, matchmine, launched a weekly sweepstakes. A little background: the company is a media discovery network, helping partners recommend better content to their users based on the users’ media preferences. The contest was created to satisfy two goals: get users to register and send traffic to partner sites.

The Prize: The winner of each week’s sweepstakes is given the choice of either

• Two tickets to the next New England Patriots home game
• A football signed by any New England Patriots player
• A $100 New England Patriots Pro Shop gift certificate

Promotion

After launching the contest on patriots.com, we identified several promotional opportunities to maximize our visibility and conversion rate.

1. Video- We shot a video that summarizes the contest, including how to create accounts on our partner sites. The video not only gave us an opportunity to succinctly explain a complex contest, it was also a great off site marketing tactic. We hosted the video on blip.tv, which is both a destination site and a publishing tool. End users go to to blip.tv to watch video, and publishers get free hosting from blip. Having the video hosted at blip gave us both a free place to host the video and a new audience that would not have been able to see the video if it was hosted in-house.

In the video, the presenter mentions the URL of the contest, and it appears on screen. This way, no matter where the video is viewed, viewers know where to go to sign up for the weekly sweepstakes.

Here’s the video:

2. Refer-A-Friend- Whenever possible, it makes sense to let the community itself expand your user base. In the context of a social network or messaging system, it makes sense for users to want to invite their friends, as they get more out of the service when people they know are there. But in a contest, inviting friends seems counterproductive: why ask your friends to sign up when each friend registration reduces your chance of winning?

We solved that problem with additional entries. Let’s use an example here. We’ll say that Frank signed up for the contest. Wanting to have the best shot at winning, he decided to invite 5 of his friends to sign up. When all 5 signed up, Frank got an additional 5 more entries. By shifting the incentive to invite more people to sign up, we gave all users motivation to promote the contest.

A great example of a social service that does this well is thesixtyone.com, a music discovery site. The site gives users points for actions like listening and rating music, and also gives incentives to invite friends to join.

3. email- Ah yes, email. When a user signs up for the contest, we immediately send a confirmation email, telling them how they can earn additional entry in the contest. Each week, we also send an email announcing the winner and reminding users how to gain additional entries.

4. Friends and Family- Once the contest was launched, the first promotional activity was what we called a “friends and family” round. We encouraged all employees to send a message to their contacts to tell them about the contest. This served dual purposes: First, it gave us a chance to receive feedback from people we know personally. Second, it helped us identify any glitches before promoting to the masses.

5. Twitter- Once we felt comfortable with the way the program was working, we encouraged employees to mention it on twitter, using a shortened URL from bit.ly. Using the bit.ly url, we were able to measure clicks from twitter, along with metrics on retweets and other twitter users using the same link.

6. Facebook- Our company set up a facebook page and group specifically for this purpose. We linked to the contest on both, and encouraged friends of the company to sign up and spread the word.

7. Company Blog- As soon as the contest was launched, I posted on the company blog, giving details on how to win. I also included the embedded video.

8. Bloggers- Finally, given the fact that we’d instituted a refer-a-friend feature, we decided to extend referrals to bloggers. We compiled a list of bloggers focused on the New England Patriots, and sent them a note about the promotion. If they were interested in posting about the contest, we would create a special URL for the blogger. That way, any reader that signed up for the contest as a result of clicking the link in their blog post would give the blogger an additional entry.

All of these promotional techniques can be utilized in any user acquisition program. Whether you have great prizes to attract the masses, or simply have a great product in need of a user base, using these social media tools is a great first step in driving user signups.