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.

Yesterday I was in my car listening to the radio when I heard a commercial for life insurance. I’ve probably heard the same commercial 50 times before, but for some reason I actually listened to the words this time. I heard “call now for a no obligation free rate quote.”

What?

Was there ever a time when you had to pay someone to ask how much what they’re selling will cost?

Imagine walking into a store and seeing a shirt you like. There’s no price tag on it, so you bring it up to the counter. You ask the price, but instead, the cashier says “pay me $20 and I’ll tell you how much it costs.”

To me, pricing information doesn’t cost anything. It just doesn’t make any sense. Simply telling me how much you’re selling something for shouldn’t cost me a dime. In all of my experience in market transactions, this has just never happened.

So maybe the “free rate quote” line is just something of a marketing buzz phrase. Perhaps the creators of the radio ad tried two versions of the ad in front of focus groups and found that those who heard “free rate quote” called 5 times more than those that did not. Sure, it’s redundant and unnecessary, but if the line is effective, I understand what you’d add it.

To me, the question isn’t why the advertiser put “free” in an ad for something largely expected to cost nothing. The real question is: what do we expect to be free?

Free On The Web

Looking at the products and services I use on the web there are a few different pricing models:

1. Free- Twitter is the best example here for me. A service that is completely free with no ads and no premium version. It is truly a free and open service that asks nothing of its (U.S.) users.

2. Free but with ads- gmail is a good example of a free service supported by advertising. gmail gives users lots of storage and a great service, and users need only tolerate a few ads.

3. Free at first- Many of the email list management services give users a free trial. After a certain time or use limit, users are required to pay for membership.

4. Freemium- Flickr and Basecamp are my favorite examples of freemium services. Flickr gives everyone a free account, but if you need more storage space or want to add new sets of photos, you’ll need a pro account. Basecamp is a great piece of small project management SaaS, but you’ll need to pay to access premium features.

5. Always Pay- Some of the business intelligence sites are membership-only and make users pay to access their information.

So do the examples scale? If you were launching a twitter competitor tomorrow, would you be forced to offer the service for free based on perceived user expectation? Has twitter’s free service defined the business model for other microblogging platforms simply based on the fact that users associate the service with the model?

And thinking back to that commercial I heard, let me ask you this: If you were tasked with creating a commercial campaign for twitter (or any free web service) would you emphasize the fact that it is free?

You’ve heard of Saas- software as a service: things like salesforce.com where the software is hosted on the web rather than on the desktop, and users can access their account from any computer. Well, I’ve noticed a trend lately online that I’m calling Feature As A Business (faab).

Here’s the idea: some developers come up with an idea for something very small: a plugin, a search based on someone else’s API, a piggyback service based on another company’s data. They then launch the product as a company. Rather than actually being a company that releases a line of products/services, they’re now a product releasing a company.

And to me, that’s not a problem.

Developers like the people that put summize together got it exactly right. They built a better way to search twitter. Using twitter’s public API, summize created a nice way to search for keywords and trends in twitter as well as a slick UI. Then twitter bought them.

Summize, to me, is the example of a feature as a business that worked. And it worked mainly because the folks behind summize didn’t suffer from the “we can build an entire business around this” syndrome. Instead, they improved on an existing product and sold their improvements to twitter.

But many developers out there take the other path. They enter a crowded market, create a clone of  an existing product, and then pitch themselves as “we’re ______ plus groups.” Or “think of us as twitter + ebay + blogger but with RSS and an iPhone app.”

The example I see most is in the travel sites popping up. It seems like there’s a new Trip_______ weekly, each saying “we’re just like the other guys but we have _____ too.

Sure, the ________ is a point of differentiation, but is it enough to create an entire business around? Conversely, when there are many competitors in a given market, is one feature enough to get users to belong to your site instead of another?

Now is the part of the post where I contradict myself.

Rereading the preceding paragraphs, it sounds like I’m knocking companies trying to turn a feature into a company. Well, that’s not what I’m shooting for at all, and let me tell you why.

I think the feature as a business model is absolutely necessary right now because of one thing…….data portability. If projects like the DataPortability Workgroup actually take off, it will completely change the way we interact with our own data. Instead of letting social networks store and control our own content, users will have control of their data, and will choose which services can access their data.

Think of it like this: rather than buying an entire meal, you can get each item a la carte. And that’s how we’ll choose our online services. Maybe I like twitter as my microblogging service and you prefer identica. That’s fine, and we can still talk to each other despite using different providers.

Though it still may be far off, interoperable, distributed services are coming. And when they do, we’ll be comparing and evaluating products and services based on their features. Might as well get a head start.