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.

Last night I got an email from a old co-worker inviting me to check out SocialMinder, which said:

SocialMinder is an online assistant that helps you maintain relationships with your LinkedIn network.

I thought that you might appreciate a free invitation to the “closed” alpha test of SocialMinder.

SociaMinder:
* Scans your email headers and maps them to your LinkedIn network
* Identifies relationships that need strengthening
* Helps identify recent business news to discuss with each contact, no matter how out of touch you are
* You get weekly updates identifying top opportunities to build a better network

I have arranged for you to get a priority account;
1) Go to http://www.SocialMinder.com , and
2) Click on the green button (‘sign me up’)

You are on the priority list, but your space is only held for 3 days.

And the price is FREE…

Hope that it works for you!

Since this came from someone I knew (and someone that has sent me beta invites in the past), I decided to go check it out. You enter your gmail username and password, and SocialMinder tells you how long it’s been since you’ve contacted everyone in your gmail address book. 

I then was brought to this screen:

If you can’t read what’s in the yellow box, it says:

Click here to upgrade to full version for free – just answer a few questions in our Alpha phase questionnaire. The full version helps you manage all of your contacts, and checks for contact updates regularly.

Oh, cool. I can get an upgrade to the full version just by answering a few questions in the Alpha phase questionnaire, right? I can answer a few questions. No biggie.

So I click. And here’s what I see:

No problem. This one’s easy. For some reason I see the following at the top:

Free Trial Upgrade- Step One of Two

But that’s okay. 

So I answer the questions and click OK. Here’s what I get:

Yup, you read that right. Here’s the line:

To get your free full trial upgrade, you must select 15 friends to be sent a pre-approved invitation to try SocialMinder.

So the third step- which wasn’t mentioned at the beginning- is spamming 15 of your friends. 

My Point:

I have no problem with services trying to get users to spread the word. It not only makes sense, it’s essential. But in user acquisition as with everything else, you have to manage expectations. And as someone who just ran through this process, I’m left feeling cheated. I feel like I wasted my time, and I’ll never go back to the service again. 

Harsh? Probably. But I’m just pointing out how easy it is to make someone feel cheated and angry when promising one thing and giving them another. 

Over the last few days, I’ve had a lot of time to think. Between talking with recruiters, networking, and doing freelance work, I’ve still found a big chunk of time where I’ve been alone with my thoughts. And when that happens, I tend to get ideas for blog posts. This one came to me while driving, so I had to write down my thoughts on the back of an envelope which still sits in my passenger seat. 

While trying to figure out my next move, I’ve been asked the following obvious, yet terrifying question many times: “What do you want to do?” It’s usually followed by “Either way, you still want to stay in social media, right?” And of course my answer leads me to an unstructured, yet passionate diatribe about social media marketing and what that actually means. This post is my attempt to explain my answer in written form. You’ll have to just imagine me flailing my hands wildly to try to convey my enthusiasm. 

When it comes to the role of marketing at any company, there are four words that pop into my head: 

1. Goals
2. Strategies
3. Tools
4. Execution

Well, you know how they tell you to write about what you’re familiar with? Here goes.

So, a couple of days ago, matchmine shut down. All 50ish of us have been working the phones, sending emails, and talking to friends trying to land our next gigs. Here are some of the tactics I’ve been using to find my next job.

1. Ning- Once the news hit, our CEO set up a matchmine network on Ning.com. The group is by invitation only, so we have a private group allowing us to post resumes, send leads to each other, and post information on search firms, headhunters, etc. Right now, this is our main forum for interaction.

2. LinkedIn- An obvious one, but so far, the best source for finding the next job. As soon as I changed my status on LinkedIn, I started getting notifications from people with opportunities. In addition, linkedin has been great for networking. By writing recommendations for former co-workers and requesting recommendations, we’re able to give potential employers a better idea of what we’re like than we could ever do on a static resume.

3. Twitter- If you’ve got a solid network on twitter, it never hurts to notify your friends that you’re looking for a new position. I wrote a blog post on the company’s closing, and linked to that on twitter. I got some great responses, and at least one solid lead.

4. Startuply- Still want to stay in the startup game? Startuply is a new job board specifically devoted to jobs at startup companies. The Boston-area list is pretty thin and far more technical than I’m looking for, but there are some decent listings there.

5. ReadWriteWeb’s JobWire- It’s brand new, but worth checking out. ReadWriteWeb is using JobThread to run their own startup-focused job board.

6. TechCrunch’s CrunchBoard- TechCrunch uses personalforce to run their tech job board.

7. Facebook- Simply saying that I was looking for a new gig led to several facebook messages from friends and colleagues, some giving decent leads.

8. Mashable’s Job Board-  Though the listings are thin, mashable’s job list has some good filtering, allowing you to search by job type, location, etc.

9. GoBigNetwork- Lists nothing but startup jobs.

10. HotStartupJobs.com- A startup focused job aggregator.

11. StartupAgents.com- A meeting place for startups and applicants to find each other. As a job seeker, you create a profile describing your startup experience, risk level, etc., and invite “agents” to connect with you.

12. Startupers.com- A no-frills job board centered around startups.

13- Your own blog- You know, like I’m doing right now.

These are just a few of the free resources available to those looking to snag a web 2.0 or startup-based gig. Please feel free to post any others you may know of.

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.

Just a quick note to say that the Social Media For Social Change event here in Boston has released their second block of tickets. The first set of tickets sold out quickly, and it looks like there are only 14 left.

The event is to benefit Jane Doe, Inc. From the SM4SC web site:

Jane Doe Inc., The Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence brings together organizations and people committed to ending domestic violence and sexual assault. We create social change by addressing the root causes of this violence, and promote justice, safety and healing for survivors.

Get tickets here.

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• Social Media For Social Change (SM4SC)- Might As Well Use All These Social Media Tools For Something Good!

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.

Today I hit a breaking point. One of those rare moments in life when you break out of the autopilot that is every day human experience and stop. Something that you’ve taken for granted suddenly changes in your mind. Your entire construction of reality up to that point is called into question, and you are forced to redefine normality.

What was it? And what did it have to do with “social media”? Well, I’ll tell you.

I watched a cartoonist argue about social media with a fictional character on twitter.

Once I realized the absurd and surreal nature of what I was witnessing, the term “social media” popped into my head, and I started to think about what it actually means. It certainly has all the feel of a buzzword without meaning, but who am I to judge? So, I did what anyone would do: I asked the googles.

After a barrage of ads from “accredited social media experts”, “social media success coaches” and companies wanting to perform a social media audit, I still had no answer. People wanted to charge me money for their expertise in something I have yet to get a definition for. My head spins.

So I turn to wikipedia. You know what they say: if it’s on the internet, it has to be true.

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories, and understandings.

Right…..I am now less intelligent for reading that. So basically “social media” is any activity that results in anything, anywhere, as long as people are around and technology is involved somewhere. If that’s the case:

• If I’m riding on a subway with an ’80s style boombox blaring, and people are around, that’s social media.
• If I bring a fishing pole into Petco and have a friend record the reactions of people who think I’m a lunatic while I try to catch a beta fish, well, that’s social media.

Well, if that’s true, being a social media expert sounds like a pretty sweet gig. How’s that for a segue…..?

This morning I saw an article on mashable entitled “Are Social Media Jobs Here to Stay?” by Ben Parr. In it, Mr. Parr says:

Let’s face it: Social media has become one of the hot buzzwords in tech circles. It used to be Web 2.0 and social networking, but now we have moved on to a broader term that encompasses not only social networking, but blogs, podcasts, user-generated content, social bookmarking, microblogging, and lifestreams. The rise of all these forms of new media has also created demand for people who can help companies position and market themselves within this new realm.

So, why do we talk about “social media” as an area of expertise? Aren’t we really talking about promotion? We’re now defining a role based on the tools used to achieve goals. We’re not interested in hiring a painter, instead we’re looking for a paint roller guru. Who wants a lion tamer when you can get a whip expert?

Am I just worrying about semantics? Maybe. But maybe not. Here’s my theory:

When you use a vague term like “social media”, you sound mysterious. Saying “I’m a social media expert” is a lot like saying “I am an alchemist. You wouldn’t understand.” The mention of the term suggests a closely guarded set of skills used to achieve an unmeasurable goal resulting in instant riches. And there’s always someone that will say “here’s my money. Do your thing” rather than “I don’t understand what you’re selling. Please explain it to me.”

Am I bashing the slick tools that comprise “social media?” Not at all. I love things like twitter, blogs, video, podcasts, the whole thing. If it’s shiny and has a beta invite available, I’m all over it. But in the end, they’re just tools. Means to an end.

A ladder isn’t very useful when you’re not trying to get to an elevated position. But if you need to clear the roof, it’s the best.

Have a great weekend. This is Nathan Burke, keyboard pressing expert, and mouse click guru.