Last night I got an email from Adam Martin of Qajack, a newly launched "video game" based on Questions and answers. Think of it as Yahoo Answers meets 12seconds. Something like that.

Here’s what they say it is:

Qajack uses video to play with what you know and what you want to know. It’s deliberately simple, no profiles to fill out, just login and play.

Qajack combines competition, ie gameplay and reward with information exchange, ie questions and answers.
How? Simple: Qajack is all video and it’s a game.

You can ask anything and answer anything by webcam! Each video capture is a maximum of 60 seconds long to keep the game flowing. Feeling shy? then you’ve got 140 characters of text or feeling verbose, you can upload a video from your desktop.

 Though I have played around with the app a little bit, the real story is their messaging. It’s really rare that someone really nails down the personality of a webapp to make it seem "cool", but they’ve done it. Here’s the email I received asking me to try out the app:

Dear Nathan,

Trust you’re well, by way of recall I’m Adam who you’ve never before, but if we did I’d almost certainly purloin some branded stationary from your office.

I’ve been involved in a start-up for last 12 months which just launched and would love for you to take a look – the new missing link in online social media, with an unpronounceable name.

We’re big String tweethearts and would stalk you if we could and it was legal and we lived in the same country/town.

www.qajack.com

Qajack uses video to play with what you know and what you want to know. It’s monkey simple, no profiles to fill out, just login, play and gamble with your reputation.

If Twitter is about brevity and inanity, Qajack is about authenticity and rich relevance.

Beta 1.0 release only supports Safari and Firefox, but we’re pounding our chests to get IE working too… oo …. oo.

We’re 3 founders, bootstrapped with my Mum’s new window fund and based in London, Barcelona and Bogota.

Best Wishes,

Now let me tell you the subtle brilliance of this email.

1. It immediately addresses the fact that we’ve never met, but moves from the feeling of spam to the feeling of familiarity.

2. It is self-effacing, calling out the fact that it has an unpronounceable name.

3. It throws a shout out to the blog, and pays a compliment.

4. It gives a crystal clear description of what it is and how easy it is to start.

5. It frames the app in a familiar context with a comparison to twitter

6. It tells me that they’re a group of 3 entrepreneurs trying to make something great with no money, just guts…and does it in a really funny way.

Now you tell me, after reading something like that, aren’t you immediately on their side?

What’s even better is that the tone of the messaging doesn’t end there. It’s consistent in their site as well:

We bootstrapped with old boots, a kindly grandparent and selling pretty much everything we owned.

My wife has threatened to leave me, until I persuaded her I could make iPhone Apps for comedians to pay the bills and feed our kids. All the while Qajack bubbled away. We talked about a launch in July 08, what were we thinking?! We’ve iterated, procrastinated (mostly me), master…ed the art of UI simplicity and like feral parents bombed on smack we’re now giving our child up for adoption.

So come and take a look, whilst the parents are pooped, stressed, narcoleptics, the kid is kinda cute and very clever. She’s like Che Guevara and Monica Bellucci’s love child, if such a thing were even possible.

If Twitter is about brevity and inanity, Qajack is about authenticity and rich relevance.

Awesome job. After I play around with it a little more, I’ll be sure to write about how the app actually works!

So, here’s the situation. I was plowing through emails this morning and had an email from FastPitch Networking. Here’s what it said:

All right. No big deal, right? You get stuff like this all the time, no? But then…….

My phone rings. I answer it.

“Hi this is Bob Poole from FastPitch Networking…..”

Wait, does Bob somehow know that I’m looking at the email at that moment? That was kinda weird.

Rather than Bob actually calling me, it was a prerecorded robocall from FastPitch Networking. The call basically reiterated the same information from the email, then let me know that if I had any questions, I could find the answers on the web site.

I looked back at their site, and noticed that a phone number is required to sign up for the service, but I didn’t see anything in the privacy policy about them calling you (though it didn’t say they wouldn’t either!).

So, I was just wondering:

• Is this a successful strategy? I mean, I understand how effective a phone call to a prospect can be, but is a robocall effective?
• Has anyone else tried this technique?
• How would you feel if a service you use (twitter, facebook, etc) robocalled you to encourage you to check out new features?

I’m not annoyed or mad, nor do I necessarily think this was a bad thing. Instead, it’s just something I’ve never heard of before and I’m curious to see what others have experienced.

Okay, so I’m still trying to figure out this whole video thing and I’m not entirely comfortable with it. But I think this format is at least a step in the right direction. This is just a quick video talking about exactly two things:

1. Gmail Video Chat

2. Twitterank and Twitter Grader

So, here goes:

Related Links:

Twitterank Creator Speaks

Twitterank.com

Twitter Grader

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 last employer, matchmine, launched a weekly sweepstakes. A little background: the company was 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.