Intel launched its Mash Maker product at the Web 2.0 Expo recently. Mash Maker is a great product for creating mashups between websites. For a product launch, what better way to spread the word, than by having a Tell-A-Friend Contest.

SocialTwists’s Tell-A-Friend Widget powers this contest.

A click on the Tell-A-Friend icon on the Mash Maker toolbar brings up the widget.

When you choose to announce about Mash Maker via email, a nicely formatted mail goes out to your friends.

The widget can be used to send IM messages to friends and if they are online, you have an instantaneous chat session starting. Four of the most popular IM clients are supported – Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, Windows Live Messenger and AIM.

It is possible to make blog postings to your personal blog straight from the widget to three of the most popular blog engines – Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad.

Additionally, you can send a Twitter Message or notify your friends on Facebook.

I like the cover page of this book; it markets the book very nicely!
We all know it is true. Most people value on what they hear from someone else (person) than what they hear from a company. Even better, if the person telling is someone we know and trust.

Why not make “Tell A Friend” a very prominent tool on the website, if word of mouth is so powerful.

On most sites where present, Tell-A-Friend is a super simple implementation – a web form asking you to fill 4 items (something like what you see in this picture). On sites where you are logged in as a registered user, it gets reduced down to two things, as site already knows your name and email.

There are a few things that could better enable WOMM.

1. Why would I need to reveal about myself on the site? Maybe small note under ‘Your email address’ saying “won’t be stored or used for sending promotional mails” could help.
2. I don’t remember my friend’s email (that long personal address) because my email client fills in that automatically and shows me nickname when I receive mail from them. How about a quick access to my address book? I could quickly pick up multiple people when I look at my address book.
3. Simple pre-populated message would make it easy. Some sites show it in the textbox.
4. Why only email? Why not Instant Messenger (we chat with friends all the time, may be we could chat on the site or leave an offline message)? Or maybe Twitter or Facebook or some other social network?

SocialTwist Tell-A-Friend Widget can help your site implement a user-friendly way to let them talk to their friend about the product/brand/site. More over you are strongly inviting the user to tell someone, when you replace the simple “Tell A Friend” hyperlink with something that looks like this: