In reply to these posts:

http://www.snarfware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=231
http://www.snarfware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=998

What I immediately did on this was to help complete the information in http://wakoopa.com/software/snarfer-091 (reported a few duplicate entries). I am also going to link to Snarfer on one of my sites.

Anyway, I am writing this post to suggest a few ideas:

1. Make a moderated wiki page/ forum thread/ whatever where users would be able to upload personally made Snarfer banners, buttons, wallpapers, screensavers, animations, video tutorials, screenshot tutorials, etc.

2. Make a moderated wiki page/ forum thread/ whatever where users would be able to suggest places on the net where it would be good to mention Snarfer.

It would be great if users both discovered such places and added a review of Snarfer. But I think the optimal solution is to ask users to do only the first of the two. The reasons are that a) users may not do it professionally enough and actually hurt the image of Snarfer; b) writing a review, registering when that is needed, etc might seem too much trouble for users. They may give up, so there would be nothing done at all.

3. Make a moderated wiki page/ forum thread/ whatever where users would be able to add the links where they mentioned Snarfer. Opera are doing this: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/forums/topic.dml?id=251639.

4. Reward users who contribute significantly (e.g. make a translation, suggest great ideas, add a beautiful banner for Snarfer, etc) by publicly giving a greater priority to their feature requests/ bug reports. This would help keep their enthusiasm to spread the word even more.

5. To help sustain Snarfer you may offer to develop "non-priority" plugins on demand for money. To see what I mean you may check this post: http://getsatisfaction.com/wakoopa/topics/paid_features_on_demand. I suggested it to Wakoopa but the general idea could be applied to Snarfer as well.

6. Good support = users happy from the product + users happy from the attention that was personally paid to them = huge enthusiasm to spread the word.

I think that the current support forum is quite good (I love the individual RSS feeds for each thread). What could be added to make support even better is a short tutorial for how to use screenshot/ screencast software so as to better describe one's technical problems/ suggestions. There must be a section with recommended software for that as well as recommended online servers for uploading the screenshots/ screencasts.

Another useful thing would be to implement a system of predefined short replies to suggestions. E.g. "added to do list", "rejected", "we are thinking on this", etc. GetSatisfaction.com have such a system. This would make users happy to know that their post was at least read while at the same time it would not consume your time to write detailed replies.

Another idea: users who post feature requests to be asked to write a tip how to spread the word about Snarfer at the end of the message body of each new topic. The tip can be things like suggesting a specific web page where it would be appropriate to mention the program, or just an idea, or a link where they have already mentioned Snarfer, etc.

Of course this needs to be done cautiously:
- users should not be obliged but only asked to do this;
- there should be clear, detailed (yet not too long!) explanation how exactly a user can help spread the word;
- users should be warned that spamming is not an acceptable form of popularizing the product.