PhotoTuts recently ran an online contest. They had a cool prize and a cool community. They did a lot right and some wrong. It got me thinking about what goes into a good contest.
Awesome doesn’t have to mean expensive. It just means something that is useful to your specific audience. In the case of the PhotoTuts contest, they gave away a camera. A really cool camera, the Canon EOS 550D / Rebel T2i. It was a prize designed to excite their audience and it succeeded. If your site is about poker you might give away a tournament entry instead.
If your site offers photography tutorials, ask your readers to submit photos. If your site is about graphic design or web design, ask your readers to create a design that promotes your site. If your site is about bowling, have your readers submit video of crazy strikes or outrageous celebrations. Whatever you do, you want to get people engaging with your site and with each other because it creates a more passionate audience.
This is really a corollary to the last point. With the Rise of Social Networks there has been a corresponding rise (and backlash) of social network spam contests. “Tweet about how much you love us every day for a chance to win!”
Look, it sounds great on paper. You get lots of free exposure. But at the end of the day, getting your audience to piss off their friends and family is not going to earn you a wider audience. It doesn’t earn you more passionate users. It doesn’t engage anything except a hatred of you or your company by people who had previously never heard of you. Don’t do it.
Spamming social networks is not the same thing as promoting your contest on social networks. You should absolutely provide buttons for people to retweet or otherwise share the details of the contest with their network. Some of their friends likely share their interests and will want to enter your cool contest too.
For the next few sections I’m going to pick on the PhotoTuts contest I mentioned earlier. Before I do that I want to point out that they had the first four steps of the contest down cold. Cool prize, building community, not spamming, and giving their members the tools to share the contest. They were the inspiration for this post both for the things they did right and the things they could have done better. That said…
Here are some of the guidelines from the PhotoTuts contest original contest page:
Photographs should be submitted at original, full resolution
While seemingly straightforward, I was left wondering whether or not photos could be cropped.
They received so many submissions they decided to break up the submissions across three posts. The first batch was posted on a Monday with a note that the following two sets would be posted “over the next two weeks.” The second batch ended up being posted on Thursday of the same week. The third batch was posted the following Monday. I’m not a mathematician, but that’s all three batches in eight days. That made it very easy for people to miss the second batch of photos completely.
The biggest confusion of the PhotoTuts contest centered around who would make it from the first round to the second. You had to read through the each of the batches from round one to find the relevant information and, worse, the relevant information changed each time.
All three batches from round one stated the following:
Voting will take place in three parts of around 50 images each, with the 10 highest rated photos of these three rounds going into a “finalâ€.
Is that the 10 highest rated from each round or just 10 from across all three rounds? It could be read either way. Then, at the bottom of the third batch, was the following:
Stay tuned to the site, because we’ll have the grand final coming up later this week. The top ten photos from each voting round will be put to a final poll to determine the winner!
Well, round 2 was labelled the “Grand Final” and it had only 10 photos total, instead of 10 photos from each voting round as stated. This meant that 2/3rds of the people who thought they qualified for the contest were summarily dismissed.
If you make a mistake, own up to it. If someone asks a question about something ambiguous, answer it publicly so everyone can benefit from the answer. If you’re going to enforce a rule, make sure it is a rule and that you stated it at the beginning of the contest.
A friend of mine had an entry that made it into the first round of the PhotoTuts contest. It was a beautiful picture of a girl blowing bubbles:
Photographer: lainers
She promoted it to her social network asking for her friends to vote for her. Then she received an email from someone involved in the contest asking her to remove a post from a forum she’s on because it was ” a photography contest, not a popularity contest.”
Now, putting aside the fact that there is a long history of people asking for votes (See also: American Idol, Elections, Am I Hot Or Not) and even putting aside the fact that others had very clearly done the same thing, nowhere in the rules or in any of the subsequent contest pages did it state or even ask people not to promote themselves.
In fact, at the bottom of the original contest page it said “Excited about the contest? Let your people know.” Which is smart, becaues letting people know brings new people to your site, which should be one of the goals of the contest in the first place.
Sending ambiguous rules, takedown notices, and not doing what you said you would can turn an otherwise great contest into something that leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many of your contestants.
Got more tips? Leave a comment.
The key to viral (or social) marketing is to make it easy for your users to help you. To do that, you need to give them the tools to help you. And to do that, you probably have to put a little bit of thought into what the best tools are.
Over at Spiceworks we have a user group called Spread Spiceworks. It’s grown organically over time and I thought I’d share some of the tools we’ve created to help our users evangelize us.
Spread Spiceworks Widget
An email form to let people instantly tell their friends about us. You have to be careful about spammers trying to abuse things like this. To keep things simple the body of the email is actually hardcoded on the back-end. If they want to send a custom message, the same text can be copied to their clipboard.
This section has buttons and screenshots to post on their blogs, on forums, or pretty much anywhere that allows HTML. Clicking on a button or screenshot opens a modal box with the HTML code. (I added syntax highlighting because, well, I’m a nerd.) If a user is logged in the HTML code will include their referral ID. That way, if anybody clicks on one of their buttons and downloads the app, they get credit for it in the form of points. I’ll talk more about the points a bit later.
This section also has wallpapers for desktops, PDAs and mobiles. While those things don’t actively help people to “spread Spiceworks” they do help passively. And, more importantly, they help our passionate users to stay passionate.
This links to our various social networks so users can stay up-to-date on what we’re doing. Elsewhere we incorporate buttons to let people share our content on their social networks.
You want to know how to create a really passionate user? Get him or her together with other passionate users. Our meet-ups are user created and user run. We facilitate things by helping them organize the group, publicizing the events, and providing them with topic materials.
This goes hand-in-hand with the meet-ups. We’ve provided users with an “Introduce to Spiceworks” slide deck they can use to give presentations… if that’s their thing. In fact, we’ve provided almost 50 slide decks! And we’ve bundled them together with custom business cards that they can print. The cards use the same referral code that the buttons use.
This is where users can go to buy hats, t-shirts, messenger bags, onesies, wall clocks, etc., all adorned with the Spiceworks brand. They look stylish and we get free advertising wherever they are.
I mentioned that the buttons and business cards have referral IDs attached to them. Actually, so do the emails and screenshots. Whenever someone downloads Spiceworks from a link that includes a referral code, the referrer gets credit and that credit takes the form of points in our community. The more points you have, the higher your “level” is in the community. Attaining higher levels is purely a point of pride amongst users and yet it’s a powerful motivational tool.
So these are some of the tools we use. What are you doing to help your passionate users?
If you have a website you should be keeping track of who’s visiting it and what they’re doing while they’re there. Google Analytics is a great tool for doing just that. If your site is built with WordPress, like mine is, you can also install a plugin like Site Stats, which will create a new page for your dashboard full of useful information like:
If you want to grow your audience this is essential information to have.
Chat Clussman is a design technologist and a father. His main obsession is quality of life but he’s also fond of writing, photography, design, grids, Apple, and WordPress. He lives in Austin, TX.
