Apr/115
How to win an Online Contest
I figured since I bugged the heck out of all my friends, customers, subscribers, wife’s friends, and followers… you to vote for me for a Travel Contest, I should at least share with you what I learned from it and also give you a chance to get some really valuable information about Facebook as well…
Maybe it’ll help you, too.
Long story short – we didn’t win. Voting is over.
In the process of trying to win, I did a little bit of googling on the girl who was in first place for a large majority of the contest.
There are some very good marketing lessons in here.
Alright, so, if you’re ever in a contest like this, here’s some of the key components I saw from the winner:
- Get Others Involved Early
I see strong evidence that her immediate family and many of her friends were helping out quite a bit from the onset. I think you’ll get more people to take action if someone else is asking for the favor:“Help my daughter win this contest” vs ”Help me win this contest”
- Do it for a ‘good cause’
The winner said she was going to help poor people in India and clean up the beaches near the Great Barrier Reef (uh, okay). Still, more reason people will take action, right?“Help my daughter win this contest so she can do good”
- Create a Facebook Group
You can invite ALL of your friends to a FB group and they’re automatically in it. Once they’re in it, they can also invite their friends as well. A few days of that and next thing you know you’ve got a FB Group with 5000 people in it.The cool thing about a FB Group is that anytime you update the group’s page — *everyone* in the group gets a little update. This was probably good for 1000 or more votes per day for the winner.
- Get Strangers w/ lots of Followers to Tweet or Share
The “others” from step 1, in this case,managed to get none other than Justin Bieber to tweet a single shout out.He would’ve never done this if he didn’t either *know* the person or it was for a good cause.
UPDATE: CORRECTION — Justin Bieber did *NOT* actually tweet for her. I misread a page in my research.
(I think a “reason of some sort” works — it doesn’t have to be total “do gooder” stuff, but it helps.) I have no idea if they knew Bieber or not. But they still needed the “do it for a good cause” angle for him to be okay tweeting it I bet.They did not know Bieber… they tried 20 or more times to get him to Tweet and he did not.That’s pretty much *it* … the 80/20 rule anyway.
If you can do the first 3 things and get lucky with the 4th – you’ll most likely win the contest.
If, like my wife and I, you have a decent network of people that’ll vote for you – *and* you do the above steps – I think you’ll DEFINITELY win.
“So, why didn’t ya win, Harris?”
Is that what you’re thinking???
Honestly, I heard about the contest pretty late… I didn’t make a plan… and I thought I would just ‘see what happens’.
The *one thing* I could’ve done that probably would’ve put me over the top though … and that I SHOULD’VE KNOWN: The Facebook Group.
By the time I realized that I should’ve done that, it was too late. And that’s what the info that I’m about to give you is all about actually:
Go Here to Get “Facebook Machine” – Social Strategy for Today’s Marketplace
It’s all about how to properly use Facebook in your business. You can get your hands on a very valuable social strategy right now.
All you have to do is click & connect. 
Hope you found this as valuable as I did.
And if you’re one of the hundreds of people who voted in the contest — THANK YOU! Ain’t no shame in 5th place (just ain’t no prizes either LOL).
Peace
Harris
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2:58 pm on April 26th, 2011
Thanks for the info AND I’m sorry you didn’t win! I clicked! And you going was a good enough cause for me. Ha ha
3:09 pm on April 26th, 2011
Thanks, cuz.
8:04 pm on April 26th, 2011
Shame you didn’t make it – you will soon, i’m sure. Always tastes a lot better though when it’s Free
Don’t let that put you off cycling to the shops wearing that robe. Boom chicka bow bow
2:08 am on May 2nd, 2011
Harris…great article! For those of you reading this comment, my name is Amy. I am the girl that the article is referencing. Here is some info that might help!
When I found the contest I was looking up ways to get cheap flights for my gap year. The three places I want to go on my gap year are India (to work with the Missionaries of Charity started by mother teresa), Europe (random volunteer projects and I have a good friend in France that will help cover cost of living), and the third place is ANYWHERE I can work along the coast and scuba dive. I use to want to major in marine biology and I want to clean up or do conservation work along some reef. This is where I messed up in the competition….the sole reason I initially put Australia was because I didnt know how sony was going to disperse the funds if I won (ex: if they would only pay for the listed location) and getting a ticket to australia was the most expensive place I looked at. From a marketing standpoint I would put India if I could do it over because thats the only place I know I am going for sure.
Your article was really insightful! You are right about the FB group. They are much better then doing a FB page. I was able to ‘force’ all my friends to join the group. What really helped was my ability to create facebook events within my group for each voting day. Each member of the group would get a notification about the event. HOWEVER, after 5,000 members you cannot invite the group as a whole to the event. The last few days I would have to delete a couple hundred members in the group bc I think it’s important to get the reminder to vote in the event. (ex: event names were “Vote Day 4!”) Also, I was personally able to invite my nearly 1,000 friends. But it wasn’t a breeze (especially at first) to get new members. I am lucky to know many friends in different states that wanted to help me and gave me their log-in information to ‘force’ join their friends to the group as well. The majority of the group members I added myself…it was very tedious. I marketed in Miami Florida, Texas, and North Carolina. At the end of everything I did end up with a lot of hate mail. Many people received 30+ group notifications if their email was linked to facebook and I would have random people message me to stop ‘spamming’ them. I had a generated response that was very nice and told them how to get out of the group. I also ‘liked’ a bunch of pages and would post on their wall as well (coca-cola, old navy, etc…)
Another thing I did was send daily emails to my 200 or so contacts. I also had my family send emails to everyone that they knew. Before the week started I told people to email me with a notice if they did not want to receive a vote reminder from me for the next 6 days. I even got UNC Chapel Hill aboard and had a student advocate and a professor send emails to some of the faculty.
You are wrong about twitter…We did not actually get a tweet from justin beiber. I tried really hard (there was about a .05% chance) and I probably tweeted to him over 200 times. (at one point twitter blocked me haha). But, he never re-tweeted anything me or my brother sent him. If he had in fact tweeted (or anyone with over a million followers) I would have sat back and watched the votes soar. Hands down if anyone in an online competition could do that they would win. People love Justin Bieber.
I also did a YouTube promotion video. That had a good amount of views. I even tried chat rooms. A complete fail. Asking random people is not smart. Get someone else that knows them to ask for you…that’s the way to go.
I’m sure I bombarded you with info. Hopefully I helped some! I might write my sociology project on this whole experience! Have a good one.
Amy
5:55 pm on July 1st, 2011
interesting