Mandi Bateson – Head of Social, Mindshare did a great session on “Social Contests” at SMX Melbourne Social Marketer Bootcamp, here are my notes from the session:
Contests can attract the wrong people:
Just competition hogs that have no interest in your product
Surprise and Delight – reward the right people that contribute to your page, other people see this and then think they may get rewarded, you aren’t promising everything, but you see interactions go through the roof. Just say thanks for all your comments and support, would like to send you something to say thanks! Warner Bros did this.
Another campaign was to win $10,000 had to purchase first
In Australia, skill vs chance:
If you want a game of chance which is drawing something out of a hat, you need permits in every state that people are able to enter and win the competition, may mean going out to every state and getting a permit, takes quite a bit of time. Need to plan about a month in advance. That’s why most of the time go for a game of skill:
– Tell me why in 25 words of less and judge it
– Having a quiz, be careful don’t start out with a game of skill and turn it into a game of chance. Like saying give a correct answer and we’ll pick a winner from those correct answers – that is a game of chance. But saying first person to answer correctly is a game of skill.
– The 25 words of less seems to be the easiest way to get around the permits, be clear what you are looking for – most creative response
Crust Pizza Friday – Tweet I love Crust Pizza Friday and every Friday someone gets 5 pizzas delivered to their work, that is game of chance
Galaxy Nexus Phone – launch of their new phone, globally run competition
Toshiba ran competition on youtube, they put a video on youtube about their latest laptop about the features it had and what features it had, they said put in the comments what you would want out of a laptop in the future. Good way to make people watch your content on youtube and then reward that.
Commonwealth Bank – About to be launched on Monday, competition on Facebook, setting up a challenge, people can win $2000 each day, pay attention to Facebook Page and check back for clues. Still have to wait and see what they do, but they are making people come back and back and keep checking FB page which is a good idea.
Facebook Promotions Guidelines
Unfortunately there is a lot that is illegal, like comment on our page and tell us this to win, or tag yourself in a photo to win, anything using Facebooks native features of functionality is illegal. It gets the most virality and impact and unfortunately we see this everywhere but it is against Facebooks rules.
There are maybe 6 Facebook account managers in Australia so they don’t have time to check or chase anything up, so people are getting away with it, risk they may take down your entire page though. Before – no alcohol as a prize, now you can as long as its over 18.
But you can build an application that will allow people to do that in a same way, does take them to an opt-in, rather than going to an application and voting on it
Other ones on the naughty list:
Competition by SAS airlines– extremely successful, for big airline, but taken down straight away. Asked people to make a profile photo
All I want for Christmas by Westfield – was pulled down within 3 days, but they got massive traffic. Did piss a lot of people off and all anti-Westfield page. When you entered it automatically changed your Facebook status to be this “All I want for Christmas is a Westfield Gift card”
2.7 million views, 14% online sales spike
Gelato place – made gelato burger completely out of cake, gelato etc, they were giving away 6, all you need to do is share our post, image looks so great you would want to share anyway, 271 share in first day for tiny gelato place in Sydney, unfortunately not something you can do
Tony Bianco– said leave a comment in the comments telling us why you should win in 25 words of less, but using FB comments is not allowed
Tiger Airways – also asking people to enter through the FB comments, not allowed
Fan Gating
It does say you can’t like a page as the entry mechanism, but it doesn’t say you can’t make a Fan Gate to get to the competition details
Kellows Big Breakfast Pledge” on Facebook – saying this is a contest that is only open to our Fans, become a fan to get the details is fine, but saying you have to “Like” to be in the draw, that is not allowed
Tools- Wildfire Competition App
Wildfire apps are quite reasonable, pay depending on how much tailoring and formatting, then pay minimal price for how long you want the competition to run for. Could run something for a month for $500 using these applications.
If you want to go around that – you can still use Facebook to promote your competition but have a landing page on your website, but if you ask them for a question and to answer correctly you have to award it to the first correct answer to keep a game of skill not chance, but then people stop entering once someone has answered right, but you can hide all the other comments so people don’t know yet and they keep entering
Make sure the prize suits what you actually want from your audience. Things like TVs are something everyone wants to win, so get all of the riff-raff and not necessarily the audience you want.
Canon had photo competition – many people took exception to the winner
Be the voice campaign they ran for TomTom, chance to be the voice for Tom Tom, but people were complaining, I can’t believe this person got this many votes, much be gaming the system
Most clients just try and make it into a game of skill and avoid the entire thing.
