How to Run an Online Contest

By Dana Oshiro / February 5, 2010 4:07 PM / 11 Comments

A year ago we launched the ReadWriteWeb Guide on Community Management with the knowledge that "Community Manager" would become an increasingly popular job title. Since then, the requirements of keeping your customers engaged have become more demanding. According to one report, contests are becoming increasingly popular. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Strutta CEO Ben Pickering, to find out what businesses can do to generate more participation from their contests.

Similar to Wildfire Apps and Meme Labs, Strutta lets you collect user-generated content and showcase it in a seamless web contest experience. Users can upload videos and photos, vote on other contest content and promote entries to their Twitter and Facebook friends.

While the site has helped create success for high profile campaigns including the Crate and Barrel Ultimate Wedding contest, UN Development Programme's photo competition and Operation Gratitude, not every contest has been successful. Pickering offers some great advice to ensure your effort doesn't go unrewarded.

1. Set Goals: Contests are a great way to engage users, get customer feedback and even drive traffic to your site. Nevertheless, it's important to be realistic with your expectations and set specific goals. Some of the factors you can take into account to measure success include earned media, email opt-ins, engagement across social networks, monthly site traffic and in some cases, direct revenue.

2. Be Relevant: It would be silly to create a car contest for a community of cyclists or a meatloaf recipe contest for a community of vegetarians. One of Pickering's most successful contests is Adorama's Picture Perfect Contest. The contest invited community members to showcase the object of their passion - their photography. Pickering also suggests the barrier-to-entry was significantly reduced as participants had multiple ways to submit their work including via an iPhone app.

3. Give Them Incentive: In addition to prizes, Pickering suggests that community managers keep in mind the importance of recognition. By opening your contest to public voting, users receive public recognition and the community becomes more active in watching the competition unfold. Additionally, because Pickering's service offers integration with Twitter and Facebook, an open competition may encourage participation from those outside of the community.

4. Offer Support: Pickering points out that video contests may require some support. He suggests community managers consider setting up a blog, Twitter account and Facebook group to help answer questions and walk users through the process. In the case of New Zealand's Your Big Break Contest entrants were expected to submit a script and a short film. Tourism New Zealand set up a Facebook group to discuss the contest and by the time it was ready to launch, hundreds of filmmakers were poised to upload their submissions.

Learn more about social media managment from experts -- check out the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It highlights the hottest issues in online community management (Download a free sample of the document here), and you get access to a password protected online aggregator that automatically serves up the most-talked about blog posts concerning community management each day -- a great resource for ongoing professional development.

Comments

Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteStart posts

All wise. Here's a question for your legions of readers, though. I'm currently running an online contest (a CMS Haiku competion - http://jonontech.com/2010/02/05/cmshaiku-2010-beer-contest/.

I've promised beers as prizes. I was wondering if there was a clever way to deliver said beers to winners on other continents. I'm dreaming of a partnership with pubs/bars where I could pay for a drink in advance, and the lucky winner could redeem their free drink token.

I was going to register tweetbeer.com, but that is already taken. Sadly, the app running there seems to be down. Does anyone know of any service that could help? Or fancy writing one ...

Thanks
Jon

Posted by: Jon Marks | February 5, 2010 4:11 PM

There used to be a service called BuyYourFriendADrink, but I think they're gone now. Facecard lets you gift cash and coffee via Facebook, there might be a beer option there.

Posted by: Dana Oshiro | February 5, 2010 4:18 PM

Hey Dana,

Thanks for the article on Strutta! I guess it's no coincidence that of all of the screenshots you could have chosen, you picked one from your home and native land.

Go Canada go,

Jordan

Posted by: Jordan Behan | February 5, 2010 5:13 PM

Incentives and benefits can make the the community join, if you offer much support it will be more encouraging for other to join and finally your goal is reachable.

Posted by: dlysen | February 5, 2010 8:24 PM

Hi,
Thank you very much for great article.Currently, there are about forty bars in the NYC participating, including Underbar at the W Hotel, Wetbar, Libation, Metro 55 , Southern Hospitality, and StoneRose (in the Time Warner)....

Posted by: r4 | February 6, 2010 1:39 AM

Do you have any tips on where to promote the contest, e.g. contest aggregators, forums...

Posted by: Bobjuck | February 6, 2010 4:15 AM

How about SEO Contest?

Posted by: WebGeek Philippines | February 6, 2010 10:30 AM

We launched into beta last week a platform for creating online contests. You may also be interested in visiting http://skril.com.

The service is currently free and there are no limits to the number of entries and on the duration of the contest. We also verify email addresses from entrants.

Contest organizers can setup a contest which allows entrants to login via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google Friend Connect, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Digg, or FriendFeed OAuth.

This is just the first rev and you can expect more improvements in the coming weeks/months. Please share some feedback with us. Would love to hear it!

Thanks,
Greg

Posted by: Greg Melton | February 6, 2010 4:13 PM

I think giving recognition goes a long way in getting more participation by community members. You should give them a reason for spreading the word as well.

Posted by: CNA training | February 6, 2010 9:11 PM

Any SEO concept..Please share..

Posted by: Photoshop Guru | February 7, 2010 4:08 AM

I'm running a monthly story contest related to the theme of a new site I'm launching, asking people to contribute a story about why a gift they received was truly unique (http://www.super-unique-gifts.com/unique-gifts-story-contest-april-2010.html).

I'm offering two gift cards as prizes, but got to wondering if there are any likely problems with gift cards being used by any winners outside of the U.S. Or should I restrict the contest to a certain geo - political boundary?

Also, what are the best places to promote contests such as this one? Does the software mentioned above from Strutta have anything built into it to help with promotion of the contest outside of the website it's hosted on?

Thanks for any tips or suggestions.

Posted by: David Stevenson | April 14, 2010 3:44 PM