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[...] Jeremiah Owyang wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt [...]

[...] Jeremiah Owyang had some great ideas on this topic.You can read a snippet of the post here.Thanks so much to everyone who entered the first British iPhone giveaway. Finally, fifteen days after the competition started, I’m pleased to announce we have a winner! Congratulations to Kuli for winning the first British iPhone … [...]

Hey after all that headache, dont u think the runner ups should get a prize!

Its only fare after all that for a iPhone!!

Come on guys, i think its worth it…

Hi Chi-Chi,

First of all well done to all your team, i think it was great competition..

I got 74 votes, god knows how that was possible!!

Anyway i wanted to share a few thoughts on your competition:

First of all i think a gadget give-away is really a eye opener for me, and to be honest i think its better then google ad sense.. Get the hits as well as the respect of the users, yes i like that..

Secondly i think you clearly need to set the deadline to a fixed position, maybe a few weeks no more then that.. this way you good benefit from the hits, and the users can benefit from a great prize..

Thirdly we know gadget giveaways are great, and we know the voting system is sorted.. maybe its now time to assess how your blog can benefit from a competition.

I would personally have a question with a voting element as well as a clue in every post on the blog up till the end of the comp! I wouldn’t make it too hard (ppl get bored), but simple enough, to allow the user to benefit from your blog (stories) and as well as from a nice prize.

Anyway thats what i would do, let me know what you think.

Kind Regards

Imran

Congratulations Kuli!

Who would have thought it would have come down to 21 votes out of over 400?

Enjoy your iPhone…just make sure you have at least one episode of Peep Show on it!

Joe Akers

@ Maty:

Thanks for your comment and for your contributions to this giveaway.

There is only one prize, unfortunately.

You’ll have to enter the next giveaway )

More details to come later on in the week.

@ Imran:

Thanks for your insightful comment and kind words.

I will respond briefly to your points here but to be honest, they merit a whole post, they are that good ;o).

In response to your first point, yes, a well-run giveaway has the potential to become a nice revenue earner.

I’m currently looking into how giveaways can be used as an online polling and marketing tool and will be blogging about this as the week progresses.

In response to your second point, yes, thankfully the voting system is now sorted and has been tested to destruction. ;o)

I will be tidying up how it works before it is used in the next giveaway. And yes, future giveaways will be run within a fixed time frame, probably around five days. Once again, I will elaborate in a forthcoming blog post.

As far as respecting the users: communicating with a site’s visitors is *the* most important thing, in my opinion. It is imperative that people know you are listening, otherwise, people get aggravated, as you may have witnessed on Friday when the voting system broke again.

I’m thinking hard about your third point. It’s a great one and neatly introduces what I’ve been thinking about doing with future giveaways. However, I’m not sure how to incorporate clues in every post about a giveaway because that would effectively turn each blog update into a new competition.

I’d love to know what you mean by this. Please clarify…

Thanks again for all your great comments and contributions to this giveaway… I’ve made a note of your email address and may well be in touch in future for gadget tips and contributions…

[...] thanks again to Imran who left an insightful comment suggesting I look at running giveaways as a revenue earner for the [...]

hi Chi Chi

whilst I’m pleased for your winner and for the result for your site, I think there are still problems with the voting system. I emailed from the ‘contact us’ page before the end of the competition to let you know that there were problems even since the reset, as I was unable then to vote. I emptied my cookes for RealTV but still the person i wanted to vote for (and had previously voted for before the change to +ve voting only) was greyed out.

I’m not expecting you to change the outcome of this giveaway, but you may want to look at this issue before the next one.

Cheers

@ Kath:

Thanks for your comment and advice.

Apologies for the delay in responding to your email. I’ve just sent you a response.

I’m sorry that you got caught out with the vote reset on Thursday.

I’ll explain why it happened:

The voting system does not use cookies.

The reason you were unable to vote is that Comment Karma detected that you had already voted before the reset; your computer’s IP address was stored against a previous vote in the system.

For this reason, the vote button appeared greyed out when you viewed the giveaway page again.

I was concerned that this might affect people who had already voted positively for entries but had had their votes cancelled out due to the problems with malicious negative voting.

I actually offered to extend the deadline to this Friday (23rd November) to accommodate this. I put this up for the public vote because it would have been the 4th time I extended the deadline myself.
Here’s where I did it:

http://www.realfresh.tv/how-to-vote-in-the-first-british-iphone-giveaway/

As you can see, the response came back 3 votes against 0 for the deadline extension.

I will be ensuring that the voting system is foolproof for future giveaways.

I hope this doesn’t dissuade you from voting in future giveaways.

Thanks again.

I’m very surprised by the distribution of votes, 2 votes at around 400 with the next entry around 27 seems a bit odd to me.

I would seriously look at improving the voting system for this kind of thing or just pick a winner at Random as it’s far to easy to game this kind of system.

IP address based restriction is unfair because a significant number of ISP’s put traffic through proxy’s so once one person has voted then the next person to vote from behind that ISP will be blocked.

On the converse some ISP’s do not use fixed IP addresses so it would be possible to vote, restart you internet connection vote again… etc.

Clearly use of cookies is out.

A registration system that tracked IP addresses in the background would probably be the way forward. If users had to register before they could vote or comment then you would start to build a community. The incentive to sign up would be reasonably high as users do have a chance of winning a prize.

The other problem with this style of voting that I’ve just thought of is that time becomes a factor. A system where users are voting and new nominations are simultaneously being added can’t give a “fair” result.

You really need to do 2 phases, a enter your competition phase and a vote phase.

I would suggest that results of the voting is kept hidden and also make each voter vote several time. i.e. each voter should be given 10 votes which they have to use up?

@ Chris Fleming:

Thanks for your incredibly insightful comments. Much appreciated.

I’ve considered everything you said and will shortly be writing a blog post detailing the changes I am making to the way the sponsored giveaways work based on your suggestions.

In response to your first comment, the distribution of votes, admittedly widely variant is probably due to the fact that the giveaway deadline was extended several times due to early problems with negative voting.

Unfortunately, this meant that people who voted early on may have lost interest as the giveaway progressed. The problems we had with patching the voting system to prevent negative voting probably didn’t help.

And, yes, running the giveaway in two stages did cross my mind. An ‘Entry Registration’ stage followed by a ‘Voting’ stage is fairly intuitive; most public competitions are organized like this; X Factor and Big Brother being two very different examples.

The reason I didn’t implement it was that I still had to find a ‘fair’ way of selecting which entries would be voted on.

The problem is that without implementing some sort of ‘random selection’ criteria, selecting which entries are voted on eventually boils down to selecting entries based on the number of votes they receive. This brings us back to square one.

I’m thinking hard about adding a user registration system to the site for handling entries in gadget giveaways. It seems to be the most effective way to manage the giveaways themselves and combat voting fraud.

Provided I can get such a system to work without requiring people to sign up to leave comment on the blog (which is something I am firmly against), I will implement it.

The options currently available include running the giveaways in a forum-like section of the site that users need to register to use first.

Thanks again for your comments.

Stay tuned for the next blog update…

[...] today’s fantastically insightful comments by Imran and Chris Fleming on how to run gadget giveaways, I am currently thinking hard about revising how sponsored gadget [...]

Where’s the written review of the iPhone from the winner?!?

I had my review drafted ready and waiting…makes me wish i had another 20 votes!

JoeAD

@ JoeAD:

Thanks for your comment.

Look out for it and news of upcoming Gadget Giveaways mid-week…

[...] out for the iPhone review by Kuli, winner of the first British iPhone Giveaway later on this [...]

[...] been meaning to note that the long awaited iPhone review was indeed written by Kuli, winner of our infamous iPhone giveaway back in [...]

[...] This Competition ended over a year ago! Just saving those of you still entering the effort of commenting. addthis_url = [...]