Refining the vision: Sponsored Gadget Giveaways
Following 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 giveaways work to make them really effective for all involved: the entrants, the sponsoring company and Real Fresh TV.
Imran made some brilliant suggestions about promoting sponsored giveaways using blog widgets via WidgetBox and by approaching respected bloggers and offering them a commission to promote the campaign to their readers.
The commission, provisionally pitched in the $50-$100 range, would only be payable if a regular reader of the partner blog goes on to win the prize.
The idea itself is worthy of merit if only for its promotional benefits. I will be approaching a handful of respected social media bloggers about this and putting forward how it could work for the mutual benefit of all involved after I’ve resolved current issues with how the giveaways work.
Which leads nicely on to my next point…
Chris raised some very good points about the actual running of the last giveaway and offered some very good suggestions for dealing with voting fraud, including introducing a user registration system to minimize this and build a community around the contests.
He also suggested revising the time-bound element of the competition, making the number of votes entered per entry invisible until a later stage in the giveaway and requiring a minimum of votes before an entry is put forward for ‘audience selection’.
Most of Chris’s suggestions can be implemented fairly easily. The one suggesting I migrate the giveaway to a ‘two stage’ process bears repeating mostly because it is something I initally considered doing.
I initially thought of implementing the first iPhone giveaway in two stages: an ‘Entry Registration’ stage and a ‘Voting’ stage but abandoned the idea because I couldn’t work out a fair way to select the entries that went on to the Voting stage. Other than using a ‘random entry selection method’ I had no way of fairly pre-selecting entries that were put up for the public vote, or so I thought.
Chris’s suggestion of limiting the number of entries put forward to only those that receive a minumum number of votes, eg 10, neatly solves this.
Also, I now think it is a much better idea to offer people a deadline for entering the competition; making them aware that there is a brief window of time in which they can vote for entries and that there is further deadline after which votes will no longer be accepted.
The main benefit would be including another time-bound element to the entry stage and ensuring that the voting process is clearly separated from the entry stage, somthing that hasn’t been done so far.
This suggestion is quite easy to implement and will probably make an appearance during the next giveaway.
Modifiying the voting system to avoid displaying the number of votes entered isn’t too difficult either and this is also being considered.
Requiring ‘user registration before entering giveaway’ is quite simple to do in theory but may impact on whether future visitors can comment on the Real Fresh TV site without registering first.
I’m not averse to implementing a sign up requirement to enter gadget giveaways. However, I am concerned that doing so may force a requirement on people signing up first before leaving comments on the site.
I’ve never liked that idea and think that the majority of blogs and sites that force users to register before leaving comments are seriously hobbling themselves in terms of user engagement and interaction.
I’m not sure how easy it would be to retrofit a forum-like site which users can sign up to use onto realfresh.tv and wonder whether this would achieve the desired purpose seeing as the main draw of the last giveaway was that it was fairly easy to enter and was publicly viewable. I’m thinking hard about this and about other alternatives, however.
All in all, Chris and Imran have provided some really useful advice and I am looking into implementing much of what they have both suggested.
Will keep you posted…
So, what do you think?
Is enforcing user registration on future entrants into gadget giveaways a great idea?
Should votes be made invisible during most of the voting stage?
Would you be incentivised to vote if you weren’t told how many votes another entry had already received?
Would you like to take part in the next gadget giveaway? ;o)
Feedback most welcomed: I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Leave them below in the comments.
Image Credit: SeattleBook.com
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