In conjunction with AMP Agency and Brand Image Productions Votigo just launched a very cool singing contest for Simon Malls. The Simon dTour Singing Competition is a karaoke competition that takes place at 24 Simon Malls across the country coinciding with the Simon dTour Live concert tour. What excites me most about this particular contest is how effectively it bridges offline and online marketing.

Contestants enter the contest in a specially designed video booth created by Brand Image Productions at malls across the country. Those video entries are then automatically uploaded into the Votigo system and entrants are notified via email that their entry is live and given access to viral tools and widgets to promote their entries.  It’s a pretty slick system!

Normally any marketing or promotion done at a mall or a physical location would be limited to that time period and location. By adding an online, social component to this campaign Simon Malls can extend their campaign and increase their reach.

To find out if the competition is coming to a mall near you or to view and vote for the entries visit the Simon dTour Singing Competition Site.  

This is the second installment in a monthly series on Adotas from Votigo, CEO Mike La Rotonda.

Engagement, engagement, engagement! That’s where the world of online advertising is going. Why now? What’s changed? What makes engagement so important?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years you know that the Web has become exponentially more social. It’s no longer simply another broadcast medium like television and radio. It’s a communication platform where friends, family, classmates, co-workers, brands and customers can gather and communicate with each other in a more vibrant way than ever before. If not already, the Internet is rapidly becoming our primary means of communication. Major contributing factors leading to this point include:

• 80%+ of active Internet users now have a broadband connection, so more people are getting online with connections that can handle the quick transfer of large amounts of data;
• Digital cameras have proliferated, making photo-sharing nearly as common as a telephone call;
• Social features like commenting, “share this” and tagging have become integrated into mainstream sites;
• Social networking, blogging and user-generated contest sites have developed and grown at such a rate that they have changed our entire notion of what Web content can be.

All of these factors lead to an Internet population that spends a lot of time online and actively shares and communicates with friends (and for some even strangers). For advertisers, this creates a perfect storm for engagement.

For the purposes of this discussion, I define engagement as the communication between a brand and its customer, a brand and its potential customer or between two customers. Put simply, for engagement to happen, there must be some back and forth between folks. A comment on a photo or blog post, the sharing of a widget ad, the submission of a photo or video into a contest or the emailing of a coupon to a friend are all great examples of engagement in advertising.

Three recent examples that I thought were particularly effective were the Scion Speak campaign, the India Jones “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” Facebook promotion and H&R Block’s use of Twitter.

In the Scion campaign users could create their own custom “coat of arms” to reflect their personalities. These coats of arms could be made into window decals or even airbrushed onto creators’ Scions. For Scion, this campaign reinforced the unique customization options of the car (a key selling point) and allowed Scion to learn more about the varied personalities of their customers. On the flip side, customers were able to express their individuality. Customers became engaged with the brand to create something together.

For the recent release of the Indiana Jones movie, “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” Paramount Pictures unleashed a massive campaign on Facebook that included custom applications, photos, videos, fan connections, and more. What I liked best about the campaign was it released 250,000 free Indy-branded Fedora virtual gifts. The first 250,000 Facebook users could send one of these limited virtual gifts to a friend. The Fedora’s were gone within 12 hours, a record for Facebook. Although simple, this is a great example of an advertiser integrating effectively into an existing social network and engaging with users without being interruptive and loud.

The last example technically isn’t even advertising. There was no media buy, no creative and no agency involved. During the past tax, season representatives from H&R Block monitored activity on Twitter for tax-related questions and offered suggestions from their H&R Block profiles. What a terrific way to communicate with existing and potential customers! The key to the success of this initiative was that H&R Block was transparent and it offered advice and suggestions without hard selling its services.

These examples show that consumers are hungry for and receptive to innovative approaches that appeal to their social needs without disrupting their user experiences. As social media and social networks continue to evolve, engagement will become the backbone of online advertising. As marketers, we must also evolve in how we evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign. I foresee click through rates and impressions being replaced by engagement metrics, such as, “how many interactions did users have with my campaign?” or “how many times was my message virally spread?”

Why is this so important? If you can engage with your customers you have built the deepest possible bond with them. And that’s good business.

Wow! This was an awesome contest with some very creative and original entries. There were over 50 commercials created by users to promote the benefits of ethanol. The turnout was amazing as the entries garnered over 170,000 views! Thanks to all of you who entered and voted. You can see the winners here. And stay tuned to as the grand prize winning video will be aired as a commercial during an upcoming Indy Car race on national television.

LX.TV 1stLook LA, the weekly TV show featuring the best of what’s new in LA dining, nightlife, shopping, wellness & more every Saturday night at 7:30pm on KNBC, is searching for a new host - & it could be YOU!

Upload an audition video of not more than 2 minutes telling us why YOU should host LX.TV 1stLook LA.

The audience will vote for their favorites and finalists will be chosen by our panel of expert judges. If you’ve always thought, “I should host” that show, this is your chance.

Check out the video for more details or visit the contest site to enter or vote.

We here at Votigo are very excited to let you know that we recently launched our new Photo Album feature for our votigo.com/community/ site.  Now you can take all of those great photos you’ve been entering into contests and upload them into Albums and share them with your friends and family.  It’s completely free! 

Next time you log in to your profile you can click on the “Edit Photo Album” link in the “My Stuff” module to create your first album and start uploading photos right away.

We hope you enjoy this new feature and we plan to have some other very exciting feature announcements in the very near future.

Thanks!
The Votigo Team

We’re excited to announce that our CEO, Mike La Rotonda, has been selected to speak at Building Blocks 2008.

The session is going to be on Thursday, August 7th at 12:25pm
Track I: The Broadband and Social Media Platform-Social Networks & User Generated Media as a Technology Challenge: The Platform, the Content & the Network.

Building Blocks 2008 is the Premier Event for Transforming the Consumer Electronics, Entertainment, Social Media & Web Application Technologies & the Global Communications Network: TV, Cable, Telco, Consumer Electronics, Mobile, Broadband, Search, Games and the Digital Home.

Hope to see you there!

We just launched a very cool video contest for CUBA Beverage Company sponsored by Hermosa Shorts Film Festival. Budding filmmakers are invited to create a :30 (30 second) commercial featuring CUBA’s new ‘All Natural’ ‘Herbal Energy Juice’. Votes from the public will help to decide the winner.

Entrants have the opportunity to create a commercial which will be played at Hermosa Shorts Film Festival on August 7th-10th, 2008, and a winning chance to be aired on Network Television. All entries will be judged by some of the top creative directors working in the nation’s best Advertising Agencies.

Best of luck to all who enter!

With the rise of social media and social networking over the past few years, a major shift has occurred in online marketing. Consumers have greater control in marketing campaigns than ever before, and Web 2.0 tools let them take their voices to a new level.

At the same time, the brand effectiveness of traditional online advertising continues to diminish as consumers pay less and less attention to banner ads. This is where social media marketing, and specifically user-generated contests, can play an important role in your company’s overall marketing strategy.

First off, let’s define a user-generated contest. This is a contest or promotion sponsored by a brand or publisher where consumers submit photos, videos, text, audio or mashups under the guidelines of a sponsor in the hopes of winning some type of a prize. Prizes may range from something major, like the opportunity to star in a user-generated commercial airing on national TV, to something smaller and community-specific, such as free CDs from a particular band. Contest winners usually are determined by popular vote, a select panel of judges, or a combination of the two. And while contests themselves are not new marketing techniques, the evolution of social media coupled with high-bandwidth Internet connections has made it possible to turbo-charge these promotions and drive measurable results.

Before racing out to embark on a new interactive marketing campaign, however, there are some factors worth considering. The points I raise below will hopefully help you make informed decisions that will lead to exceeding your marketing goals:

Why User-generated Contests Work for Marketers:

• They Create a Dialogue with Consumers - Given the current online marketing landscape, it’s critical for savvy marketers to engage consumers in an open, two-way dialogue. By allowing consumers to contribute to marketing campaigns through photos, videos, text and user-voting, campaigns become personal. You can learn a lot about what resonates with your core consumers in a very short period of time based on what they share with you on the site, as well as what they send to friends and family as contest participants transform into viral evangelists for your brand.
• They Virally Spread Your Marketing Message - Assuming your contest site is built well and with the right viral tools at the disposal of users (see the tips below), user-generated contests can be a great way to virally spread your marketing message. What is unique about contests is that entrants have an incentive to promote themselves in order to get the votes needed to win the contest. And as we’re learning, in a digital world with a lot of noise, consumers have a higher level of trust and interest in content referred by their friends. This provides brands with an amazing way to expose their message to a new audience of engaged consumers.
• They Build Community Around Your Brand - Creating a contest microsite with built-in social networking features provides the landscape for your customers to talk about the promotion. What’s a contest microsite you might ask? It’s a standalone web site or sub-section of your existing brand web site that is dedicated to the contest and fully customized to your look and feel. In addition to contest rules, guidelines, user entry forms and voting it should utilize key social features allowing visitors to share and interact with the contest entries and each other. Depending on the theme of your contest, this interactive conversation could be focused on your product or brand specifically or something with which you want your brand associated with. For example, Columbia Sportswear ran an Adventure Travel Photo Contest with Votigo to help associate their brand with adventure travel. It wasn’t a clothing contest but it was very relevant to the brand.
• They Allow for Safe Participation in Social Media - As I often hear many brands are reluctant to turn over control of their marketing to consumers for fear of what the masses might say. Contests can provide a great way for brands to safely participate in social media. By clearly outlining rules and guidelines for entering contests and making smart use of prescreen and administrative tools, your brand can remain protected.
• They Build Your Customer Database - Because of the viral nature of entrants reaching out to friends and family to promote entries, contests can be a great way to build your customer database for future marketing efforts. It goes without saying, however, that users must opt-in to receive future marketing messages. We all learned from Beacon.

How to Use Contests to Meet your Marketing Objectives

In my own business experiences and in checking things out across the web I’ve noticed user-generated contests implemented to meet a wide array of marketing objectives. Some of the more common and/or efficient uses include:

• Launching a New Product - We’ve seen this a lot in the music industry as bands like “Simple Plan” have created photo or video contests to promote the release of a new album. In these campaigns users might submit photos representing songs on an album, develop posters for album artwork, or create music videos for a new single.
• Launching a New Feature - Contests can be used to promote a new feature on your site. This works best when it’s a user-generated feature like a blog, or the ability to upload photos or videos. To promote new features, you can create a contest with guidelines that encourage the best uses of the new feature.
• Reaching a New Customer Segment - One of my favorite examples is the “Real Men Eat Gardenbuger” Contest where Gardenburger used a combination photo and essay contest to extend its reach beyond its core customer base of women and vegetarians to attract male burger junkies. It was creative and fun, and yielded a diverse crop of entries.
• Acquiring Advertising Materials - Let users create your next TV commercial, banner ad or poster for you, showing off what appeals most to them about your product. You’ve seen this done successfully by Doritos and Taco Bell. Now, the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council (EPIC) is testing these waters as well, with new user-generated ads touting the benefits of ethanol slated to run during this year’s Indy 500.

Five Tips for Making Your Contest Successful

1. Clearly Define Your Objectives – This may seem obvious, but clearly understanding your objectives will help determine if a contest is right for you and more importantly, what type of contest you should run. If a high number of submissions is the goal, a photo contest is the way to go because of the low barrier to entry. If you’re looking for high-quality content to be used in future marketing efforts, a video commercial contest might be a better approach.

2. Choose the Right Partner – Occasionally when I talk with prospective clients, they say something like, “We have photo upload and ratings so we’re thinking about developing the contest in-house.” That’s like saying, “I’ve got a hammer and a screwdriver in the garage so I think I’ll put in the new transmission myself.” Working with experts can be the difference between a wildly successful campaign and a dud. A few things to consider when evaluating potential partners:

• Do they support photo, video, audio and text?
• Do they have the necessary administrative tools to protect my brand?
• Can they handle the legal aspects of a contest?
• Does their offering have the viral and social networking features built in to make my campaign successful?
• Can the look and feel of the contest site be customized?
• Do I own the user data for participants in the contest?
• Can they help me get distribution and entries into my contest?
• What sort of metrics do they provide so I can measure my success?
• Can they scale?
• Have they successfully run campaigns in the past?

This last question is an important one. There are far more “platforms” on the market than there are experts in social media marketing. Choosing the right partner means finding a company with great technology and great expertise in the space.

3. Promote It – This doesn’t have to be expensive but you need to promote your contest if you expect to get entries. Your own site, a newsletter or a note to your following on an existing social network like Facebook or MySpace are quick and easy places to start.

4. Make it Social – Lack of a social component is probably the single biggest mistake I see when marketers try to execute a user-generated contest. What does it mean to make it social? It means enabling visitors to use social media to interact and communicate with each other and your brand. It means ensuring that the right tools are in place for entrants to promote their entries. And your campaign is designed to be as user-friendly as possible to encourage this behavior. A good place to start is by implementing voting widgets and email tools for entrants to easily contact friends and family and promote their entries on their existing blogs and social network profiles. This can result in driving traffic back to the contest microsite. In addition, commenting, sharing, friend / favorite connections are all vital social networking functionality that will allow users to participate and become engaged in the promotion. Done correctly this will create a micro-community around your brand.

5. Use the Results – Often times when a contest is over the marketer fails to capitalize on the great photos, videos, essays, comments and relationships acquired during the campaign. Instead, create a photo or video gallery of the entries on your website or mix a few quotes into your advertising campaigns. Extend your contest site into a branded social network where users can continue to share and interact around your brand. Any of these will strengthen the relationship you’ve built with your customers and make your marketing more authentic.

The benefits of running online user-generated video and photo contests are clear. They create a positive consumer association with your brand by offering tangible rewards for participation. Actively involving consumers in the campaign creates a unique way to inform them of new products and services and make them advocates for your brand. When considering a user-generated contest for your next campaign remember that not all contests are created equal and careful planning can make a world of difference.

Come join us at our booth #6382 April 15-17, 2008 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. We’ll be demoing our products and showing off some very cool new products for Advertisers and Publishers.  To schedule a time to meet please contact us using our form.

We’re very excited with the turn out for the “When I’m Gone” Photo Contest by Simple Plan! It’s had 579 entries so far with one week left to go. Fans have really turned out for this one. The contest has over 130,000 views! Check out some of the photos in the contest widget below.