There is plenty of evidence to suggest that contests mix pretty well with brand marketing. And it is common to include public voting in contests to encourage social sharing. That’s the good news. The bad news is that some humans are wired to take short cuts, to seek an edge, or in other words, to cheat. When you create a competition between two people or two million people, it makes no difference, you need to be vigilant. In fact with any competition you, as the sponsor, need to play the role of referee.
Even the best of referees can’t see everything. So why then would you want to make things harder on yourself? By including a leaderboard you have handed potential cheaters a key to a variety of voting schemes. When honest entrant experiences oddities in vote counts on a leaderboard I call it getting Vote F***ed. As in “my friends and family had me in the lead but then I got Vote F***ed!”
Steady everyone.
I am, of course, referring to getting Vote “Farmed.” Consumers may use other expletives as well, and they would be right to do so, because Vote Farming takes place when total strangers offer reciprocal voting of each other’s contest entries through contest exchange sites. They even have their own vernacular like “RTF” which means return the favor. They’re not honest, but they sure are devilishly clever. Everyone loses but them. Take a read on the nightmare that took place with a Coke contest in the link above.
OK so back to your contest; not 10 minutes after the winner’s page goes up, the buzz starts, crying foul. Posts are flying all over Facebook alleging tampering. So what do you do to restore integrity? Unfortunately once this gets to this level your choices are between bad and worse. Bad, at least economically, is to just quietly award a second prize if the prize isn’t too pricey. You can chalk it up to learning if that makes you feel better. Worse is to stand your ground and tempt a social media nightmare.
In the planning stage, what should you do differently? Work with an experienced provider of social media promotions like us. We will create a plan to ensure you do not suffer a situation like the one with Coke. We have found no positive benefit to ever include a leader board. Even without the knowledge of their rankings and left on their own, finalists will still engage their own network anyway, in all forms of social media they are involved in, in an attempt to spread the word “legally” about the contest, their entry and the prize they may receive for that opportunity to win.
Marden-Kane has developed hundreds of successful consumer and trade contests that meet their stated engagement objectives without including a leader board. Keep integrity at the core and you can, avoid losing sleep playing referee. When looking for assistance to develop a well planned contest without any fires to put out, please reach out to us at expert@mardenkane.com.
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