Running a contest can be a great way to get links and traffic in the short term but in the end can it actually hurt your company?
Let’s look at the recent Invesp debacle.
Invesp decided to do a contest for Internet Marketer of 2009. They picked 100 people who have a blog. Sounds smart right? That should get them a lot of links and traffic! Well… lets see what happened.
I was talking with John Chow about how silly I thought the contest was and how we should endorse an underdog to win. He suggested we tell everyone to vote for ZK. I thought it was a great idea.
Within the next couple days ZK jumped out to a massive commanding lead.
Then the powers that be at Invesp nuked all of ZK’s votes claiming they were all from a couple IP addresses.
So here is the thing. Either way Invesp looks incompetent.
They either completely rigged their contest OR they are so incompetent that they cant do a voting script that discounts the same IP address.
Another issue I see is that If 100 people are nominated for an award then that means you have to tell 99 people that they are losers. Now I don’t know about you but I do not like to lose at anything.
To be fair to Invesp I know nothing about them or what they do. They could be the greatest PPC management & SEO company in the world.
But at viral marketing with contests they clearly cost themselves a lot of reputation… and for what?
So be careful with your contests. If you are going to do them… then do them right!
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2416 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
Images provided by ShutterStock
How A $1295 Gambling Debt Turned Me Into An Online Marketer 
Men (And Women) Of Honor – In An Industry That Does Not Have Much 
Shawn Hogan Speaks Out On FBI Charges 
{ 66 comments… read them below or add one }
Basically you’re saying screwing up a contest will hurt your company, not running one. This one contest was poorly run- I think the title and hype is unneeded
That kinda seems a bad thing of them, to do so. I think before starting a contest, we should think a lot on it, to make it successful.
I don’t know if running a contest would hurt my company or not, but it is going to be very profitable to my blog, currently I don’t have enough money and not a single sponsor, but when I do, I’ll do it big
Thanks
http://www.dumblittleblogger.blogspot.com/
Well if you run a contest and screw up, dont you think it WILL hurt your company? It will be worth it if you run one straight and legit. Now what invesp did was (in my opinion and from what i have seen and heard), they were not happy about ZK getting tons of votes while they expected someone more popular to win. Seems like they didnt play fair and this can really hurt their rep. Running a contest is not that difficult and you always do not need a sponsor. You can start by giving freebies which you can afford
; work hard and in the long run you will find sponsors! Cheers
I don’t think so but before starting contest we should create proper graph otherwise it will give bad result.
I think running a contest is indeed a great way to get people know you, but the system is abused then the contest runner should do something to prevent it.
Well at least to make it run in the way we want.
I little feel bad for these guys, they made this mistake ( I agree it’s a mistake ) and now they have ” Can’t Trust Invesp PPC & Conversion Guys ” on the first page of Google. Not to mention the viral effect of your posts.
Wired.com now has similar competition, guess who’s leading … or better why? Viewers of some Youtube celebrity voted for random person he chosed.
John Chow has little to say about business ethnics, at least for me, his TTZ media still owns me a payment for over 1 year, no proper response via email. Yeeah, he’s on my shit list .. but he doesn’t care, he’s eeeevil *roll*
I don’t think they ruined there rep that bad, I still haven’t personally heard of them. But either way I still wouldn’t use them
I disagree. You tried to manipulate the poll and they rightly fixed it.
Now, once again, you’re trying to use your blog as a weapon in yet another useless petty war because you didn’t get what you wanted. Awwnnn.
lol that’s a big oops..
Shoe, thanks for the little heads up. I’m currently ready to conduct a very small contest and I’ve been preparing it for about a month now. Hopefully things go well. Wish me luck!
I don’t know on this one.
If they do plan on selling viral marketing it depends on who they viral marketing too. They can show all the links and an analytics report or whatever to show how popular it was. Leaving out all the bad stuff. Most clients will never look.
However you are right that you need to think through all the possibilities of your viral project going viral and be ok with the results of it.
And yes don’t scrub votes after you post. Ask any smart affiliate network that. You scrub before you tell them they made money.
Before starting a contest, I think we need to test the script and see if it works correctly according to the conditions. Discount the same IP address Should be the first action of any voting Script if we really want to make a good contest.
Maybe they were hoping to gain exposure = done
Is DK the internet marketer of the year? Most likely not…so why endorse him?
I guess in this industry you have to do something like that, and others have to be immature to gain exposure for themselves. It is not a problem with the contest, it is a branding problem and an industry problem.
I still don’t understand why anyone would knowingly nuke someone’s contest to prove that the contest was not fool-proof.
You have ZK and DK mixed up.
U guys are giving ideas that will help beginners like me in promoting my blog.
Ok spammer thanks.
So if I automate a process to reply to a comment with a “Looks like you’re a spammer”, would you be able to verify that my comment is also spam?
I think a little logic goes for many things not just starting a contest. Thanks shoe for the post.
When I read your first post to support ZK I smell something nasty. Why guy like you who already have big name support ZK without giving any good reason like is it ZK worth enough so your reader have to support him???
If ZK did win on this contest is like you and John Chow say ZK worth to be winner in stupid contest or ZK worth to compete on some stupid contest only.
Don`t do that again Shoe, just reveal the stupid contest with your own analysis and opinion. Don`t use other people to test the stupid contest.
A little bit of hype is needed but if you create a lot of buzz and fail to deliver the expectations of your audience, then, it will definitely hurt your company (or your site).
I’ve made this mistake once with a blog of mine too.
I’ve run a couple of Twitter contests for my blog and they’ve been pretty successful. Mind you, I don’t have an 80K+ following, but I kept it simple and was able to pick up a lot of new followers and some decent backlinks in the process. I can see how contest could easily get out of hand though.
I also feel with contests that you’re trying to buy an audience. With Twitter contests, the people have to follow you to enter, but chances are they don’t give a crap about your blog, and will either unfollow or pay no mind to anything you tweet in the future. I’m not sure how to run a contest and make it organic and not like you’re paying people off people to visit your site.
Even if you are paying them off to visit the site, you usually have to pay someone to get visitors in some form(time for SEO, pay google for adwords, etc.) anyway. So yeah it can decrease the value of your average visitor but the hope is that you also get some extra visitors in the process.
Another thing that can help is if the contest prize is related to the site. So you give away something that relates to your site and that only those targeted visitors would like anyway. Example a fashion site could give away free shoes to a twitter follower.. the only people who choose to follow them probably would be following them anyway.
If yo are about to promote your website contest might help but make sure you run the contest right.
Shoemoney.com ranks #3 in Google for “invesp”
how the hell do you do that… haha
He blogs real good and his SEO is tight!
Shoemoney.com is an authority blog on Google.
Agreed sounds like they just pissed a lot of people off running this contest of theirs.
Clearly they were miffed that you and John’s plan messed up their contest.
I’m sure they noticed that ZK had such a massive lead that there was no way anyone else would be competitive.
Once everyone realized there was no way they would be able to catch up, the contest loses it’s momentum. People assume there’s no way they can win…essentially killing the buzz builder they wanted.
I did not pay attention while they had the contest up, but were users able to actually see how many votes each person had?
I think you could eliminate the issue by just making that data hidden. Just show a ranker of nominees. You dont need to show whether he’s 20,000 votes in the lead or 2 votes in the lead. That way it at least seems competitive regardless of what’s happening on the backend.
Or they could have had a basic registration with email verification to vote. The end product would have been a nice email list too.
Excellent analysis, not showing the number of votes would have fixed everything.
Could not agree more, I have lost complete faith in them. Whats with the rigging part :@
One idiot once did a `rank for my name contest` with pretty bad rules and results.
Looks like you recovered well from it well though Shoemoney.
This contest surely did hurt their company!
-Kristina
All publicity is good publicity. You just have to use the right PR to spin it.
Regardless of who is at fault, they got a couple of moderatly known marketers to promote their contest, even if it was for the wrong intentions.
Just remember comes around, goes around.
This contest has indeed landed Invesp into a dark hole, I think this is the end of their contests or the end of me being nominated for any of their future contests
This example is a great case study on the power of blogging and the trust that Shoe and John have built over the years with their readers.
Invesp never had any rules or regulations on their site for the content. They never mentioned anywhere that duplicate IPs would be deleted or anything similar, unless I missed reading the rules nor was there a system on their contest page to prevent the duplication
The contest ended on 13 th December and they mentioned that the results would be declared after 10 days ..its been 17 days since the contest ended and they still have the same page up …
I want to thank Shoe and John once again for endorsing me for the contest. I am very humbled by your gesture. God Bless.
Happy New Year and best wishes.
You’re actually right.. Most people really think that by running a contest, you don’t lose anything and gain everything but there’s really some consequences on running one.
For example, when I first ran a contest and an unknown guy won the contest some of my audience accused me that it’s planned by me. That that unknown guy is just me pretending to be a different person.. yea, it really sucks when a contest actually caus harm to your company or website..
I am sure with that you have learned your lesson and now will be able to handle it nicely.
This actually happened to me once. I was nominated for a specific subject, so I told all of the people at my office and did the whole blast to the public.
I received an email from the guy (I’m not going to call him out) saying basically I was an asshole and spamming his system (I only had a little over 100 votes but I was winning).
I tried to explain to him that if I were spamming his system I would have done some IP spoofing and I would have had 1000s of votes but he wouldn’t listen. It finally came down to where I said, if you don’t believe me just take me out of the contest. He took me out but only at the end and added that I asked to be removed.
I actually thought this was pretty lame and I was extremely pissed for about a day before I decided to just let it go. Let’s just say I thought about everything from confronting him to DOS attack on his server
I do read his blog and follow him on social sites and I actually think he’s a pretty cool guy, just a bad experience.
I wish everybody a very HAPPY and PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR 2010
I think if you do the contest right then it can gain you a significant following and a good amount of good quality links. However, the caveat to this, as shown in the terrible Invesp debacle, is that if you screw up big, then you have to work twice as hard to gain 3/4 of what you once had. A contest isn’t worth it unless you can do it right the first time, and if you decide to do a contest of the top 100 Internet Marketers, then at least put the effort into a plan that makes it worthy of Internet Marketers’ attention. Calling it a top 100 Internet Marketers list composed of random blogs and popular names is a good idea, but at least create some competent metrics that anyone can follow that doesn’t make it obvious that the contest is rigged for the most popular person to win.
Well, I found this website on the “top 100 internet marketers” so that’s gotta be good for everyone involved. I don’t care who wins or loses, I think that a company that gets into top 100 of anything is awesome. So congrats to shoemaker. cheers and happy new year. Dawn McCooey
You hit the nail on the head with this statement:
“If 100 people are nominated for an award then that means you have to tell 99 people that they are losers”
That’s more of a strategic error, but they also did not handle the fallout from criticism.
I must say that they have handled all these things very poorly without any management, without any prior preparation.
When they failed they started allegation. I am asking them why there was loop holes in your end.
Hi Shoemoney, I’m your fans.
Happy new year 2010 !!
You say that if 1 out 100 people win then 99 people lose. However that personally doesn’t bother me because it’s easy to just say to yourself “Well there were so many people I wasn’t likely to win anyway”.
It would bother me more if only a couple of people entered and I didn’t win. Otherwise it’s easy to shrug it off.
I am glad to see that you cleared Invesp of the whole bad PPC thing. Yes I do agree with you about running the contest and yes it can be risky but we should not judge these people and their skills based on a contest that they ran. I am very happy that you clarified that.
BTW Happy New Year Shoe.
Happy new year 2010 shoe money !!
Happy New Year ShoeMoney and everybody! How about running a contest where 99 out of
100 are winners. And the loser gets . . .
something greater than the prize of the 99 winners.
I bet that’ll get some jumps on the Traffic!
Every body wins! Success, Success, Success!
.
I believe that contests are a tricky business especially when running one which involves voting for someone because there will be all sorts of allegations. Invesp messed up pretty bad though allowing people to vote over and over with same IP.
I’m wondering how did they know that most of ZKs votes were from the same IP? They either got suspicious at the number of votes he had because they didn’t think he would be so popular so they did a manual check in the database or they had a script they they auto ran to delete multiple IP votes so if they had time to do that they could have built in IP detection in the first place.
great blog, happy new year wishes!
If you’re competent and have your i’s dotted and t’s crossed before you launch, running a contest shouldn’t hurt you. If you’re incompetent however……watch out….
thanks for this – happy holidays
We face this challenge with corporate clients to sponsor a contest on our Zug.com comedy community. We hire moderators to control the user generated submissions and screen the content produced. But you have to be a brand that’s willing to have a little fun with your product or service to find a viral edge to create some buzz with the approved theme of the contest that we create.
Contests can be good if they are created correctly and run with competence. This one was obviously created for a specific person to win and when this didn’t look like it was going to happen, they changed the rules. Pathetic I would say.
Thanks for the great posting – and happy new year to you all
In all cases this can hurt your company dangerously. Running to get better positions, might situate you and your company is negative way
I respect that they didn’t let you and chow rig their contest. Happy New Year.
one thing ur blogs are giving invesp guys some mileage.. though negative.. they will take it..
and as the matter of conducting contest goes.. your definitely right about it..
To truly have a well run contest you need to provide for more than just the winner and second place winner. If not you won’t get lower level participants to join and sites/people with a large member basis will automatically win. How do you do this? Offer prizes for participants that reach a certain amount of votes and randomly drawn prizes for participants. If all participants truly have a chance to win something you’ll have much more participation and ultimately more traffic to your site. In my opinion that’s the way to run a contest. Make it fun and let everyone have a chance to win something.
Like all marketing activities, contests need careful planning.
Simon
http://www.bestbusinessangels.com/
Check the results of the invesp contest http://www.invesp.net/
…they say the voting was not an important factor….if you check the voting page
http://www.invesp.com/2009/top-100-marketers-of-2009.html
my votes are at 3.5 % ( thanks to shoe and john ) ..but I don’t feature in the top 100
The 100 in the voting process are different from the 100 in the top marketers list, if you have a voting system for 100 then you ensure that its the same 100 that are going be the top 100 …
Unless the top 100 are already selected ( by whatever method ) , then why have any voting and have names of other in the voting
You can’t overemphasize the importance of planning in these projects.
I was searching for a portable generator to carry along with my rv got a great one from portablegenerators4less.com
All marketing activity carries risk but it can minimised by careful planning.
Good planning and consulting professionals is the key to minimising your risk and maixmising your contest returns.