JaysonAmbrose.com

At Filemobile, I manage the deployment of a number of UGC contests. People upload pictures, videos of things they like, explain themselves to a webcam or write a story in order to be considered for a prize.   It’s pretty straight forward until you have to pick a winner.  You could go with a random draw, but that’s no fun.  A classic voting scheme keeps people coming back, it provides a sense of competition and it produces a winner.

Contest hosts want to maximize the number of times a person can vote.  If you do not wish to have users log in to vote, they can vote repeatedly.  Although this can translate into page views, more and more UIs are moving to a stationary experience, where pages are more dynamic and don’t require page refreshes.  In order to prevent people from just hacking away at it, or writing scripts to vote automatically, we always require a captcha.  Why not just disable the vote button and set a session cookie?  This is unreliable because some users (like my paranoid dad) have cookies disabled for various reasons.  This means some people will never know that they are not meant to have unlimited votes.

There are a number of options for a voting process if you require the person to log in.  Our system is able to attribute votes to a logged-in user and hence regulate the frequency of voting ie. voting once per day, once per entry, etc… Daily voting generates more engaging page views, as users return repeatedly to complete the experience (however short!).

The main problem with having people log in to vote, is that they have to register. Registration pages are notoriously bouncy: people hit them and split.

This is a good primer on bounce and exit rates.

Long site registration forms can be the touch of death, but there are ways to minimize the bounciness with shorter forms and potentially, services like Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect,  and other single sign-on systems.

A two-step process would make it easier for a person to engage the site and as a result, lower the bounce rate on that page. The first step is a fast and simple, one-click register experience.  Once a person is logged in, he can vote and comment. He has a display name, an avatar, and all the fixins.  You can see this happening on this very blog using Facebook Connect.

If the person wishes to submit an entry to the contest, we need some more information.  Another form is presented to them, asking for name, address, etc… At this point, we would not require a captcha.

In the case where a 3rd party identity isn’t used, users must at least enter a password and confirm their email in order to participate.

Here are some ways people try to log fraudulent votes, and what to do about it:

1) A cheater can register repeatedly with phoney email addresses, and basically get unlimited votes. Without centralized identity, we can mitigate this by sending activation emails (yuk). The alternative is the contest host being prepared to manually search a vote log xls file and disqualify votes.

2) The cheating bastard could write a script to break your captcha and vote like crazy, automatically. A good programmer can use a combination of OCR software and other methods to read and crack a captcha. A better captcha makes this possible for only the more rare wily hacker. At that point, we can usually detect a crazy number of vote requests coming in via IP address. The user is denied access, and we can determine an estimated number of fraudulent votes.

3) The best fail safe is to simply reserve the right, in the rules, to use discretion in selecting a winner. If some jerk does manage to cheat, turf him.

I think voting is fun and effective for UGC contests.  If publishers and sponsors take the appropriate care, ensure a reasonable user experience, and allow discretion in the rules and regulations, voting can contribute greatly to the success of the project.

Online Advertising, Social Media contests, SSO, UGC, voting

Originally published October 14, 2009

EMarketer recently published research into interactive ROI, and concluded that the primary objectives of online marketers are to aquire and retain new customers.  Now it’s the fall and little has changed.

There are a number of projects, technologies and tactics that can be deployed to drive customer aquisition and retention, and I will be focusing on how publishers and brands can apply their online community platform for this purpose.

While the explicit definition of the terms ‘customer’, ‘acquired’ and ‘retained’ vary across organizations, I consider a new registered website user to be acquired, and a returning registered website participant to be retained.

Top interactive tactics include email and SEO

“For online marketers”, says David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst, “search is the most effective tactic for customer acquisition, and e-mail is the most effective for customer retention.”

Below is a breakdown of interactive marketing tactics.  Email is still the weapon of choice, and many of the other tactics are methods to add to the email database.

Niche communities should also be included on this list of tactics for several reasons.

First, they can provide value to existing and potential clients via support forums and knowledge exchange.

Second, these communities, if seeded, supported and nurtured by a community manager, can also reenforce the primary tactics of SEO for acquisition and email for retention.

Acquisition through community SEO

Eric Enge of Search Engine Land writes that “[t]here is the widely held belief in the SEO community that social media will be a major source of ranking signals for the search engines in the future.”

Using search engine optimized web applications that include blogs, commenting, forums and Q&A can build many more pages of relevant content. By enabling and encouraging sharing of that content, and setting up complimentary external social networking pages, you can greatly increase the number of quality, relevant inbound links.  Inbound linking is critical for SEO.

Site Suite has a good article on inbound linking, and Lee Odden describes the 5 Essential Steps to social media SEO success at Mashable.

Inside Facebook also provides an excellent guide to optimizing your actual Facebook fan page for search engines.

Community Managers should actively participate in the conversation, answering questions, and adding additional topical links.  They should quote and link industry blogs, and share community discussions in the comments of those blogs.

Focus on adding value for your audience, and you will grow your community.

Retention through community participation

Community platforms generate branded, direct communications from fellow community members.  Because these messages originate with others in the community, they tend to represent trusted advocacy sources and are less likely to be ignored.

Branded email can be generated by a number of activities:

• Digest content update (daily, weekly, etc…)
• Content matching specified interest has been posted
• Comment made on posted content
• Comment added to thread
• Content sent to fellow users
• Internal message waiting
• Registration welcome email
• Friend request or follow notification

Niche communities can also have any number of custom message triggers such as, “UserBob thinks you are funny” or “HandyHardware is interested in building your house”.

Each of these emails could be HTML emails with image branding, commercial calls to action or even banner ads, all in addition to the actual message linking back to the site.

MailerMailer recently published an Email Marketing Metrics Report (summarized by eMarketer.com).  The chapter How Personalization Affects Open and Click Rates states:

“Personalizing the message itself is associated with higher click rates. It is also correlated with higher open rates, though open rates are generally more influenced by the subject line, sender name, and subscribers’ relationship with the sender.”

Community-generated email perfectly provides these elements because the subject is timely and relevant to the user and the sender name can be the familiar community or a fellow member name.

If you have ever received an email from YouTube or Facebook stating that someone has commented on your content, you understand that opening it is irresistible.

UPDATE: EMarketer has just published research, “Top E-Mail Subject Lines Focus on ‘You’”.  It has ‘you/your’ showing up as the number one used word in marketing email subject lines, and ‘welcome’ coming in at #9.  This shows that the naturally personal email that is generated by a community to its members has high value to hosts and sponsors.

How many emails can be expected?

This depends on a wide range of factors including the number of members, nature of the community and level of engagement.

An example is the wildly successful CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada Anthem Challenge that was built and run by Filemobile on the Media Factory platform.  The website logged 90,000 registered users, 80,000 comments, and 35,000 content shares.

That is 205,000 branded messages generated by the community in 90 days (and this assumes only one person saw a social network share message!)

This was not a permanent community, but shows how many messages can be generated by a great campaign.

Community management is key

This point is worth restating.  Active community management is key to acquiring and retaining customers online.

• Engage users personally and improve the breadth and depth of the conversation
• Push discussion points and conclusions out to the social web to link people back

The content created by this cycle draws people in via search and keeps them coming back with personal email.

For some great insight on community management, read this series of articles by Dawn Foster at Web Worker Daily.

Online Advertising, Social Media community

Why should all publishers be looking at Facebook Connect?

There are a number of websites to find examples of the cool stuff you can do by implementing Facebook Connect (FBC) into your product. Razorfish’s Jesse Pickard posted an article for insidefacebook.com that outlined a number of interesting connected applications, AllFacebook.com has a list of the “top” Facebook Connect enabled sites, and The Facebook Developer wiki aspires to maintain an exhaustive list of connected sites.  If you are a PowerPoint freak, here is a slideshow created by social media marketing agency bigMETHOD, laying down the FBC basics.

The Facebook Connect homepage lays out the key benefits:

Enable your users to…

* Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
* Connect and find their friends who also use your site
* Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

Beyond that, they also claim:

“early results have shown that sites using Facebook Connect for login have seen as many as 2 out of 3 new registrations come via Facebook Connect, and those users have about 50% more engagement on sites.”

The enthusiasm for FBC and excitement about its potential is significant.

However, our clients (large media companies and brands) have been hesitant to adopt, or even experiment with FBC because of some early assumptions relating primarily to user data access.

I would like to try to address some of the questions I have been asked by these clients about Facebook Connect.

What user data do I get from Facebook?

What data can I keep?

What can I store in my CRM?

Will my community be limited to Facebook users?

Read more…

Media Technology, Online Advertising, Social Media CRM, Facebook API, Facebook Connect, Media Factory, publishing, social graph

I am doing some research into Facebook privacy, and stumbled upon this option in the Facebook privacy policy.

Users must explicitly opt out of being included in “Social Ads”. For those who are not familiar with this concept, picture your profile mug in a sidebar ad suggesting you heartily endorse this event or product.

In the Social Ads tab, change Appearance in Social Ads to No one.

I’m really very surprised about the lack of “Hey! WTF?” that this feature has gotten, especially after the Beacon debacle and other Facebook criticisms.

Online Advertising, Social Media Facebook, Krusty the Clown, privacy, social ads

In the process of media sales, there comes a time when the deal needs to be sweetened, and some sizzle is required to excite an otherwise conservative brand into aligning with a broadcast product. An example of a deal might be a TV spot against a weekly seasonal show that appeals to the brand’s target demographic. Value adds can include becoming the show sponsor or even having the dashing host heartily endorse your event or product.

When that just isn’t enough, it has become increasingly common to “throw in” a UGC contest. It provides further tie-in to the show via the existing web presence, is low-cost and if you know your Web 2.0 lingo, can get a client’s curiosity, interest and even excitement.

I think it is worth looking at some of the ways to value a UGC contest. This is a contest wherein you must upload content in order to be considered for a prize. Winners can be determined in a number of ways including public opinion, judging or random draw. There a number of issues to consider when defining rules, but this outside the scope of this post.

In order to measure the value of a contest, it is important to note what you can expect a contest to produce. Three key products of a UGC contest are demographic data, ad inventory and content. There is also the less quantifiable “positive brand affinity”, but if it can’t be easily measured, it’s little more than a sales talking point.

Demographic data

Who is engaging with my brand, where are they, and will they let me spam them? This is by far the most common brute-force method of generating a tangible, actionable product via a contest. It can also be one of the more obnoxious aspects of participating in a contest. It’s important that there is a balance between getting the data, and minimizing bounces (people immediately leaving the site).

The number of completed entries in your database is proportional to the value of the prize. With this in mind, you don’t need anything except an entry form and a prize information page. Think of it this way: you are offering them a chance to win something in exchange for their personal information. Users are savvy enough these days to know that their data is valuable, and a toaster is not enough to get them to give it up.

Don’t ask for information you don’t need. For example, if you aren’t sending a mailer, do you still need their street address? Most contest systems require the user to enter at least an email address. If want them to opt in to your newsletter, give them a good idea of what the newsletter contains. Make it even more worthwhile by offering coupons for your product via email.

Ad Inventory

For a publisher, the motivation for a self-sponsored contest is primarily to drive subscriptions for electronic newsletters or build awareness of another product (such as CTV’s fall launch campaign). That doesn’t mean you can’t add the page views and video pre-roll to your existing inventory.

Where this makes the most sense is with a sponsored contest. A fully branded microsite within the publisher’s brand site benefits from a built in audience. Any publisher will have excellent statistics describing their core audience demographic.

So how can a UGC contest be in a unique position to drive impressions through social media? If the contest has a voting aspect, users will be compelled to share their video with peers on their social networks via social bookmarking and posting tools on the contest site. Making Facebook Connect available to users allows some social activities (such as uploading and commenting) to automatically be broadcast to their friends. This places a tidy brand message in Facebook, and potentially brings users’ friends back to the contest site.

With some creativity and some Flash razzle-dazzle, you could build a branded widget that allows users to feature their content on any social network, with branding, and interaction built in. Remember how people use these networks, though: on Facebook, I put my content there to be consumed by my friends, not by me.

A good way to have people share content is to tie it with voting. Give people the tools to campaign for their entry.

Content

Although user-generated is generally synonymous with “bad”, it is the needles in the haystack, the diamonds in the rough and that tasty sausage in a sea of turds that can make the campaign memorable, if even only for that fleeting 15 minutes.

In order to get usable content, make the task simple and specific. Seed content with a variety of interpretations of the simple task. Nobody wants to be first, and most people will take a lead and go with it. Focus your concept on video, because it is more engaging and you can sell pre-roll against it.

It’s not uncommon for firms to spend tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousand of dollars on a 30 second TV spot. You only need to focus your strategy on gathering 1-2 minutes of footage to cut together a decent spot.

These are a few observations have come up with many of the UGC contests I have worked on. If you have some examples of good UGC contest concepts, let us know in the comments.

Media Technology, Online Advertising, Social Media advertising, content, contests, CPM, demographic, UGC, value proposition