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.

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.

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?

What user data do I get from Facebook?

First, you need to understand that there is information you can call and information you can keep.

The information you can keep is the minimum required in order to properly call the data you need for your application.

The Facebook API includes calls to do just about anything you can imagine with a Facebook user. These things include:

• Events: Create, edit, list, delete, RSVP
• Photos and Videos: get, list and create albums, get list and upload photos, get and set tags
• Friends: list a users friends, get a list of friends using your app (more about friends below)
• Marketplace: get, add, categorize and modify listings
• Status: Get and set the user’s status (this is brand-spanking and kind of a big deal)
• Notes: Get, edit, delete and create notes (also new, gives you access to a user’s ‘blog’ on Facebook)
• Links: Get a user’s posted items, and allow a user to post directly from your app (also new, just a better way to do what you could already do)

What data can I keep?

This is the most frequent question I get. It stems from the perceived value of a registered user database and their demographic information. As stated above, you can only store the minimum amount of data that is required to identify a user to the API in order to call back data.

You can view the entire list of 12 items here, but the following are helpful for this post:

• uid (User ID)
• flid (friend list ID)
• proxied_email (Placeholder email addresses for your users)

In addition, you may store data explicitly defined as Exportable Facebook Properties, of which there are none.

It is important to note that any information that you request from Facebook can only be cached on your servers for up to 24 hours “for performance reasons”.  You can, of course, automatically request all the relevant data every 24 hours, so the effect is that you always have the data to display.  What’s the difference?  If I close my Facebook account, you also lose access to my data.

Makes sense to me.

One of the most important items for our clients is the user’s email address.  By default, you can send users email via proxied email.  Basically, you can send users email, but you don’t get to know what the email address is. Another downside of this process is that you are limited to sending 100 emails at a time.  One good thing is that you can send email that appears from your domain.

What about all the other juicy demographic tidbits that I want to store in my ultra-sophisticated CRM?

You can still ask for it, so you should.

Use the FBC register and login method to a) make it dead easy to register, b) get access to lots of cool FB features. If you are running a community or a contest, simply make the registration process two steps:

1. Click to connect with Facebook or create a new account on our site
2. Ask for additional information, including email address, mailing address, postal code, blood type, mother’s maiden name, pet’s name, phone number, mailing list opt-in preferences and demographic questions.

According to the Facebook Development Team (if that is indeed your real name), “If you have users manually enter email addresses, then you are permitted to store or export those as you see fit (provided that you display your Privacy Disclosure and Terms of Use on the page that you request that data).

Will my branded community be limited to Facebook users?

No, but you can grow your community and your database much more quickly and organically if you leverage the FBC Friend Linking feature.

In my opinion, this is the most interesting and significant function of Facebook Connect, especially with respect to the types of projects I work on with our clients.  These projects are user-generated content communities and contests primarily.  If the goal is to drive people to the site, then this is how to do it.

The feature includes two main functions:

• Users can join your community via FBC, and invite their voracious consumer friends to join via Facebook
• You can suggest current, non-Facebook connected members of your community to the new user so that they can be invited

Here is an excellent (if ugly) flow chart describing the friend linking feature by Cameron McGrane.

The connect acceptance sends the user back to your site, where you can run them through the full registration gauntlet.

The second function is particularly valuable to publishers who wish to add FBC features to their existing community.  As new users join, existing members can be prompted by their friends to link their Facebook accounts to their community accounts.

You may have a niche community where users will want to be friends with others on your site, but not necessarily be friends on Facebook.  Using a platform like Media Factory, Facebook users can potentially be friends with your non-Facebook users, and even Google Friend Connect users.

This all sounds a bit complicated…

This blog post concentrates on the “what” with respect to implementing Facebook Connect.  The “how” is a bit more complex, and is covered in both excruciating detail and baffling ambiguity at the Facebook wiki and forum.

To summarize:

• You should use Facebook Connect to grow your user base and increase engagement
• You get what you need from Facebook
• You get what you want from the user directly
• You can start with an existing database and are not limited to Facebook users

If you would like to take some of these features for a quick test drive, join this blog from the right sidebar, and publish a comment on this article to your news feed!

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.

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.

The value of users creating content is that your customers can be participants, and interact with your message instead of just being spectators. With a well-considered moderation plan, this user-generated content (UGC) can create brand credibility via public advocacy.

Case in point: CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada presents Bring Home the Stanley Cup.

Videos posted by hockey fans (particularly the finalists – currently posted from last year’s campaign) display passion for the game of hockey, the history of the NHL and Stanley Cup, family values and national unity. What better messages for Canada’s National broadcaster, a network for the people and of the people (via tax dollars), and the National Hockey League, striving to present family-friendly entertainment to an ever-fickle, globalized consumer?  The winning videos are even shown during a HNIC broadcast.

Although this is a great example of brand-focused, successful UGC campaign, most user-generated content is just plain bad.

Sure we can get people to submit videos and even get those videos on broadcast, but most of it is unpalatable.

What other roles can users fill within the communications value chain besides that of content producers?

User-Generated Programming (UGP)

This is in the form of having users create their own playlists of “engineered content”. Joe or Jane Sixpack can create their own channels of content, whether it be highlights of her favourite sports team, his favourite heavy metal playlist, or news as she wants it: world, business then entertainment. Users will stay longer, consume more content and even watch ads, if they are getting what they want AND its easy to get it.

User-Distributed Programming (UDP)

This is more than letting users share items with friends, or even embedding your video on their MySpace or Facebook page. Once a user creates his custom programming, he should be able to watch it anywhere. Take for instance, a popular talent show on television. The user selects an “engineered playlist”, such as all content, the 5 most popular clips, last night’s highlights, etc; and places it on his iGoogle. Every time that show airs, he get his fix HOW he wants and WHERE he wants it. He is such a big fan that he filters a playlist by a particular contestant (or team, etc…) and places it on his Facebook to show everyone that he is a fan. Wrap a call to action around it, and you’ve got a tethered, programmable, interactive, advocated, customizable, traffic-driving super-widget that is hit-trackable back the source! How, you ask?

Note the difference between iGoogle and Facebook/MySpace. On iGoogle, I consume MY content. On Facebook/MySpace YOU consume MY content. Well, sort of. Here is a great quote from Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, trying to impress a high school girl:

“I took a bunch of pictures, you can see them on my MySpace page along with my favourite songs and movies and things that other people have created that I use to express my individualism.”

I do feel for the artist that simply must accept that people, probably their fans, are stealing their music. I would probably be pissed off too.

Some people within and without the music business argue that giving away your music for free is great publicity. I couldn’t agree more, but the fact is, artists have no choice. There is a big difference between giving and taking.

So I say “give it”. Give all the studio recordings away. It’s over. Let it go.

Stop trying to sell your marketing.

It used to be that the labels would spend a bundle on a recording, and then use music videos and tours to sell the song on disc.

Now, the reality is that the studio recording is the marketing of the band experience. “Listen to our music, share our music, visit our website, get addicted, then pay!”

• For high-quality versions of awesome video set to the band’s music. Serj Tankian is drip-feeding his fans super-cool videos for all his songs on his required-viewing-for-labels website. Who’s his label, anyway? Granted, he isn’t charging for it, but he could (read on)…
• Concert appearances. You have to be good, very good these days to be a successful musician. Good. It’s about time we went back to the pre-autotune days (sort of).
• Merch
• Fan club. Join for $30/year and get the album and tons of free content. With a shipping and handling fee, send them the CD and a t-shirt. A fan in a t-shirt is more marketing.
• Keep the content coming. Moblog from the road, shoot some back-stage video, twitter… Upload to the site daily. Let people send concert pics right to the fan site.
• Pollute the social networks with your music. It’s the new radio, and it listener-programmed. Free advocacy.
• Use Filemobile to do all this stuff (shameless)

Artists need to create long-lasting relationships with each and every fan. Who’s responsibility is this part of the business of artist development? I would think that the future role of the big labels would be as digital marketing agencies. If that’s the case, why don’t artists get a regular digital marketing agency to do this for them? I might think its because the labels are savvy of the public’s consumption of music and have the necessary technical acumen to provide a comprehensive digital strategy.

The last line of The Age article really sent my head shaking:

“[Missy Higgins' manager] believes that due to the lack of resources within labels, it is incumbent upon artists and managers to work on marketing and promotion independently and be more directly accountable for turning people on to new music” (Murfett, 2008)

Maybe next year.

Full hypocrisy disclosure: I have downloaded my share of music.

I have also just bought the Protest the Hero album from iTunes which included the special edition instrumental version. It was not special enough, however to include lyrics, etc and Canada does not get the HQ downloads yet. Good record, though. I also bought my Killswitch tickets for May 10th with Poison the Well and The End. I was notified that they were on pre-sale to fan club members.

Although “Digital Tech Consulting expects online media stores to generate $7 billion in revenues by 2008, up from under $250 million in 2003”(IT Facts, 2004), the digitally distributed product requires additional marketing, promotion and technology spending and there is no evidence that digital sales will produce enough revenue to cover these new expenses. It has also been suggested that since “record companies are taking such a large cut from tracks sold online that many of the burgeoning online music stores will go out of business”(Andrew Orlowski and Charles Arthur, 2004). This is not sustainable and hence, not beneficial to any of the players in the long term. This will become more significant if major labels decide to raise the wholesale prices of songs that they claim “were originally set artificially low in a bid to stimulate demand.” (CNN Money, 2005)

The authors make subjective claims and provide no supporting bibliographical references therefore affecting the reliability of their conclusions. Two sentences in particular stand out: “Audiophiles claim there is loss of quality, but most people hear no difference in quality with digital music vs. a physical CD.” There is no qualitative evidence of audiophiles ‘claims’ and no definition of ‘quality’. Within the same paragraph, the authors claim that “recording or “ripping” digital music at 96kbs or higher provides similar audio quality as a physical CD”, again with no references to listening tests or that “similar quality” in this case, is lower quality. According to a PC World double-blind listening test, “the lowest rate that is really usable for MP3 is 128 kbps; any lower, and the quality begins to suffer significantly.” (Baguley, 2001)

The basis for much of this future model is the successful implementation of digital rights management (DRM). It remains to be seen how effective these encryption schemes will be. Technology experts believe that DRM for digital music, however applied, is fallible. One such expert believes that “given a functioning implementation of [DRM] technologies, we are confident we can defeat them”. (Felton et al, 2001) There is also always the possibility that anything that can be heard of seen can be rerecorded using a high quality signal path and digitized free of DRM with minimal loss of quality. The articles conclusions also lack practicality due to assumptions related to the creation of an IP Rights Enforcement Body. This fictitious group is described as “legal bodies [who] contribute to the value chain by enforcing IP rights and fighting piracy”. Whether the RIAA suing Napster creates value or not, is debatable.

“The Move to Artist-Led Online Music Distribution” which was chosen to be part of the Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference of System Sciences, fills a need within the music industry for a description of potential roles in the future for both music and technology players. The explanation uses specific, real-life examples to illustrate the application of abstract business proposals. However, the validity of the conclusion is put in question by the use of highly subjective interpretation of evidence and editorial. The arbitrary inclusion and exclusion of actors within the model, such as P2P as a viable marketing platform and the addition of a non-existent IP Rights Enforcement agency described as “legal bodies [who] contribute to the value chain by enforcing IP rights and fighting piracy”, suggests significant bias toward RIAA interests and hence, impacts the reliability of the conclusion.

Since 2006, we have seen the majors pulling out all the stops on the Internet.  They have married and divorced iTunes, ripped down and posted content to YouTube, and generally throwed everything at the kitchen sink to see what sticks.  The sticky question: “How do we get money from these free-loading deadbeats?”

One of the more recent endeavours is trying to sell DRM-free music.  I believe that this is a subtle way for the labels to admit that what sounded sensible a few years ago simply didn’t work and annoyed people with limited device interoperability.  It’s not that they have given up, but that they have realized that the recorded track is now a loss leader; most practically for the youth demographic most likely to steal their wares.  MP3s are now the perfect viral marketing vehicle for the product: the artist.

The use of overlay ads on YouTube could be the next big gold-mine for the massively valued Google (GOOG). Instead of that new plasma TV, perhaps you should buy 3 shares.

“Ads need to provide value to the user community,” said Eileen Naughton, Google’s director of media platforms. “We’ve proved over and over again on Google that ads are really useful information when users raise their hands and engage with them.” (AP)

Well said.