Experiential and luxury prizes

While a huge cash prize can bring in a tonne of submissions, you are also going to attract pros and cheaters.  Professional contesters scour the net for fast, easy contests and know every trick in the book to stuff the ballet box.  A large cash prize is sufficient motivation for a good developer to build software to exploit your user-friendly entry process.

Branded contests and communities should be more interested in attracting their core fans and getting them excited and involved.  Music fans will sing into their webcam, remix a video or create an original tour poster if it gives them a chance to meet their favourite band, get the limited edition box set or win an autographed guitar.

Make it Easy

Don’t make me think, don’t make me work.  If at all possible, don’t even make me get up: let me say / sing / yell something into my webcam.  Got a digital camera?  Capture the everyday everyman: “Show us your backyard and win a patio set” or “Show us why you need a new car”.

Because most users need an imagination kick-start, one of the most critical elements for a successful campaign is seeded content.  Nothing causes a high page bounce rate like the message, “Be the first to enter!”

Reach out to your internal network and get them to submit a video or photo.

When all else fails, have people upload a picture of their pet!  Canadian Living has blown the doors off the UGC contest standard with two massively successful editions of Most Lovable Pet 2009 and this years 2010 campaign.

Attractive Association

I don’t want to be perceived as evil or a sell-out for participating.  For example, “Show us how you club, and win a trip to Baby Seal Island” or “Tell us why you love Telecom Customer Service” are bad ideas and should be avoided.

Facebook Connect

When I upload my video, a link is automatically posted to my Facebook stream.  When someone comments or votes, they can instantly tell all their friends.  We have seen huge referral numbers from Facebook on our UGC campaigns.  Campbell’s Chunky Most Valuable Coach in particular is a great example of getting the most out of Facebook Connect.

Multimedia Commenting

Text comments are great, but enabling comment attachments and webcam responses, you can increase the number of photos and videos on your site.  Start a discussion or set a community assignment that facilitates the use of photos and videos.  For example, a men’s forum might have a thread for the best hair style, while women might enjoy exchanging pictures of their gnarliest scars.

Community Management

As I’ve written before, community management is key.  These days, growing an online community organically can be challenging if not impossible.  Community management is the growth hormone and industrial pesticide of niche networks and brand-centric discussions.

Your niche community might be a resource for customers, such as a support forum or advice column.  Depending on the technographics of your target audience, your manager(s) may be the life of the party, getting people excited, loosening them up and letting them participate in a way that keeps them feeling comfortable.  The authors of Groundswell, a Forrester Research joint, provide the Consumer Technographic Profile Tool for figuring out what makes your audience tick.

Quality user-generated content, and multimedia in particular is not something that comes easy.  Applying some of these tips to your next campaign, contest or community discussion will help keep things fresh and unique.

Direct Referrers in Google Analytics

A direct referrer is usually meant to indicate that your website URL was pasted or typed directly into a browser address bar.  While this is a useful stat, the growth of Twitter has started to skew this data.

Many links that are clicked via desktop applications such as Tweetdeck and Mail, and browser plugins like TwitterFox show up as direct referrers in Google Analytics.

WebTrends Outsider has a good list of reasons for “Direct Traffic” in referrer reports.

Manually Adding Analytics Data to Link

You can manually add query strings to your URL that will provide referrer data to the Google Analytics code in a website page.

For example, when I broadcast a message on Twitter stating that I have a new blog post, I use the following:

New Blog Post: Vanity Analytics http://www.jambrose.ca/vanity-analytics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=blog RT SVP

This pretty ugly, so I shorten the URL with bit.ly:

New Blog Post: Vanity Analytics http://bit.ly/QuWlH RT SVP

When someone clicks that link, the following is recorded in Google Analytics:

Creating a Vanalytics URL

Now that you have control over how your referrers are recorded in your Google Analytics, why not spam someone elses?

For example, when I retweet a great Twitter post, I use the following:

RT @TheOnion New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time http://www.theonion.com/content/video/new_live_poll_allows_pundits_to?utm_source=@jaysonambrose&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=retweet Super funny!

Shortened (check out the video, too):

RT @TheOnion New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time http://bit.ly/16kLMW Super funny!

This makes my name appear in Google Analyics for The Onion!

Since The Onion already adds their own query strings to their tweets, I would leave it as a matter of ettiquette.

But if you are just sharing a link with your Twitter followers, why not take some credit for spreading the word?

Of course, there is good chance no one will see your tag on a large website’s analytics, but it might get noticed on a bloggers list.

I admit this is a goofy idea, but I thought it would be fun to coin Vanalytics and Spamalytics!

Can you think of some funny, smart or easter-egg-style Spamalytics?

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.

Honestly though, a great viral marketing campaign!

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.

Besides being pretty impressed with the interface and user experience, I get 25GB of free storage.

Check it out here.

I think that is cool.  Check out the message targeting I have now:

I can also set up some ads in a few clicks…

Even my favourite: social ads!

Stop using the Internet. It is just simply not for you.  Don’t use email anymore, because any message you send is stored on your ISP’s server, the destination server, probably on a backup or two in some data center somewhere.  The message itself is readable by sinister criminals looking to steal your identity.  If you created a profile on Facebook with all your personal details, and pictures of your dog, and whatever, then your expectation of privacy is non-existent.

For those of you that are concerned that Evil Facebook is claiming to own your pictures of your dog, and your deep, dark secret status updates:

Get over yourself. Your pictures and videos are worthless, and even if Facebook had claimed sole ownership of it (which they never did), what do you think they will do with it?  Sell t-shirts with your picture on it, or sell DVDs of your birthday party, and not cut you in for at least a few points on the back end?  Understand what is Facebook’s potential business model: your participatory information.  That is, they want to know what you are doing, where you are doing it and when you are doing it.  This is the raison d’etre for Facebook Connect.  They just announced that they will sell crowd-sourced market research data to corporations.  They need you to participate.  For this to work, certain information needs to stick around, and they want to keep it.  This explicitly does not include anything you marked “private”.  If you have marked stuff private, see my first point.

If you don’t like it, close your account. Facebook is a FREE service that allows you communicate with your friends, share pictures and videos, and all kinds of other fun and useful stuff.  Close your account and go to MySpace or Linked In (who’s terms read like a non-exclusive content licensing deal, potentially in perpetuity).  Don’t enter ANY user-generated content site, who will universally claim the sole ownership of your goofy video, and WILL re-purpose it in every conceivable way.

I like Facebook.  I don’t think they are evil.  I think they have a cool product, and they can’t seem to make any money.  If I can passively provide data to help them make a buck, then all the power to them.

Just don’t represent me to my friends that I endorse schlock.

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.