4 Key Mistakes Of A Social Media Competition

My last post was about ” The 7 Secrets to Ford’s Social Media Marketing Success” which was primarily about the success of the Ford Fiesta Project’s social media competition. What impressed me about the Ford Fiseta Project social Media Marketing campaign was the targeting and involvement of the 100  “Socially Vibrant” participants. This enabled the  competition using social media to be amplified and awareness increased through the online social media hyperactivity of the participants throughout the entire campaign.

Today I wanted to write a post about other case studies on successful social media competitions.. (that will now be my next post).. because on coming across the “Best Bottom In The World Contest”, I discovered a case study revealing  an example of how not to run a social media campaign by “not” including social media in the marketing mix in an effective optimized manner.

Contest: Best Bottom In The World

Company: American Apparel

1. They spent a lot of money on Mass Media and reached out to large publications instead, to post the news and promote their competition. – Expensive! (Ford didn’t spend one dollar on a traditional marketing until just prior to the launch of the US Fiesta production model).

These large publications include:

1. Style List
2. The Frisky
3. New York Fashion

2. They didn’t reach out to personal fashion bloggers niche such as Fashion Toast.

She is a hugely trafficked fashion blog who advertises on her sidebar for American Apparel.  Furthermore, she is well connected to the other fashion bloggers online, so there is a strong way to leverage her sponsorship to influence others to participate.

3. Facebook Not Optimized For The Competition

Theyshould have created a Facebook Application that allows fan to upload their image directly to the FB page.  Fans can then vote through the Facebook Fan Page and tell their community who they voted for.

Their expensive mass media competition is not anywhere to be found on the Facebook page, which by the way has 193,000 Fans, who are not offered an easy way to spread the competition virally via Face book with its 400 Million members.

4. Minimal Use Of Twitter

They made an announcement on Twitter, but they could have made it so much more engaging, such as a  Twit Pic Submission. Twitter users should be able to upload an image directly from Twit pic to the AA main site.  In this way, they could generate more buzz from the Twitter community and allow for an easier submission process.

To their credit American Apparels use of YouTube seems to be more  effective for the competition with Channel Views of 33,607 and total Upload Views of 365,982

So how would you run a Social Media competition for your company?