How to Run an Online Voting Competition

So, you’ve read about what happens When Voting Competitions Go Wrong, and you still want to run one? Here’s some advice to ensure your competition runs as smoothly as possible – although don’t say I didn’t warn you if it all goes pear shaped! My main advice would be NOT to make it a competition with one big prize for the most popular entry. Consider giving away more, smaller value prizes to the runners-up, to your favourite entry, or even to randomly picked entrants and voters.

Facebook rules
If you’re running the voting competition on Facebook, you should use an external App with its own tab on your fanpage. Asking entrants to upload content to the wall violates Facebook promotion policy – you can ask fans to email their entries to you, which you should then publish within your ‘App’. Many promoters will collate the entries in a wall post or photo album for people to ‘Like’, but this is still against Facebook policy. It also violates Facebook terms to announce the winners in a post on your wall, or even by sending a Facebook message – you should notify them via email.

As these policies aren’t enforced, you’ll see that many promotions don’t adhere to the guidelines – but it’s best that you do in case anything goes wrong. As of 1 March 2011, the CAP Code (The UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing) will apply to digital advertising and promotions on Facebook, so you should ‘ensure that all advertising is legal, decent, honest and truthful’, or you’ll find yourself named and shamed – like The Sun did – on the ASA website.

Most ‘Likes’

Awarding a prize to the entry with the most ‘Likes’ isn’t a great idea as it can’t be properly regulated – and on 11 May 2011, Facebook  introduced a guideline stating ‘You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion’. There is no way of ending the competition at a certain time, and you will need to be logged on to check the Like count of every competing entry at the exact closing time of the competition. It’s also confusing – you could have entrants posting on your Wall, and also as comments on your competition post(s), so you will have to look through all these. PayPal had to give out two prizes in a competition last year because they didn’t explain how to enter it properly and two different people thought they had won. The Outdoors Show and WeeRide both made a mistake counting the Likes and announced an incorrect winner for a bike and child’s bike seat – doing this will make you look very unprofessional.

Recently Sweaty Betty made an error counting the Likes in their promotion and announced the £250 voucher winner to be an entry with 18 Likes. An entrant pointed out in a Wall post that she had 397 Likes for her entry – Sweaty Betty realised their error, and not only did they give out a prize to the rightful winner, they also gave a prize to my entry, because my 50 Likes exceeded the 18 of their incorrect winner (who they had to give a prize to, as they’d already publicly announced her as the winner!). So the promotion cost them £500 more than it should have done, and made them look unprofessional too.

If you still want to keep the ‘Like’ element, why not make it a requirement that only entrants with a minimum of 50 ‘Likes’ on their entry will go into a random draw or be judged for the prize? That way you’ll get lots of new fans but without the stress for the contestant!

Note: Facebook updates in September 2011 mean that a comment or photo can be ‘Liked’ without a member needing to Like the fan page first – this essentially means that running a ‘Most Likes Wins’ competition is pointless, as fans are no longer forced to Like the page in order to vote.

Brand-related content
Consider running a competition that’s related to your brand: ask your fans to make a video, take a photo, or write a story. Ask them to include your product in the photo or video – this ensures they’re creating something specifically for your competition rather than just digging out old photos or using Googled imagery to enter. There are people out there with 4000 Facebook friends, who know they can win a voting competition by submitting any old nonsense, so make it harder for them to take part by demanding creativity and thought. If you’re asking people to take the time to do this, think carefully about also asking them to go out and canvas for votes – surely their efforts should be rewarded with a fair judging process?

Judge the entries
Choose a shortlist – ideally using an independent judge – of 10 or 20 entries which can then be put to a public vote, ensuring you will have a good quality winning entry that you’re happy with. You could offer a small runner-up prize to all those who made the shortlist. You will get more traffic to your page if you reverse this method and judge from the 10 or 20 most popular entries – but in this case, the most popular entry is rarely judged the best and sometimes that disgruntled entrant will complain publicly on your Facebook wall. If the final winner is chosen by a judge, post up details of why it was chosen.

Another way of introducing judging is to run it alongside the voting element. Rather than giving away one high value prize to the most voted entry, why not give a prize to the most popular entry, and a second prize to the one you judge as the best. The current Wicked Pig competition has three monthly £500 value prizes for the most popular entries, but the main £5000 prize will be judged from every single entry – this ensures they get the hits on their website for 3 months from voters, but more importantly that they get to choose a worthy winner!

Prizes: Quantity over quality
Don’t have just one high-value prize like a car or £5,000 cash. Imagine how you would feel if you spent 4 weeks begging people daily for votes, only for someone to come along and beat you in the last few hours – they get a car, you get zilch. Offering runners-up prizes makes the pain of losing a bit more bearable! The ideal voting promotion would have prizes for the most popular entries, but also a prize for the judge’s choice, AND prizes for random entrants too – this would encourage more people to take part. BizzyBee are currently running a promotion like this – the fans complained about their use of a ‘Dislike’ feature, which made the voting system incredibly unfair, so they removed it and added in the judged and random prizes. UPDATE 28/2/11: Despite changing the rules, BizzyBee still had to disqualify the entrant with the most votes after it materialised she had swapped hundreds of fake votes to win. The prize was a year’s supply of cleaning products – was that really worth cheating for?

Offer prizes for voters too – just one small prize like a Flip camcorder is appealing enough to encourage people to vote.

Plagiarism
If any entries seem suspiciously good, then google the text or search for the photos using www.tineye.com. Don’t get into the mess Appletiser did when they announced a copyrighted Flickr.com photo as their prizewinner!

Terms and Conditions
Always have detailed terms and conditions for the competition (you can put these on your Notes page if it’s a Facebook promotion) and include a term that allows you to alter the competition rules. Do try to avoid changing the terms and conditions in the middle of the promotion – but if people complain about a voting competition before you have any entries then consider changing it to be judged. To start with a voting competition and then change to a judged competition part way through, like Ask Jeeves and Flip Video did, will annoy those entrants who have spent time gathering hundreds of votes. Remember though, it’s NEVER TOO LATE to change the rules if you do encounter problems!

You need to decide if you’re happy for entrants to use Vote Exchange sites and forums (www.getonlinevotes.com and Facebook Groups like Vote for Me) and explain in detail your stance on vote swapping, cheating, fake profiles, etc.Are you aware that people can actually BUY votes for as little as 10p using a site like Amazon Mechanical Turk? If you don’t want this to happen then make this clear in the rules.

Don’t forget to choose a closing date and time when you can be online to verify the winning vote counts. In the American Apparel Halloween contest they let the voting run beyond the stated closing time, and the entrant in third place lost out to a newcomer. Again, this was unprofessional and unfair.

Voting systems
Avoid using the daily vote system that is so popular in American contests. Asking your entrants to hassle people for votes for weeks on end is spamming on your behalf. If a link to your promotion is flagged up as spam on Facebook due to an entrant posting or messaging it too much, it can be embarrassing.

Think twice about using star ratings or Thumbs Up/Down. Contestants will happily give their fellow entrants a Thumbs down or a low star rating, which isn’t in the spirit of a fun competition, and it‘s hurtful too.

Allow a period of time to enter the competition and then a separate period for the voting, so contestants who enter late don’t have a disadvantage. Don’t make the voting period longer than a few weeks as people will get sick of seeing your links all over Facebook.

Complaints
If your promotion is on Facebook, be prepared for plenty of complaints and arguments on your Wall. Make sure that someone is around to respond to these as professionally and quickly as possible to avoid a war of words between disgruntled competitors, bystanders and troublemakers. Assure your fans that any suspicious activity will be investigated and deal with personal insults by flagging the comments.

Fake Facebook Profiles
Be aware that fake profiles can be created easily or even bought online – there is a good blog post at Contest Mob on how to spot the cheaters. If an entrant has swapped multiple votes on a group like Contest Votes Exchange or Vote for Me, it’s likely that these votes are from fake profiles. If your Terms and Conditions state that votes from fake profiles will disqualify the entry, competitors may try to disqualify others by voting for them with a fake profile with the intention of getting them kicked out (this happened recently in a Sony competition, and resulted in the promotion being scrapped).

Don’t count YouTube views as votes
It’s easy to purchase 5,000 YouTube views for just $10 at www.socialkik.com – clearly not a fair way of choosing your winner.

Discourage cheaters
Make the fanpage, entries and voting only accessible to UK users – most multiple vote-swapping forums have members based outside the UK. There are organised syndicates in Asia who have hundreds of fake profiles and will win prizes in American and European contests, then sell these prizes on. Ask for a name, email address and a phone number from voters. It takes more time for the voter but ultimately you will have an email address for your mailing list and cheats will be less interested in completing all these details over and over again. In your terms and conditions make it clear that anyone found to be cheating will be immediately removed from the competition. When the competition is over, take time to check the votes to ensure that the winning entrant hasn’t cheated. It’s perfectly acceptable for you to disqualify the winning entry – Skoda did this with their latest promotion, and awarded the prize car to the entrant who finished second.

I hope this advice has been useful – if you have any queries then contact me at blog@superlucky.co.uk. I do take part in voting competitions myself (albeit with limited success), so I can offer helpful tips from both voters’ and contestants’ points of view. And finally, if you haven’t already, check out my other post on When Voting Competitions Go Wrong.