Making voting competitions fairer
It’s time to revisit the topic of online voting competitions. Since I blogged about them in February (see ‘When Voting Competitions Go Wrong‘) there have definitely been improvements, with more promoters introducing judged or random prizes, and some offering prizes for voters too. We’re seeing a lot less of the ‘pure voting’ competitions that offer one big prize to the entrant with the most votes, but there are still issues with vague terms and conditions that don’t mention what is acceptable in terms of how the entrant may source their votes. Promoters are still wearing blinkers and naively won’t accept the lengths that people will go to for a prize – yes, people really do create fake Facebook accounts, buy votes online, and steal photos, recipes and stories from copyrighted websites, knowing that they can get enough votes to win regardless of whether they’ve created the entry themselves!
Because it’s so easy to cheat, I believe there’s no way a ‘pure’ voting competition can be fair. If a promoter expects their fans to spend time and effort on a photo, video or recipe then the least they can do is apply some form of judging – in an ideal world all creative competitions would be completely judged. The problem with this is that judged competitions won’t attract as much traffic to a Facebook page as a voting competition will. And with the public fancount and ‘talking about this’ statistics on every Facebook fan page, these figures are more relevant than ever to PR and marketing agencies as the sign of a successful promotion – whereas actually, it’s much better for a company to attract a few loyal fans than a thousand Asian vote-swappers!
As good examples of alternatives to voting competitions, Tesco and Argos launched completely judged creative competitions in the Summer which had a great response – they achieved this through offering daily prizes. For the Argos competition, entrants uploaded a photo featuring the new Argos catalogue and the most creative photo was chosen everyday to receive a £50 voucher. Tesco invited entrants to choose a prize from their online catalogue, and add a reason why they should win it. Every hour from 9am-5pm for a week Tesco chose their favourite entry to win their specified prize. This created a real buzz on Facebook and the winning entries were very original and creative. These promotions were successful because of the daily element, because fans could enter every draw – and because the pages had thousands of fans so the word spread quickly!
But it’s not all bad news with voting competitions, as promoters are finding ways to make them a little bit fairer…
Most voting competitions now include a judged element, either:
- Before the voting (eg. a shortlist of 20 went to public vote in the Jamaica Ginger Cake recipe competition, a shortlist of 10 in the Cafe Collection video competition) – if the competition has a good response the promoter should be assured of a quality winner if all the entries are judged. Ideally, every shortlisted entry should get a prize.
- After the voting (eg. a winner is chosen from the six most popular entries in the Crock-Pot recipe competition, and the top ten in the Duck and Cover model competition) – the promoter will get more traffic to the site with this method, but if judging is limited to just the top few there might not be a decent entry in there.
- Alongside the voting (eg. Mecca Bingo gave the three most popular videos in their Bingo Lingo comp big cash prizes, whilst awarding their 5 favourite videos each week £100 vouchers, and in the Ecover photo comp, they are awarding iPad2s to both their favourite and the most voted entries) – with this method, I recommend giving the bigger prize to your chosen winner and a smaller prize to the most popular entry.
Other promoters have introduced a random element:
- Campbells recipe competition gave a prize daily to a random entrant, whilst the recipe with the most votes won a knife block.
Or given prizes to the voters:
- Fab gave digital cameras to random voters in their ‘Fab Den’ competition
Whilst some offered prizes to early entries, to create an early buzz:
- No Fear gave £50 cash to the first 20 videos uploaded to their Fearless Fred competition
- Cafe Collection gave a case of wine to the first ten video entries
Now for the bad news – let’s look at some recent case studies that haven’t run very smoothly:
- Westfield Stratford City disqualified their ‘Create Your Take’ winner after it materialised that some of their votes were from fake Facebook profiles. Facebook fans responded by posting up ‘evidence’ that the replacement winner had cheated too. The situation meant that the announcement of the winners became a slanging match, which put a dampener on the occasion for the eight ‘blogger’s choice’ judged winners.
- Fab Ice Lollies ran their ‘Design a Den’ competition again this year and shortlisted 15 entries. These then went to a public vote with prizes for voters, but during the early stages of the competition the promoter decided to hide the vote counts. It also became clear that by refreshing the browser, people could vote multiple times. Fab refused to confirm whether these multiple votes counted towards the total scores and when the winners were announced many people weren’t convinced by the fairness of the results.
- Grand Marnier invited Facebook fans to upload a photo of a sunset for their competition. Generously, the most popular 200 photos won a Grand Marnier goody bag, whilst the photo with the most votes would bag a trip to Paris plus spending money. Despite many people warning the promoter about the perils of voting on their Facebook page, the top two photos managed to suspiciously gain over a thousand votes, way more than the other entries. Just a few days before the closing date, Grand Marnier decided to change the rules and recruited an independent judge to pick the winner.
- Crock-pot are running a recipe competition where the six most popular entries will win £250 Abel and Cole vouchers, and one overall recipe will be chosen to win £1500 vouchers and a cookery course. Of the current top ten entries, five of them are taken directly from recipe sites including Jamie Oliver and BBC Good Food, despite the rules stating the recipe must be their own. Crock-pot have stated all shortlisted entries must comply with their T&Cs, but if this competition was judged on merit this wouldn’t be an issue. Some people really have no qualms about public cheating on Facebook – they know they are able to get votes so it doesn’t matter what they enter into the competition!
- SeaSalt Clothing invited fans to send in photos to represent Summer and created a gallery for voting on their Facebook page. The gallery contained professional photos, stolen photos, Winter photos… and the fans weren’t happy! (scroll down to see the comments under the gallery!) – needless to say, the photo of people in Winter coats at Lulworth Cove won the prize hamper!
- Mercedes recently ran a competition to win a Vito van; ten shortlisted entrants went head to head to try and get the most votes. It soon materialised that the two frontrunners had been buying votes on websites www.fivesquids.co.uk and www.microworkers.com. The third placed contestant Sarah blogged about the issue, and eventually Mercedes changed the rules and disqualified the vote buyers – but also disqualified Sarah for asking for votes on the www.getonlinevotes.com forum. Not great PR for Mercedes.
Some of these situations may have been avoided if the promoters had spent a little more effort on writing the terms and conditions. If promoters do insist on running a voting competition, here are some terms and conditions that might help to avoid these problems – ensure these rules are easily accessible to all entrants.
The promoter reserves the right to disqualify any entrants who have used the following methods to gain votes:
– creation of fake or multiple Facebook profiles
– offering any type of compensation (monetary or otherwise) in exchange for votes
– using ‘Vote Exchange’ forums
– using robotic or automatic devices
Promoters should monitor the voting and investigate any suspicious activity such as a rapid increase in votes, or a lot of votes from Facebook members in a certain area of the world. They should regularly search for links to the competition on Google and Facebook in case they have been posted in Exchange forums. Watch out though – if you do add terms to disqualify entrants who use vote swap forums, jealous contestants might go as far as to post fake requests on forums such as www.getonlinevotes.com in order to get the leader kicked out of the competition! This may sound far-fetched but I can assure you it happens – you should research thoroughly any accusations of cheating before you decide to disqualify the contestant.
Promoters could also introduce a clause along the lines of:
Finalists will be chosen based on a combination of public votes received and the preference of an independent judging panel.
So, if the most popular story simply isn’t suitable or of a high enough standard to make the shortlist, they have the option to exclude it. In this case though, the most popular entrants may become rather annoyed – it would be best to specify the exact percentages of public and judge voting that make up the final scores.
To discourage plagiarism, add a clause similar to:
We reserve the right to reject photos/recipes/stories that are not the entrant’s original work or not in the spirit of the competition
If a promoter doesn’t want to go down the ‘creative’ or voting route, they could launch an imaginative and original viral campaign like these recent competitions:
- Innocent Drinks Fruit Field Trips – invite three Facebook friends to join your holiday postcard. If all 3 accept you’re entered into the draw to win a holiday. You can invite as many friends as you like, with each completed postcard getting you another entry into the prize draw. The viral effect is achieved by automatic wall posts.
- Kleenex Lost Box – a clever weekly Facebook game. Inviting friends to join your team, you plot pins on a map to try and locate the ‘Lost Box’. With a full squad of 4 members, you have a possible 28 pins a week to help you get a 100% score. Every team with 100% is entered into the weekly prize draw to win a £250 prize for each member of the team! This encouraged people to invite friends, as well as logging into the Kleenex App daily to ensure a good score.
Most people on Facebook will have 3 friends that they can ask to join a competition without feeling they’re harassing them. When it comes to asking for votes from 100+ friends, now that’s spamming!
I hope this information has been useful – please read in conjunction with my older post on How to Run a Voting Competition and do email me with any queries.
I hope this information has been useful – please read in conjunction with my older post on How to Run a Voting Competition and do email me with any queries.
Would it help if we posted links to vote swap sites and paying for votes sites on every voting comp we could find so that the people running the competition are aware of such things?
Thanks for your comment, Anon! I think that would have an effect if there were actual vote requests on a particular group for the competition in question – but many UK promoters just see links and requests for US contests and presume their promotion won’t be affected. But I certainly think anything that raises awareness among promoters – and the poor contestants who think they are in with a chance – is a good thing, so why not! There’s a fine line between asking nicely for one vote in return for another (as on http://www.getonlinevotes.com), and swapping several votes at a time on Facebook groups (which may or may not be from fake profiles). It’s hard to say when vote-swapping actually becomes ‘cheating’, which is why promoters need to be very clear in their T&Cs.
I really enjoyed your article, I think its great that more sponsors are listening to different ways people are winning, I stick to random draws, judged or top ten and then a draw, even those are not easy, but if the prize is really good I go for it to a point, but I have seen friendships end and acusations fly when someone has lost or dq from something, Good article, I win more when I am not asking for a vote, and just entering, but I am always there giving a vote for a friend, but they all need to be judged or random draw, that day is coming, I see it in the future. have a great day
I obsessively watched the votes in one of these competitions and witnessed the person eventually pronounced the winner receive two very distinct blocks of 150 votes, one overnight, and the second block the following day over the space of around an hour and a half, these blocks were separated by, and followed by only 2 votes in around 4 or 5 hours. Coincidence? Perhaps? Did the promoter look into it? I doubt it and I doubt even less that they care. What annoys me most about voting competitions is that it shouldn’t be down to the entrants to regulate them. The people running them should be constantly keeping an eye open for cheats, whether in the form of vote buying, or in fraudulent entries stolen from elsewhere. It should not be down to us to have to research the activities of the people we are up against. I wont be going near any again in the future, which is a shame as some have wonderful prizes and the creative element that interests me but the ONLY way I think promoters are going to stop running them is if no-one, I mean NO-ONE is willing to enter them.
I have only ever been involved in one voting contest, and it wasn’t by choice. I was tagged into a group of 5 by an app, and 10 of those groups were selected to compete for votes to win a weekend survival trip. It was with Film Feed on facebook and it quickly dimnished into arguments. Never touched one since, I will enter if it has a judged element but no way will I ever ask for votes. Great post again Di, glad to see you still raising awareness for both competition hosts and consumers.
I couldn’t agree more Di! Very well said!!!! Voting competitions really should vanish as you can never be sure wither if it was fair or not. I’ve tried for 2 voting comps recently. One was for a piece of diamond jewellry. I’ve taken a photo of my wedding rings abroad specially for this comps with my phone, but most people just sent a photo from ealier, and there were some professional wedding photos too. Just didn’t think it was fair.
The other was for a new suit for hubby. I thought I have a chance and was the only female in the comps. Unfortunately a guy entered 2 days before closing date and generated hundreds of votes instantly…and he won. it just left sour grapes in everyone’s mouth…really hope all the companyies will stop doing voting comps. It’s not worth the hassle, and always ends up badly.