When Voting Competitions Go Wrong
Reasons why a voting competition is a bad idea:
- It’s not the public that are voting. Naively, promoters really do believe that the public will visit a website, watch dozens of videos, browse photos or read stories in order to judge which is worthy of winning the prize. Sorry, but the general public simply aren’t interested! Even if you offer a prize for voters, you’re only really likely to have ‘compers’ visiting the site, along with the friends and family of each of the entrants. Many of those visiting won’t even click ‘play’ on the video or read the stories – they’re only there to vote and probably couldn’t give two hoots about your product.
- You could end up with an absolutely awful/inappropriate/embarrassing winner. In the Asda Stationery Rio holiday competition the most ‘Liked’ entry was a nice little animation of the words ‘Asda stationary’ – perhaps if the lucky girl had spelt ‘stationery’ correctly, Asda would have been able to use the video for publicity! You can see the winning photos from last year’s Baileys photography competition online, with a glaring omission – the most popular ROI winner doesn’t feature because after awarding the prize, Baileys realised that someone in the photo was intoxicated (which was against the terms and conditions) and they should never have been allowed to win. Had either of these competitions been judged, the promoters might have ended up with a winning entry they could use for publicity, rather than discreetly trying to sweep under the carpet. Mountain Dew judged the winner of their recent £5000 t-shirt design competition from the ten most popular entries, and the fans were furious at their choice.
- You will end up with lots of criticism and nasty comments about the entries posted on your Facebook wall, and much of it will be juvenile and embarrassing. If you delete the posts then it will only make things worse.
- The same people are winning voting competitions time and time again. There aren’t actually that many people who are good at voting contests, as you need to have time, determination and a thick skin to succeed. Those that do well are household names on Facebook, and if one of them wins your competition there will be public grumbling and often accusations of cheating for you to deal with.
The following are examples of 2010 voting competitions that didn’t go quite according to plan….
PayPal Caption and iPod Competitions
PayPal ran a couple of voting competitions on Facebook at the end of last year. The first was to win an iPod, and PayPal asked entrants to leave a comment and then get people to ‘Like’ it – the most liked comment would win. Because there were no proper terms and conditions, it was unclear whether the comment had to be left on PayPal’s competition post, or as a new comment on the wall. As a result, when the closing date came, two different people claimed to have won the prize – to keep the grumbling fans happy, PayPal had to give both of them an iPod! Perhaps learning from their mistake, their subsequent iPad competition did stick to Facebook rules, and was administered using a separate ‘App’. However it was no less controversial, due to a late entry getting hundreds of votes in the last few days of the competition. Soon there were a whole host of angry wall posts accusing this contestant of cheating. PayPal assured their fans that an audit of the votes would be conducted, and after doing so concluded there was no foul play, but they never announced the winner, for fear of a public outcry!
Next Baby Boutique Model Competition
The ultimate promotion for competitive mums, the 2010 Next Baby Boutique competition required parents to upload a photograph of their baby via a tab on the Next Facebook fan page. The most popular 12 babies in the two age groups were invited to a photo shoot, and then the babies judged for the 2 top prizes of £500 and a 12 month modelling contract. The competition received 100,000 entries, and vote counts were not displayed on the Next website so althought you could see your child’s position, you had no idea how many votes were required to get them into the top 12. Soon, several Mums realised they had no way of getting enough votes to win, so a rumour was started that it was a fake promotion set up by a paedophile ring. Chaos ensued, with hundreds of angry Mums posting on the Next wall demanding their photos be removed. Amongst these, Mums desperately offered ‘vote for mine, I’ll vote for yours’ requests and for weeks the Next wall was a shambolic mess of begging messages and nasty comments. Eventually Next offered a place in the final to the top 24 babies, but surely a fairer solution would have been for Next to choose the extra 12 babies?
Kleenex Design a Cube
Kleenex ran a voting competition to design a tissue box cube, with the rules stating they would choose the 3 winners from the ten most popular designs. One of the leading entrants was told partway through the competition (after amassing hundreds of votes) that her entry wasn’t valid as it included photographs of people. This hadn’t been mentioned in the terms and conditions, and you can imagine what controversy this caused on Twitter and Facebook – many of the entrants had submitted cube designs featuring their family and friends. Kleenex then decided to change the rules again so they could judge the winning entries from a shortlist of the top 35, rather than ten! Eventually Kleenex decided to give an extra three iPads away to the entrants with the most votes to keep everyone happy.
Jeeves Unanswerables
Ask Jeeves ran a competition called ‘Unanswerables’ where the public were asked to answer Jeeves’ ten most popular questions. People could register on the Ask Jeeves website and give a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down to the answers, and the most popular answer to each of the ten questions would win an iPad. It didn’t take long for the voting to take a sinister turn. The answers with the most Thumbs Up ratings soon saw their Thumbs Down ratings climbing – competitors were voting down each other’s entries. Complaints were made on the Ask Jeeves Facebook page, and Jeeves’ lighthearted responses infuriated the contestants. As the ‘Thumbs Down’ ratings continued to rise amongst the leading entries (which incidentally, were almost all badly written and unoriginal) Jeeves made the decision to change the system to a judged competition – but of course this wasn’t fair on the people who had campaigned to get hundreds of votes. And surprise surprise, the ten winning entries (all very impressive) had only a handful of ‘Thumbs Up’ votes between them, infuriating the entrants who had strived to get their hundreds of votes!
Sony Profile Hero
Sony ran a Profile Hero competition on Facebook where each week, the person with the most votes for their profile picture (which you could enter in a number of different categories) won a digital camera. As usual, people worked hard to get hundreds of votes and then suddenly, in the last few days of the weekly competitions, in every category a contestant rapidly gained hundreds of votes to get to the top spot. Suspiciously, all these leading contestants had Facebook friends in common. After some investigation it materialised that many of these ‘friends’ had no profile pictures, and only a couple of friends and ‘Likes’ on their profile page – the telltale signs of a fake profile. When disgruntled competitors posted on the Sony wall to complain about these ‘cheaters’, suddenly their own entries began collecting more votes, cast by these ‘fake’ profiles – the cheaters were now seeking to get the genuine entrants disqualified! Sony pulled the competition after a couple of weeks wthout awarding any prizes.
WKD Noel’s Rubbish Presents
WKD ran a competition in January to win five televisions – entrants needed to post a description of their worst Christmas gift and the 5 with the most votes would win a TV. Before long there was moaning on the Facebook wall that the leading entries were unworthy of a prize, and even complaints that the leading entrant was bribing voters by offering to post them gifts! Personal vindictive attacks on contestants were all over the WKD Wall, and eventually WKD had to offer a TV to their favourite 3 entries too.
Skoda
Not strictly a voting competition, Skoda gave away two cars this month to the people whose Facebook friends rated them as the ‘meanest ‘ or ‘loveliest’. In the final weeks of the competition Skoda had to remove many entrants who were cheating by rating themselves with fake Facebook profiles. The votes of the eventual ‘meanest’ entrant were throroughly checked and a decision was made to disqualify them and award the car to the second placed contestant! Whilst their vigilance should be applauded, Skoda should have been able to prevent such cheating from the outset.
And Finally…
Remember, it’s NEVER TOO LATE to change your mind about the format of a competition. Promoters who made the sensible decision to swap from a voting system to a judged system due to complaints include Lambrini, Orange, Flip Video, Ryvita, Tesco Diets and Kuoni. These are all promotions which have required effort to enter – videos, photos and recipes. Surely it’s only fair that someone who may have spent hours planning, editing and filming a video should be automatically considered for a prize, rather than them having to spend additional time badgering people to vote for it?
There’s a ‘Help stop Facebook and Online Voting competitions’ group with links to new voting competitions, and the members work as a team to try and get the rules changed. Many of us would love to see skill competitions made fair to everybody, and by educating promoters before they launch their promotions, hopefully we can do this.
Finally, if you’re not prepared to run your promotion without any element of voting, there are plenty of ways you can make your contest fairer, which is why I have written a second post on How to Run an Online Voting Competition.
You should have wrote about the Tesco diets competition. That was based on the highest votes, 5x £1000 prizes over five weeks. You won one of these with a really good entry, (Deserved win imo) But some of the main entries that almost won was a photograph of a really fatty chocolate cake, and the first two winners were both compers well known for winning vote competitions. One of them also went on to win one of the TV’s from WKD – Also listed in this blog.
Brilliant Di..really informative to me as ive only just started comping.
I recently entered a comp with the Daily Mail for a two week exotic holiday/honeymoon, it was a liking competition and i was new to all comps so gave it a go, i wrote a lovely poem and got around 25 votes before i gave up asking my friends (someone else had 1207 votes the last time i looked) rediculous things. So annoying when you put the effort in i think x Carla Morris
Yes Yes Yes I love comps and am willing to enter compose stand on my head or whatever but I donot like begging or bombarding my friends with begging letters. So I also approve of your brilliant write up.!!! and where’s that “Ban voting comp on fb” I’ll be putting my name to it!!
Brilliant write-up, Di!