Banyan Branch

Posted by Tara Miller, Sales Planner

Weddings are expensive. With an entire industry encouraging you to spend money on things you didn’t even know existed (does every guest really need their own monogrammed pashmina?), even basic weddings can get out of hand. So when my fiancé and I found out about the “I Do with Mirassou” contest, we entered immediately. And because of our hard work–we won.

Now, vote based contests are brilliant for companies and difficult for participants. Companies are ensuring that hundreds or thousands of people are visiting their site during the course of the contest to vote for their friend or family member. But what can contestants do to get more votes without annoying everyone they know? Here are some of the steps we took:

1. Give them something to vote for.

I’ve been harassed to vote for contest tons of times, but get nothing in return. We decided to make short videos for our friends and family in exchange for their votes. We sent them the link with our email requesting the votes, and encouraged them to send the videos and request to their friends and family. Because they had something amusing to pass on, our friends and family were more likely to email their contacts. I had Facebook friends of my 7^th grade teacher talking about how funny the videos were!

Want to make videos? Make sure to keep them short, relevant, appropriate for all family members and work associates, and funny. They’ll be more likely to be passed around. You can take a look at our videos at www.youtube.com/zerodollarwedding

2. Be Personal

Although posting generic requests for votes on Facebook and Twitter did result in some traffic, we noticed the majority of our traffic coming from email. By sending an email, we were able to be sure our friends and family received it, instead of hoping our post ended up on their News Feed. Friends (who are more used to us writing on their wall then sending email) knew that it was important because of the email, and were more likely to click through.

Those who responded to our emails and posts on Facebook and Twitter were followed up with a “Thank you” and a personal message. These people were going out of their way to assist us in winning money­–we wanted to make sure they knew how much we appreciated it and valued their friendship!

3. Use your networks

Working in social media was a blessing for this contest. I was able to leverage my growing social media accounts as well as those of my colleagues. Having influential members of the Seattle Social Media scene tweet out the link to the contest was a huge help. In addition, I asked my few celebrity contacts to help me out. This resulted in tweets from @actordougjones (of Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy fame) and @kristinahorner (of YouTube and wizard rock fame). Vote-based contests are no time to be shy: we emailed co-workers, past employers, childhood friends, wedding sites, even local news stations. We didn’t always receive a response, but we knew we did everything we could.

4. Keep an eye on the conversation

My fiancé and I are both analytic, and wanted to keep an eye on the conversation around the contest as well as the amount of mentions for both us and the other contestants. Using FacePinch, TweetGrid, and Google Alerts, I was able to monitor that conversation, and see what was being said by both us, our friends, and our competitors. In multiple instances, this helped me find friends of friends encouraging their followers to votes for us; I was then able to thank them for their votes personally. By “liking” all mentions of the contest on Facebook, I was able to see the comments that our friends were writing about voting, and could answer questions quickly. When the site stopped working for a day, I was able to catch it and immediately send out a new web address (as well as alert the company of the issue). My fiancé put together a bit.ly link for the contest that we used in our emails, so we could see how many votes we were receiving. The last weekend of the contest, we sent out an email to our Facebook friends that resulted in almost 500 click-throughs alone!

Overall, vote-based contests can seem daunting and purely luck-based (those with the largest families and circles of friends win). But if you’re smart about it and use social media to extend your network while keeping an entertaining and personal touch, you too could win a contest!

We look forward to our trip to San Francisco and Wine Country at the beginning of October, and cannot wait to put the $10,000 for our wedding to use on a lot of food, and of course, wine, for all of our guests.

The press release for the contest can be found here.

And news of our win on Mirassou’s site is here.

Congrats Tara! – Team Banyan