Social Media Strategy – Running a Customer Contest via Flickr or YouTube

I want to share a good example of how to run a photo/video contest through a social media site like Flickr or YouTube and how it can work for your company’s online marketing strategy. I think this is a brilliant example to get your customers involved. It is also an easy way to implement with very little IT investment - a matter of copying and pasting a code snippet from Flikr on your site. A few years back I did a similar contest with an online store and it was high maintenance (manual process) as I had not thought of this method, nor were the social media sites as friendly to execute such a campaign.


Here’s how you can use social media site for a contest and tips:

• Host the contest on a video-sharing (like YouTube, Vimeo or Viddler) or photo-sharing site (like Flikr).
  
• Advertise the contest details on your website with simple and clear instructions. Give the link for where to upload the media piece for the contest. Is it a video or photo contest? Be clear on what they should tag the video or photo so you can review them and pull them through your site (like a mashup).
  
• Define a specific tag or channel that can be used for your contest - making sure the tag is not so generic that it could accidently be used for other photos or videos.
  
• Use the top favorites is an indicator of finalists - no need to collect votes via a form on your site. YouTube or Flickr does all the work and tallying for you!


• Entice the contestants to send out the link of the contest on your site to their friends and family to vote for them. This is where it can become very viral!
  
• Advertise your contest everywhere you can. If your company has a blog, Facebook or twitter account – make sure you cross-promote the contest and link to it! Try sending out a press release if it is a big contest.
  
• Use a mashup to advertise and show off your contest. A mashup is a mini application that combines the submitted videos or photos that were defined under a particular tag on the social media site (i.e., YouTube or Flickr). You can obtain the code snippet from the host site and display the mashup on your website, blog etc by simply copying and pasting the html code. The mashup is dynamically (shows up right away) updated whenever anyone submits a piece to that category.
  
• Define a deadline date and use three to five top votes as finalists and send out a message to all participants asking for votes on the finalists. You can obtain longevity and more interactivity when you include your customers with the final voting!

This is a continuation from my “How Social Media Can Help You With Your Online Marketing Strategies” blog after attending Darren Barefoot’s The Many-Armed Starfish: Social Media Marketing 101. He mentioned a case study that is similar to above idea.

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.) If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!