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Marketers both love and hate sweepstakes and contests. While effective tools to build brand awareness and generate prospect lists, they tedious, time consuming, and challenging to administer. So when Daniel Herndon of Red Wall Live came up with a terrific idea for a back to school promotion for our client Dr. Jeremy Ciano of RevolutionEyes I was excited about the idea, but concerned about the execution.

The contest is simple:

1. Parents submit photos of their kids wearing glasses and sunglasses
2. Then they get their friends and family to vote.
3. The child with the most votes wins a helicopter ride, tickets to an Ice game and a ride in a zamboni machine, and a behind the scenes tour of the zoo.

The objectives behind the contest, not so simple:

1. Collect images we can use to build awareness of the pediatric practice
2. Build fans for facebook page
3. Collect email addresses

The administration was intimidating. But this is the age of the internet and the iPhone, and there is always an “App” for that. In this case the application is Wildfire. What I like About using Wildfire:

• It was relatively easy to build the campaign. (Depending on how much time you want to spend on the graphics you can be up in less than an hour)
• We had options: Sweepstakes, coupons, photos and essay contests
• Inserts easily into fan page.
• Facebook is not required -Wildfire also offers simply widget for website and a microsite you can direct contestants to as well.
• The simple user interface makes it easy for people to invite their friends and expand the contest virally.
• The price is reasonable. Depending on the length of the campaign, and the amount of customization you require, your administration budget will be a fraction of what it used to cost to run a program like this. ( Dr. Ciano’s budget spent around $200 for this six week program)

What I don’t like about Wildfire: ( Lets face it, nothing is perfect)

• Only one submission per computer – I understand the reason, but this prevents us from signing people up as they come to Dr. Ciano’s office. While we can hand out reminders, not everyone will go home and do it. (after I wrote this post, we found a way to increase the number of submissions, so one less thing to dislike)
• We can capture emails of everyone who submits, but not everyone who votes. The real benefit of this campaign is expanding the mailing list. So we want o parents AND all of their friends and family members. To accomplish this, we will switch to Formstack for the voting

Bottom line… I am excited about Wildfire, and will be testing a number of the variations for clients in the coming months. Including our own : Biz Card Makeover Have you used Wildfire? What experiences have you had with the product?

Don’t forget to – enter your child or grandchild to win a ride on a helicopter, zamboni machine and more!

This post was written by Lorraine Ball

Lorraine Ball twenty years in corporate America, before she came to her senses. Today, you can find her at Roundpeg, a small marketing firm, based in Carmel, Indiana. Along with an extraordinarily talented team (which includes Bonnie the dog and Clyde the cat) she shares what she knows about marketing, networking, pr, social media and business planning. Committed to contributing to a vibrant entrepreneurial economy in Central Indiana, Lorraine is focused on helping small businesses, become big businesses.

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I just wrote this question directly from my sidebar using the ChaCha.me widget with WordPress integration enabled on a custom profile built just for The Marketing Technology Blog.

In addition to WordPress (publishing via XML-RPC), your questions can also be published on your Facebook profile, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter Account and even your Tumblr account! Blogger integration is coming next!

This is a fantastic means of opening your blog to questions from your visitors. Very cool!

Disclaimer: ChaCha is a client and I am assisting them directly with some of these features and social media integration as a whole.

Ask me anything, even anonymously

This post was written by ChaCha Questions

Use ChaCha to submit your Online Marketing questions to The Marketing Technology blog! This account utilizes the WordPress integration available at ChaCha.me. Ask us your question now!

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Let’s get one thing straight about press releases: They are not the primary driver for good public relations. Words on paper does not a relationship make. They are, however, an important component to delivering information to those who wish to cover your organization, event or company. For most, local press releases — those sent to media outlets in a specific geographic boundary or target — are the lifeblood of publicity. The PR 2.0 world kinda forgot about that. Thankfully, readMedia has a solution that serves the local press release target, serves up web and social media-friendly release tools and helps clients appear in online news aggregators like Google News, all for a reasonable price.

In a nutshell, a readMedia customer signs up for a low subscription price (more in a moment), selects the geographic region they are targeting, calls out the media offered from a readMedia-curated database, adds any they see fit to add, enters the press release in the system and the distribution is done. Releases are emailed (or faxed based on the media outlet’s preference … yes, some people apparently still fax) posted to the online news aggregation services and placed in an online newsroom. From there, media can embed the releases using an iFrame mechanism (see below for an example) and grab multimedia or other assets the customer makes available.

The client can then grab a widget of their own release headlines to use on their Facebook page, blog or website, embed the releases wherever they like or share across several social networks. The service is not yet set up to, nor meant to, replace your own website or even media page/news room, but gives you the tools to dress your website up with a newsroom feed and share mechanisms.

Now, I’m sure a few of you who are all social media’d up are saying, “Well, isn’t that what PitchEngine is?” No. PitchEngine doesn’t have a media database attached to it. (Although I caught wind they were announcing one today.) As of Friday on PitchEngine, you build a social media press release. Driving people to it is up to you (though they certainly have a community of readers and social tools baked in as well.) And even if PitchEngine adds a media database back-end to their offering, it won’t likely be built to be hyper-local in focus.

readMedia’s front page sells the service as good for State Agencies, Local Governments or Schools. But it’s as appropriate for local or regional businesses as it is for these type organizations. Still, as a former college public relations director, I can see how this can be mighty useful. (And that’s without the hometown press release program they have … more in a moment.)

I logged in to test the service and picked the Lexington, Ky. metro area, my former primary market when PR director at Georgetown College many moons ago. Turns out to use the readMedia service for that market, I only have to pay $29.00 per month for up to 50 contacts. The maximum fee would be $49.00 per month for 250 contacts and five user accounts. The per DMA, volume pricing automatically makes a cool, Web 2.0 PR service affordable for smaller market businesses.

When I reviewed the media list, I was impressed. They had all the main players, many hometown weeklies in outlying towns like Nicholasville and Winchester and even several local radio stations with news departments. For a company that doesn’t use a large media database company but rather builds and curates the lists themselves (with the help of client feedback, of course) readMedia impressed me.

I got hold of a client’s newsroom as well. The Nathan Littauer Hostpital “news room” is really just a list of release headlines. They have more graphically-driven information positioned on their website and use readMedia as a media utility. All readMedia “news rooms” are like this now, but they tell me a more designed, customizable presentation is on the way soon. Littauer’s most recent news, a story of a citation as being a progressive facility for energy conservation from Thursday, came up (as of Friday) as the top Google News result for “hospital energy conservation,” so the news postings are working well.

The embed-offering of the release is even strong because it’s branded, but in subtle fashion, making it easy to use on any website or blog with little awkwardness in design.

And since everything is digitally-driven, they deliver a nice analytics report that tells you how many folks view, embed and share your news, plus where your stats rank against other releases in their system, etc.

So for local-based media relations efforts, readMedia is the real deal. Smart, easy to use, reliable database service that can be customized to your liking as well, all with smart Web 2.0 tools.

And then I looked at their offering for schools. Sure, this type of approach isn’t going to resonate with everyone, but not only are there tens of thousands of education public relations professionals in the U.S. alone, but in certain instances, this could apply beyond education.

readMedia’s pricing for schools is based on your student enrollment and geared toward hometown releases, a program that allows colleges to send press releases to the local newspapers of all their students (for Dean’s List announcements, etc.) regardless of geographic centricity to the institution. A college with a class size of 2,500 can run a hometown release program using readMedia for just $39.00 per month. I would have paid 10 times that amount when I was having to send 800 hometown press releases out each semester at Georgetown.

As you can tell, I really dig readMedia and what they offer. For the price and the service, I don’t know of anyone offering something comparable. The service’s focus on local press release distribution sets them apart. As one readMedia client told Amy Mengel, readMedia’s new inbound marketing director, using the big media database companies for local press release services is like using a 747 to cross the street. readMedia is a targeted service for people who need it. And well worth checking out.

Now, it would be remiss of me to not disclaim the hell out of this review. Press releases are a piece of your public relations arsenal. They should never be sent to media members who do not ask for them, in my opinion. Releases are tools for more information after the reporter has said, “Yes, I’m interested.” Blasting releases to your list should only happen when you have culled that list to ensure the media members on it write about the topic your release covers, their audience is potentially interested in the subject and they know and approve of you putting them on a distribution list.

(I’ll pause while some PR people curse me a few times.)

A press release is not a pitching mechanism. Your personal outreach to the media outlet is. Pitch first. Release if requested. Follow that framework and you’ll see better results.

And if you’re focused on local press release distribution, readMedia can help you get them, too.

You may include a third party add on to your blog using a html/javascript widget (page element) available on the
Template | Page Elements | [Add Page Element] (link)http://theedifier.com/blogging-blogger/

Like many folks, I underestimated the power of ChaCha. A lot of people thought that ChaCha has been a crazy experiment. People have joked about the ChaCha guides just looking stuff up on Google and responding with it.

Working closely with Scott Jones and ChaCha has been quick-paced, challenging, fun… and rewarding. ChaCha is turning a corner… and people are starting to take notice. The next month at ChaCha will be even more exciting than the last… this I promise you!

What ChaCha has amassed is one of the fastest and most complete question and answer databases on the Internet. Some questions have been asked hundreds or thousands of times… and ChaCha no longer has to verify the request, they can simply provide it.

The numbers are pretty amazing… over a million requests answered a day. Over 4.5 million Chuck Norris joke requests alone! It’s not all fun and games, though. ChaCha has real-time answers on what’s happening in Haiti, how big is the universe, or practical answers like how to get gum out of your hair or the address or phone number for a company.

ChaCha.com continues to grow in traffic as well – not just from direct requests but from the search engines themselves. Even Google has noticed how good ChaCha’s answers are – search engine growth continues to rise. The site is now the largest Indiana website for traffic and has surpassed many social media darlings in Silicon Valley.

Ask ChaCha a trivia question and you’ll probably get a pretty good response, as well! Try it yourself by texting a question to 242242 or calling 1-800-224-2242 (242242 spells ChaCha). Or you can test out a new widget I built in my sidebar. (Note: There’s still some clean-up to do on it – like figuring out why IE sometimes doesn’t like it!).

While Google has amassed a well-indexed database of where to find answers on the Internet, ChaCha has actually found the answers. That’s no easy feat. As the database gets larger and the number of users of the system grows, you’ll notice the quality of responses is growing as well. It’s not perfect – but ChaCha is a tool that, when used correctly, can be quite an asset to have!

ChaCha also has insight into trends (to the left is a dashboard I’ve also built). Twitter trends is what people are talking about, Google trends is what people are trying to find… and ChaCha has the exact questions that people are asking. That’s pretty valuable information – something that ChaCha is also beginning to realize. Of course it was probably something that Jones et Investors understood all along.

Full disclosure: ChaCha is a key client of mine.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

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I sat in the audience at SOBCon last May astonished at the presentation given by Glenda Watson Hyatt on accessibility and social media. Glenda, who has cerebral palsy — and I say “has” instead of “suffers from” because if you’ve ever met her, you know damn well she doesn’t suffer from anything — is probably the leading authority on technology and accessibility. I learned that day that for all the people Social Media Explorer serves, it doesn’t serve everyone well. Today, it takes a step closer to doing so thanks to BuzzVoice.

You’ll notice the sidebar now includes a widget, just under the search box, that says, “This Site Talks!” Hit play and you can listen to real time, text-to-voice processing of the posts here. Let it run and you can listen to post after post in reverse chronological order. While the posts as podcasts (yeah, you can even subscribe in iTunes) feature is cool, the reason I’m so excited to be a part of BuzzVoice’s Real Time Radio beta is because it gives a level of accessibility to those with visual impairments.

BuzzVoice, formerly known as PimpMyNews, has been offering their technology up for a couple of years now, but with a primary consumer focus. Their product essentially allowed you to subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds as podcasts. I use BuzzVoice’s iPhone app to listen to my top 6-8 blogs via podcast as I commute to work. While I could certainly take the SME RSS feed and reposition it as a podcast, but making all that work and look nice would probably require more brain power than I have.

Enter BuzzVoice’s new publisher focus with the real time radio widgets. The platform provides real-time audio translations (and the voices aren’t even all that awkward) of your blog to give your audience the ability to enjoy the blog on the go … or if they have visual impairments. The widget allows your blog to become a streaming radio station, of sorts. You can stream live, subscribe to the podcast version in iTunes, access it via the BuzzVoice iPhone app and even grab the widget to share on other sites.

Give it a test drive. BuzzVoice is in beta with the publisher’s platform right now and wants your feedback. Drop them in the comments below or email publishers@buzzvoice.com.

While there are just a handful of publishers who are a part of the Beta program, they go live to enable everyone to have their blog offered in real time radio format next month. To ensure your site is in the offering, email them your site’s RSS feed URL at publishers@buzzvoice.com.

And they’ve given me 10 private Beta invites to hand out. If you’re interested, drop a request in the comments below. I have to choose the 10 based on some prescribed criteria, but let me know if you’re interested and I’ll reach out if there’s an invite left.

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I have a wordpress blog (webkinzrumorz) and want to add one of those map loco (maploco.com) and want to put it on a widget if you know how i would greatly appreciate your help.

My friends at AddThis sent me the list of the most shared content of 2009 according to the 600 million monthly people who view their share widget. I thought it was an interesting list and worth sharing.

Keep in mind this is online users who choose to share content by clicking on a widget embedded on the site or post as opposed to copy-pasting the link or using other share bookmarklets or plugins. I don’t think it really skews the data too much, though, because I believe those outside the social media bubble probably use the share widgets like AddThis more than those of us with other mechanisms to do so. This is what was popular for the world. What was popular to the social media bubble doesn’t matter much.

Shockers for me? The wedding dance video seemed low to me. I remember when it came out it seemed like everyone in the world was talking about it. Also, there seems to be an unusual number of entries from Pawnation. It’s an entertaining site, but didn’t figure one blog would have several entries.

What about you? Drop a line in the comments.

Most Shared Content of 2009
AddThis Share Widget Data

1. Santa Yourself – 71,848 shares
2. African Thunderstorm – The Kim Komando Show – 50,008 shares
3. Surprised Kitty Rampages – Pawnation – 32,270 shares -
4. Cannabis College Now Enrolling Students – disinformation – 24,338 shares
5. Extreme Shepherding Ad Campaign – Pawnation – 18,165 shares
6. Michael Jackson Dies – TMZ – 13,481 shares
7. Swine Flu Cover-up – Mercola.com – 12,722 shares
8. Best. Wedding Entrance. Ever. – lemondrop – 12,693 shares
9. Faith the Two-Legged Dog Turns Seven – Pawnation – 11,546 shares
10. Santelli’s Tea Party – CNBC – 11,020 shares
11. Best Graphics Cards For The Money – Tom’s Hardware – 10,802 shares
12. Ukrainian Has Definitely ‘Got Talent’ – PopEater – 10,620 shares
13. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Has Jewish Past – Telegraph (UK) – 10,502 shares
14. Man’s Surprising Laugh – The Kim Komando Show – 7,340 shares
15. Investigación – Parte 1 – El Caso Mascherano – 7,149 shares

I am trying to find the code to add to the sidebar.php that will allow me to use widgets and I need to know if I need to change other .php files. I am using 2.2.1
I used some code I found somewhere but I only added it to the sidebar.php and I can only use the calendar widget. When I try to add any others the sidebar format goes all hay wire.
TIA

ShareThis, the sharing widget of choice for many bloggers, including me, released some information last week that confirms the Tell-A-Friend data we discussed last month. Email is still the sharing mechanism of choice for most web users. In fact, ShareThis’s numbers almost match those from Tell-A-Friend across the board, so we can reasonably conclude the numbers aren’t that affected by the type of tool used.

Tell-A-Friend told us their analysis showed that people shared web content in the following breakdown: Email – 59%; Instant Messenger – 25%; Social Networking – 14% (broken down to 79% of that via Facebook or 11% of the total, 15% via MySpace and just 5% via Twitter).

ShareThis offered up some different methodology but shows the following statistics on shares per channel: Email – 46%; Facebook 33%; other social channels – 15% and Twitter 6%.

Image courtesy of ShareThis

My biggest problem with the numbers was that Twitter seems to almost be the share channel of choice these days. The numbers don’t reflect that. But many who share via Twitter are probably more tech-savvy users who don’t use ShareThis or similar buttons, thus accounting for the gap. I have no statistical evidence to back this up, just an educated guess.

What ShareThis’s information does reveal, however, is a bit more insight into what’s done with the share data from those it is shared with. These numbers are revealing in their own right:

Twitter is by far the most effective share channel, with 40% of recipients clicking on the link shared. Facebook (25%) is second. Email effectiveness is last among their four categories at 15%.

But beyond the first click, what ShareThis called how recipients engage with the content shared, Email makes a comeback. Those who do click on email-shared links view 2.95 pages after the click, on average. Facebook shares resulted in 2.76 page views per unique click. Other social network shares saw 1.59 pages per click while Twitter was again last at 1.56.

All of this analysis is still a bit of anecdotal conclusion, but it appears people on Twitter will gladly click your junk, but care less beyond looking at it. If you email someone a link, or pass it on via Facebook, the audience is more apt to read, click through to something else and so on.

As with any information sampling, I would use this information as an FYI and little more. What really makes the difference in these networks isn’t some stat gleaned from a widget. Networks are made of people, not links, gadgets or servers. Understanding your audience on Twitter and how it differs from the one on Facebook is more important than how many people click on a link shared there.

It’s also probably getting more to the reason of why they click and engage more.

Twitter users, for instance, gravitate more toward the here and now attention span. Don’t want to call them ADD, but it’s close. They’ll click, but unless there’s something pretty freakin’ persuasive on that page, they’re done.

Facebook is different, as we’ve recently chronicled by asking Facebook users what they think about Twitter. People there are much less time constrained in their use and mentality. They’ll take more time to read the content, click through to more information. They want to get to know what you’re sharing, not just making mental notes of what it is.

All this is to say that you have to use research and statistics wisely. I love the fact that Tell-A-Friend and ShareThis are sharing this kind of user data with us. It helps make us more intelligent Internet marketers and social media thinkers. But don’t let the data get in the way of understanding your audiences. With any kind of communications, nothing beats that.

You can read more about ShareThis’s research here. Tell-A-Friend’s information is available on SocialTwist’s 2009 Sharing Report blog post.

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