Voting competitions. I don't like them, and following my latest investigations into cheating I no longer enter them, and will only vote if I believe the entry is a worthy winner. I'm trying hard to educate promoters, marketing and PR agencies that voting competitions are NEVER a good idea, but there's still some way to go...
IKEA have invested a lot into promoting their new 'Snap a Napper' competition - google it and it's all over PR and marketing websites. The promotional videos and photos look good, and the concept is fun too. Snap a photo of a friend or family member (NOT a stranger!) snoozing, and you could BOTH win a brand new bed from Ikea. The winner is chosen at random from the five entries with the most votes.
It's still eight days until the voting ends, but take a look a the current top four. Two of the photos feature a child, when the terms and conditions state 'Entrants must not upload photographs of anyone aged under 18'. The other two entries are from a Cumbrian couple, Paul and Julie, who were recently disqualified from the Littlewoods Mum of the Year voting competition.
Poundland and Bupa recently ran similar competitions where their winners were judged from the ten most popular videos/photos. In the final 48 hours of BOTH these competitions, multiple (poor quality and mainly irrelevant) entries were submitted and gained 200+ votes in 24 hours to finish in the top ten. Luckily both Poundland and Bupa were on the ball and disqualified these entries at the judging stage - but there was still a lot of disappointment and anger amongst their Facebook fans, who couldn't understand why the entries were approved in the first place.
IKEA have included in their terms 'Fraudulent or deceptive voting practices are not permitted and any entrant that engages in such practices will be disqualified.' Most promoters now feel that including a term like this is enough to stop the cheats, and their technical team can check and disqualify votes from fake Facebook profiles, vote exchange or vote buying sites. What most companies don't realise is that many cheats can easily sabotage others' entries by voting for them with fake profiles, or by posting an anonymous vote request on a forum like freelancer.com, microworkers.com or one of the many Facebook voting exchange groups. They then email a link to the fake request to the promoter, or use another fake profile to post a screen grab onto the promoter's Facebook wall. THIS IS NOT FAR FETCHED. It happens, and if you want evidence and screenshots then feel free to email me.
I messaged IKEA via their Facebook page last week with a link to my recent blog post about cheating, suggesting they should check IP addresses and voter profiles for the top entries. They didn't respond. Yesterday I logged into Facebook to find this message in my Inbox - several other friends had also received it.
I took a look at IKEA's page to see if they had answered anyone's queries about the competition yet. I posted a response on this thread along the lines of 'Considering the investment you've put into the PR for this promotion, it would be good if you could actually start to respond to your messages and comments. It's not great customer service to ignore us!'. Not long afterwards, my comment was deleted and I was blocked from posting on their page. I returned to the thread to see that the same had happened to others - yet still no response from IKEA.
I'm aware that it's likely to be a PR company who control the IKEA social media channels, and on a Bank Holiday weekend they won't be paying as much attention as usual. But it's VERY important to respond to concerns and questions - yes, a complaint on a Facebook wall is bad PR, but a swift and polite response can also be very good PR. Removing comments entirely - and blocking your fans - should NEVER happen.
It's not just IKEA who are sweeping things under the rug. Yazoo Milkshake are also heavily promoting their 'Shake Squad' Facebook App, which offers a whopping ten grand to the best photo. They're judging the overall winner, but alongside this they're giving away £250 cash every week to the entry with the most votes. The competition has been running for 3 weeks, and for the last two weeks Yazoo have awarded the cash prize to the third placed contestant. They've not explained their reasons why, and aren't even publicly admitting this is the case. Indeed, their wall post announcing the latest winner says 'This week's winner of a cool £250 is Mark. His picture received the most votes this week'. Erm, that's not exactly true is it? They should say 'the most VALID votes' or 'the most ELIGIBLE' votes' - but that would be admitting there's a problem with cheating, so of course they wouldn't want to draw attention to that would they?
Yazoo rules simply state 'The weekly prizes will be awarded to the Entrant whose submission earns the highest number of votes within the competition gallery during the promotional period, as specified in point 3, providing they are eligible' - but there's no details of what constitutes an 'eligible' vote. If your husband and son vote for you from the same computer/IP address, are those votes ineligible?
Then there's the problem of whether people actually ARE cheating. The Yazoo entrants who were disqualified were informed that votes gained on their entry appeared fraudulent. One entrant claimed her votes increased significantly overnight and that her entry had been inflated by fake votes simply to get her disqualified.
And that's the problem: an entry has votes from fake Facebook profiles, the same IP address, or bulk votes received via a vote-buying forum. How can a promoter tell if these ineligible votes are being submitted by the entrant themselves, by a contact of the entrant, or by a fellow contestant trying to get the entrant disqualified? The truth is, they can't. So ANY voting competition can easily descend into a farce.
In an ideal world every photo, video and tiebreaker competition should be judged, but I understand that promoters want to get the viral results that a voting competition achieves. So why not try a different approach? Perhaps tiered prizes - any entrant with 10+ votes goes into a random draw for a small prize, any entrant with 30+ votes goes into a draw for a larger prize. Or every entry with a certain number of votes goes to the judging stage?
Promoters and PR agencies need to accept the fact that people WILL try and cheat - and even if they get disqualified from one competition, they will try and cheat again in another one. It's no good trying to sweep the fact under the carpet. And as long as we keep complaining about it and trying to warn promoters and agencies about these problems, then we CAN make a difference!
ENJOY PART 2: THE NAME AND SHAME HERE.... (sadly, a Cease & desist order meant the follow-up post has been removed by Google!)
IKEA have invested a lot into promoting their new 'Snap a Napper' competition - google it and it's all over PR and marketing websites. The promotional videos and photos look good, and the concept is fun too. Snap a photo of a friend or family member (NOT a stranger!) snoozing, and you could BOTH win a brand new bed from Ikea. The winner is chosen at random from the five entries with the most votes.
It's still eight days until the voting ends, but take a look a the current top four. Two of the photos feature a child, when the terms and conditions state 'Entrants must not upload photographs of anyone aged under 18'. The other two entries are from a Cumbrian couple, Paul and Julie, who were recently disqualified from the Littlewoods Mum of the Year voting competition.
Poundland and Bupa recently ran similar competitions where their winners were judged from the ten most popular videos/photos. In the final 48 hours of BOTH these competitions, multiple (poor quality and mainly irrelevant) entries were submitted and gained 200+ votes in 24 hours to finish in the top ten. Luckily both Poundland and Bupa were on the ball and disqualified these entries at the judging stage - but there was still a lot of disappointment and anger amongst their Facebook fans, who couldn't understand why the entries were approved in the first place.
IKEA have included in their terms 'Fraudulent or deceptive voting practices are not permitted and any entrant that engages in such practices will be disqualified.' Most promoters now feel that including a term like this is enough to stop the cheats, and their technical team can check and disqualify votes from fake Facebook profiles, vote exchange or vote buying sites. What most companies don't realise is that many cheats can easily sabotage others' entries by voting for them with fake profiles, or by posting an anonymous vote request on a forum like freelancer.com, microworkers.com or one of the many Facebook voting exchange groups. They then email a link to the fake request to the promoter, or use another fake profile to post a screen grab onto the promoter's Facebook wall. THIS IS NOT FAR FETCHED. It happens, and if you want evidence and screenshots then feel free to email me.
I messaged IKEA via their Facebook page last week with a link to my recent blog post about cheating, suggesting they should check IP addresses and voter profiles for the top entries. They didn't respond. Yesterday I logged into Facebook to find this message in my Inbox - several other friends had also received it.
I took a look at IKEA's page to see if they had answered anyone's queries about the competition yet. I posted a response on this thread along the lines of 'Considering the investment you've put into the PR for this promotion, it would be good if you could actually start to respond to your messages and comments. It's not great customer service to ignore us!'. Not long afterwards, my comment was deleted and I was blocked from posting on their page. I returned to the thread to see that the same had happened to others - yet still no response from IKEA.
I'm aware that it's likely to be a PR company who control the IKEA social media channels, and on a Bank Holiday weekend they won't be paying as much attention as usual. But it's VERY important to respond to concerns and questions - yes, a complaint on a Facebook wall is bad PR, but a swift and polite response can also be very good PR. Removing comments entirely - and blocking your fans - should NEVER happen.
It's not just IKEA who are sweeping things under the rug. Yazoo Milkshake are also heavily promoting their 'Shake Squad' Facebook App, which offers a whopping ten grand to the best photo. They're judging the overall winner, but alongside this they're giving away £250 cash every week to the entry with the most votes. The competition has been running for 3 weeks, and for the last two weeks Yazoo have awarded the cash prize to the third placed contestant. They've not explained their reasons why, and aren't even publicly admitting this is the case. Indeed, their wall post announcing the latest winner says 'This week's winner of a cool £250 is Mark. His picture received the most votes this week'. Erm, that's not exactly true is it? They should say 'the most VALID votes' or 'the most ELIGIBLE' votes' - but that would be admitting there's a problem with cheating, so of course they wouldn't want to draw attention to that would they?
Yazoo rules simply state 'The weekly prizes will be awarded to the Entrant whose submission earns the highest number of votes within the competition gallery during the promotional period, as specified in point 3, providing they are eligible' - but there's no details of what constitutes an 'eligible' vote. If your husband and son vote for you from the same computer/IP address, are those votes ineligible?
Then there's the problem of whether people actually ARE cheating. The Yazoo entrants who were disqualified were informed that votes gained on their entry appeared fraudulent. One entrant claimed her votes increased significantly overnight and that her entry had been inflated by fake votes simply to get her disqualified.
And that's the problem: an entry has votes from fake Facebook profiles, the same IP address, or bulk votes received via a vote-buying forum. How can a promoter tell if these ineligible votes are being submitted by the entrant themselves, by a contact of the entrant, or by a fellow contestant trying to get the entrant disqualified? The truth is, they can't. So ANY voting competition can easily descend into a farce.
In an ideal world every photo, video and tiebreaker competition should be judged, but I understand that promoters want to get the viral results that a voting competition achieves. So why not try a different approach? Perhaps tiered prizes - any entrant with 10+ votes goes into a random draw for a small prize, any entrant with 30+ votes goes into a draw for a larger prize. Or every entry with a certain number of votes goes to the judging stage?
Promoters and PR agencies need to accept the fact that people WILL try and cheat - and even if they get disqualified from one competition, they will try and cheat again in another one. It's no good trying to sweep the fact under the carpet. And as long as we keep complaining about it and trying to warn promoters and agencies about these problems, then we CAN make a difference!
ENJOY PART 2: THE NAME AND SHAME HERE.... (sadly, a Cease & desist order meant the follow-up post has been removed by Google!)
