How to make a competition so that more than 2 people participate in it

I think almost everyone here remembers the recent competition for the MS-tablet, which called for a bunch of still-born topics and caused some boiling up. It was an example of how it can be done popularly, actively, dynamically, but not in the subject. The problem is that sometimes even this does not work.

If you yourself held contests and everything was ok - do not read the topic. If somewhere waited for a bummer - welcome under the cat.

The story is simple: at some point I decided to try to launch a contest with us and realized that I don’t know how to make it soar. The problem is that the contests that I have seen from other companies either collected two and a half people, or looked like a shaped misrepresentation. After a series of experiments, we got a more or less stable understanding of how to do it.
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Choosing a prize

The prize is the motivation to participate, our main counterargument of laziness. The difficulty here is that at the moment of reading the conditions of the competition, laziness integrated into each participant begins to whisper something like this: “Dude, well, you don’t need him! Why do you need to waste your time if the prize is not visible to you as your own ears? ” At this point, you need to convince that the prize is worthy of some action and can be obtained.

General principle: the main prize should be very desirable . For him, people will come to you at all. A large apple gland, for example, is quite suitable. There is, however, a very important point. From the appearance of such a prize, a participant begins to salivate ... but in the depths of his soul almost everyone does not believe in luck. Wants to believe, but does not believe. Therefore, you need several prizes. In principle, it is not very important what will be the second, third, fourth, twentieth prizes - it is necessary that a person also wants these things a little and think that since the main thing did not come out, one of them will definitely be him. There is also an important objection from the late Soviet past - “well, still, they will give the main prize to theirs”. Several prizes and the previous history of competitions help to remove it.

The most popular mistake - to put a prize to something from the range. Your customer may not need your products at all: either he has such a thing, or he wants another one, or, the most neglected option, you give a prize to something that could not be sold. This all dramatically reduces the number of participants. A good option is to make a prize a certificate for the purchase of any items in the store (and immediately show examples of “sets” that you can buy to “drool saliva”). This, by the way, I learned from Smile - they have only one certificate for several types of entertainment, among which you need to choose. When you take such a box, it seems that there is very dofig everything. With a prize as well: one main prize in the form of a certificate and 5 examples of its implementation will accurately hook all your main audience segments. Just a certificate in itself is an abstraction that must be specified.

I also like the idea of ​​assigning a small prize to a pair of randomly selected participants. It encourages the participation of even those who feel quite far from the topic or do not see the point of participating at all. Plus it keeps the tension and anticipation to the very end.

Conditions of the competition

The first criterion - laziness - is unwillingness to do something complicated and special. For example, our traditional competition for a romantic couple for February 14 is very simple for the user to implement: you just need to attach a photo from your album. And the competition “you with your favorite desktop” is difficult, because you need to go and take pictures.

The second criterion is security . First, a person must clearly understand what exactly needs to be done to participate and what steps will be next - this is prescribed in the rules. Secondly, few people want to unwind other people's resources. The safest place is a personal blog or a page on the social network: it is on it that you can do a lot that a person would never do on someone else’s website or in an incomprehensible group. When I realized that we ourselves had to go visit people, and not call them to ourselves, it turned out to be simply huge contests. The mechanics are simple - “write to YOURSELF in a blog and ...”

I also refused all registrations and other official things. To participate, it is enough to make a simple action, for example, send a letter with a link to your topic - and that’s enough. You can ask for your name and address later if the person wins something. By the way, because of this, at first there was a problem with delivery across the CIS: people won, suddenly, from Belarus and Ukraine.

Increase conversion

Feedback should be instantaneous and expected - a small reinforcement is needed for everyone who will participate in the competition in order for them to simply start doing something. For example, in our blogger contests, a link was immediately put to every new written topic - for someone it was an SEO bonus, for someone else there were a few dozen readers.

Another incentive may be some store bonuses (discount for the next order, a small souvenir, etc.) or even a member certificate sent by mail. The user thinks like this: “Even if I won nothing, after 5 minutes I will have something concrete. Okay, I will try. ”I don’t like to participate in contests, but I’ve been to this many times before.

Progress information

In the competition is important dynamics. It is necessary to update the contest status every day so that the participants can track what is happening, and the audience can see that there is a real movement and it is necessary to participate. Realtime is even better.

Victory criteria

It is important not to turn the competition into a census of friends who clicked like. This, of course, is a good method of group promotion, but very much one-time and causing negative. The criterion for achieving victory should depend only on the contribution of the participants. The number of friends should not affect the result.

You should not breed local democracy: the “people's choice” among the participants causes far less trust than the choice of an outside jury. But you can make a prize of sympathy from the participants.

It is necessary to give equal chances in time: the participant who joined on the last day should not have less chances than the one who knew about the competition in advance. By the way, many photo contests collecting huskies are wrong with this.

There should not be many nominations. Complicated victory criteria mean that it is not clear what to do - and the person believes that it is better not to participate. Three nominations are probably optimal. Better then select another one and give an additional prize, but do not load the conditions.

Sowing

Competition without attracting an additional audience makes almost no sense (if not to talk about stimulating repeat purchases, but this is a rare case). Consider the contest as a smart informational occasion, send out all the required press releases, inform the thematic communities in LiveJournal - and, most importantly, make sure that the contest with development captures new people.

The social mechanism is very simple: each participant must report that he participates in the competition.

Two kick

At the 60th and 90th percent of the competition period, you need to do a mini-review of what has already happened and tell you again what will happen next. This is necessary in order to remind those who are still thinking about the competition, plus encourage several other people to participate. And in general, these are good news feeds within your social media. I will definitely make a reminder 3 days before the end of the contest, because I myself remember very well how I tried several, forgetting when they had deadlines.

Summarizing

Summing up is a stress for those who did not receive a prize and joy for those who won. Despite the fact that everyone in his heart believed that he would not win (and rejoices in this prize), everyone also in his heart believed that he would take the main prize - and therefore the lack of such is shock.

To mitigate this, it is imperative to tell about all the participants in the final information: who did what and why it could not, which was good. After that, you need to do some more small and pleasant thing to all those who participated, thanking them for their patience: for example, to hand over a discount card. Member it really earned, believe me.

UPD: examples . Our major competition with well-written conditions for the last new year. MS contest : it caused a boiling up because it was cut off from the Habr rating system and produced weak articles in tons. Intel's very fussy Miss Sys with a whole story about awarding prizes. HTC Contest , Favorite on Habré (estimate another rake: the domain of the promo site is over, the link is in the topic). Plus, we are currently having a twitter contest that contains experimental extraction of data from the topic. By the way, thanks to him, I systematized all this - and I will be happy with any advice on implementation that I missed.

Check list:

• A good prize (you should be sorry to give it to him).
• Simple conditions, clear criteria for winning (everything should fit in one tweet).
• Transparent course of the competition (the person must immediately represent the chain from participation to the receipt of the prize).
• Sow wherever you reach.
• Permanent display of dynamics.
• Two reviews with reminders - a little later in the middle and at the end.
• Make a holiday from summarizing and tell about all.
• Announce the next competition if it is scheduled.

Yes! One more thing: if you see that there is a shortage of prizes somewhere and it’s just a pity to leave someone without a prize, don’t pinch, give extra. For the first time I had it with people who were out of formal demands, but did something unusual and outstanding. The second time it happened was when we decided for a very long time which of the two participants to give the prize to - in the end they gave to both. For the third time, the participants themselves asked to hand in a prize to one of those who did not win: of course, we met.

UPD: Have you ever participated in contests? What attracted - a prize or an interesting motion?