June 2015 - American Sweepstakes

Menchie’s Sweet Summer Getaway kicks off the summer promotions

Say hello to summer with Frozen Yogurt! To help celebrate the first full week of summer here’s a new sweepstakes from Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt that we helped launch. Their “Sweet Summer Giveaway” sweepstakes offers the chance to win a 7-day Caribbean cruise for up to four people courtesy of Princess Cruises.

From now up till July 31 Menchie’s customers will automatically receive one entry into the Sweepstakes when they use their registered Menchie’s loyalty card at any Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt store. Those that don’t have a card are invited to stop in any location and register for their My Smileage club. Participants can also enter online at a promotional micro-site and off the the Menchie’s Facebook page.

Menchie’s has locations in 37 states in the U.S.. as well as D.C., and many in Canada as well. Last summer Menchie’s partnered with Hershey on the Hershey’s Experience Sweepstakes to help promote their new Chocolate Glazed Toffee Bar flavor. The prize last year was a family vacation to Hershey’s Chocolate World and Hershey Park Attractions. This year instead they are partnering with Princess Cruises and providing them with some added exposure.

The sweepstakes is being promoted within Menchie’s locations with posters and other point-of-sale and on their social media sites. We set up the Sweepstakes entry pages for Menchie’s and again are using the Shortstack Application. Shortstack first started out as a Facebook application, but last year they broaden the capabilities of their platform and you can now not only install the app on a Facebook tab page, but you can also embed the entry form on any webpage or host online as a separate promotional micro-site which we are doing here. Both entry forms are utilizing the same graphics and all entries go into one database. Therefore this allows for only one entry per day, per person’s email address regardless of what method they entered from.

All entry pages are mobile friendly from the start with Shortstack’s “One Campaign for any screen” design philosophy. If you would like more details on how to set up a promotion utilizing the Shortstack platform, please feel free to contact me. It’s a great tool and it also includes a great team of support people.

Enjoy the summer and come back here to read about some more popular summertime promotions. Don’t forget to enjoy some frozen yogurt and ice cream. My favorite flavor has always been pistachio!

Joffery’s Magic in Your Mug Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes vs. Contests

I included a summary of the promotional guidelines from the various social media platforms that I had presented in my recent session at the BlogPaws Conference in Nashville in last week’s blog post. So in keeping with some of this presentation content I thought I would share here the question that we get asked quite often….what is the difference between a sweepstakes (giveaway) and a contest and why chose one over the other? So here goes.

Why Run a Sweepstakes?
First of, sweepstakes are a game of chance, a random drawing, and are also referred to quite often as giveaways. Sweepstakes can help create awareness and excitement around your brand, company or organization. They can help to reach your desired objectives by just running on their own or acting as an overlay to your overall marketing program.They are a great way to easily build or grow your database via email or mobile text messaging by collecting user data.

Sweepstakes are highly measurable and can be very effective when integrated with the right incentive. Therefore, an effective sweepstakes will not only offer participants the chance to win great prizes, but can help you reach some of the following objectives:

– Build and expand your database: entries capture user information
– Drive traffic to your website, social media channels or to your physical locations
– Keep your prize budget manageable, you set the prize package up front
– Reinforce the features and benefits of your brand/service/company through themed sweepstakes and prize tie-ins
– Entice consumers with hard-to-get prizes: leveraging existing partnerships and sponsorships and your own products

Here’s an example of a sweepstakes that is running now for Joffrey’s Coffee that we are administering. It’s a simple random draw that will award one lucky grand prize winner a Disney World vacation by just filling out and submitting the online entry form. Joffrey’s is the official coffee of Walt Disney World so this is a great example of how they are utilizing their partnership with Disney to promote their brand.

Why Run a Contest?
Like sweepstakes, contests also generate buzz and awareness and are a great fit for offering a chance to win a great prize. Unlike sweepstakes, contests are defined as a game of skill, not chance. A contest must be judged based on a degree of skill or uniqueness, and this judging criteria must be stated in the official rules. In a contest you are asking people to do some work to enter, therefore you may receive fewer entries for a contest then from just a random-draw sweepstakes, however they will be more likely to be higher quality.

The most common types of contests today include user-generated content such as photo, video, essay, recipe and design contests. Submissions are then judged or evaluated based on the contest theme and judging criteria and in some cases open for public voting. If you run a contest that invites participants to submit a photo or video you increase the chances that they will share their submission on social media.

So if your marketing goals are as follows, here is why contests are the better tactic:

– Reinforce your brand attributes: customers’ photos, videos and essays highlighting your strengths speak volumes
– Elicit user-generated content that can then be used in your future promotions
– Your engaged followers will help spread the word for you, especially through social channels

Pictured above is an example of an ongoing photo contest we’ve been assisting the team at Rail Europe with. They have been running this monthly on their Facebook page as a way to engage with their followers and build a nice database of photos of iconic Europe scenery.

Sweepstakes and contests must both follow the lottery laws which state that any purchase or payment is not allowed in order to enter. If so, then an alternate means of entry without purchase must be included. Contests however can include a purchase if it’s required to create the submission that will be judged. If you’re interested in discussing your needs and what may be the best tactic for your marketing efforts, please feel free to contact me.

Here’s a summary of the various social media promotion guidelines

Last week at the 7th annual BlogPaws Conference in Nashville I presented a session titled Key Legal Developments in Sweepstakes, Contests and Social Media. So I thought I’d share here a recap of the section that covers the broad array of the guidelines for promotions from the various social media platforms.

Facebook
Back on August 7, 2014, Facebook announced on it’s Developer’s Page that it no longer would allow Like Gating. They gave developers and page administers a 3 month window to make any adjustments to their apps which went into effect in November. Here’s what they stated:

“You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.”

So you certainly can still ask fans to like your page, “Don’t forget to Like our page”. You just can’t make it mandatory in order to enter a sweepstakes or contest.

Then about a month after this announcement Facebook then changed their Promotional Guidelines again and stated that you no longer have to use an 3rd-party app and can run Sweepstakes and Contest promotions right on your Page’s Timeline by simply asking fans to Comment on or Like a post as a way to enter. We’ve seen some promotions run this way since the change, but the majority still appear to be using an app. The issue with running a promotion right on your page is that you are not collecting data on the participants and therefore it’s hard to contact the winner(s). So it all depends on what your objectives are in choosing which method to follow.

Twitter
Twitter’s Guidelines are pretty simple and overall they want to avoid “spammy” posts filling up their platform. When running contests or sweepstakes they ask businesses to ensure that participants follow their overall guidelines which include:

– Discourage posting the same Tweet repeatedly. This means do not create a sweepstakes where the most retweets win.
– Discourage the creation of multiple accounts in order to gain extra entries.
– A good practice is to always ask users to include an @ reply to ensure you can view all entries.
– Encourage the use of posts that are relevant to the contest. Don’t use a hashtag that is not related to the topic.

Instagram
Instagram’s Promotional Guidelines are somewhat similar to the other social media platforms which they encourage having a set of official rules that are legally compliant with the applicable rules and regulations for running a sweepstakes or contest. They also want the rules to state that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram (as you should do with any social media platform that you are including as a method of entry.

The only additional guideline is do not inaccurately tag content or encourage users to inaccurately tag content (ex: don’t encourage people to tag themselves in photos if they aren’t in the photo).

Pinterest
Pinterest came out with some updates to their Brand Guidelines to include best practices for sweepstakes and contests. Here are some of the dont’s they suggest :

– Don’t suggest that Pinterest sponsors or endorses you or your promotion.
– Don’t require people to Pin from a selection – let them pin what they like,
– Don’t make people pin or repin your contest rules.
– Don’t run a sweepstakes where each pin, repin, board, like or follow represents an entry.
– Don’t encourage spammy behavior, such as asking participants to comment.
– Don’t ask people to vote with pins, repins, boards, or likes.
– Don’t overdo it: contests can get old fast.
– Don’t require a minimum number of pins. One is plenty.

Google + – Does still not allow promotions on their platform. You are only able to promote it on this platform.

FTC – Federal Trade Commission
Besides the social media platform guidelines, you should also be aware of updates on the FTC endorsement and testimonial policy. They recently published a list of Q&A’s that you may want to take a look at. When it comes to sweepstakes and contests they state that any incentive, no matter how minimal such as an entry into a contest or sweepstakes for making a post on social media sites, may be an endorsement. Thus it requires a disclosure. The use of the promotion title alone is not adequate, and they are encouraging including #Contest or #Sweepstakes or #Entry or similar designation in a hashtag. The recent updated Q&A’s say that using #sweeps is not enough and instead it should be the whole word in this case.

That’s all the latest that I’m aware of. They change on a regular basis, so it’s tough to stay updated, but hopefully this summary will be of help to all. If you have any further updates you are aware of please share them here.

BlogPaws 2015 Conference Recap from Nashville

Just back from Nashville and the 7th BlogPaws Conference which was again another great event. I got to present on Saturday, day 2 of the conference, on Key Legal Developments in Sweepstakes, Contests and Social Media. Even though I was one of the break-out sessions scheduled after lunch, we had a good turn-out with some great questions from the audience (along with a couple of shout-outs from a few dogs!). I will be uploading the presentation to our LinkedIn profile here www.linkedin.com/company/american-sweepstakes-&-promotion-company if interested.

For those that are not familiar, the Blog Paws Conference is catered to pet bloggers to help them grow and learn social media skills. But it is also a great event for anyone interested in building their brand online. It’s the only conference were you’ll find some attendees wearing cat ears along with those that have brought their dogs and cats and this year, ducks, pigs, ferrets and even a rat! So I wanted to share here a few of the highlights and photos of the conference.

One of the speakers I was really looking forward to was Peter Shankman, a PR and social media marketing consultant, speaker, author and founder of Help a Reporter Out, who took the stage as Friday morning’s keynote speaker. He was very engaging and had us all laughing pretty hard. This was the third time I heard him speak and was glad to that he is still saying that one of the key rules today in the world of media and marketing is “Transparency”. I’ve been repeating that rule in many of my own presentations ever since. Peter used the new Periscope app to live tweet part of his presentation on Twitter, so I decided to do it as well. It was one of my first times using this new app. I was able to upload here it to YouTube. So take a look, this excerpt quite funny.

The BlogPaws team is still tallying some of the final numbers they were able to donate to various local shelters, but they stated last night in a Twitter Chat (#BlogPawsChat) that approximately $18k in cash, 27k+ lbs of food and over $5k in product was donated from #BlogPaws 2015! Next year’s conference was announced to be held in Phoenix, June 23-25. You can click on the image to register.

Please enjoy some of the photos I took of a few of this year’s pet attendees! Hope to be back next year!

www.linkedin.com/company/american-sweepstakes-&-promotion-companywww.linkedin.com/com

pany/american-sweepstakes-&-promotion-company