Author: Donna DeClemente

I use the term Social Sweeps to describe a sweepstakes or contest promotion that integrates with social media platforms. This helps to provide participants flexibility in accessing and interacting with a promotion. By providing these various options for users to participate, you appeal to them more positively which helps to increase the participation rate. I’ve always been a big believer that by utilizing social media platforms you enable participants to share your promotion with their friends which allows them to get the word out for you faster and farther!

I came across a recent study that was conducted to learn more about how and why participants share the online promotions that they’ve entered on the various social platforms. The study was done by Easypromos in which they extracted data from more than 200 promotions that were running on their Premium Application from January-February, 2015, in which over 140,000 people took part.

We now get asked quite often about allowing participants to gain bonus entries for sharing which many promotions now include. For example, after a participant enters they are asked to share on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram and they gain additional entries for each share. However, if the promotion is being run on Facebook then you would be in violation of the Facebook policy if you encourage sharing to gain entries. Instead what most Facebook applications allow is for users to invite friends to enter the promotion and if that friend enters, the original user gets an extra entry.

The team at Easypromos created this infographic that displays the results of their study, so I thought I’d share it here. It does state that participants will share the promotion much more when they are offered an incentive, such as extra entries. Take a look.

The study did show that it was almost 50/50 between desktop vs. mobile and Facebook was the top social platform for sharing. However, on January 20th, Easypromos introduced instant messaging applications as another option for mobile users to share the promotion. In that short time WhatsApp became the second most-chosen platform for sharing promotions from a mobile device: 17.19% of shares were done through this app. So this is definitely a trend to watch.  Thanks to Easypromos for compiling and sharing the data.

They say that Spring is here, but it appears to be more prevalent in some parts of the country than others. Just watching the news I see people outside in t-shirts and shorts. Haven’t gotten there yet in Western New York. Maybe this weekend!

For those of you that live or are traveling through the state of Virginia you will undoubtedly begin to see the iconic LOVE letters. The State of Virginia’s traveling LOVEwork sculpture ties into their tourism slogan, “Virginia is for Lovers”.  We’ve been working with the marketing team at Colonial Williamsburg through our sister company, Alliance Sweepstakes, for about five years now and they are extremely excited to host the LOVE letters for the first time.

Through an agreement with the Virginia Tourism Corporation and working with the Garden Clubs of Virginia, they have timed the arrival of the letters during Historic Garden Week. The letters will reside on Duke of Gloucester Street in Merchants Square, April 17-23. In celebration of the sculpture’s arrival, Colonial Williamsburg Merchants Square will be running the “Share the LOVE” photo sweepstakes during that week. Here’s how it works:

• People are invited to take a picture of the LOVE letters
• Then they must visit either the Colonial Williamsburg Merchants Square website or Facebook Page and follow the links to the Sweepstakes entry form
• Once there they fill out the form, upload a photo, and once it’s submitted and approved, the photo will be shared in the promotion’s photo gallery.
• For those that would like to use Instagram, the can first post their photo there using the #LOVEMSQSweeps hashtag. Once on the entry form, they will have the option to upload their photo from Instagram.

Each photo submitted will count as an entry into the Sweepstakes for a chance to win one of three $800 prize packages, including a $500 Merchants Square shopping spree and two statewide passes to the 2016 Garden Club of Virginia Historic Garden Week. Many of the Merchants are planning special events while the letters are in town along with the Williamsburg Farmer’s Market on Saturdays.

As with the Kiss Nail Products Dream Vacation Sweepstakes that I wrote about here a couple of weeks ago, we are also hosting and managing the entry form for this Share the Love Sweepstakes. So again we are using my favorite app for this, Shortstack. The app allows us to install the promotion to a tab on the Colonial Williamsburg Merchants Square Facebook Page as well as host it online so the Sponsor can link to it from their website and emails.

Shortstack just announced their new and improved analytic reports. Now you can easily know in real time where your traffic is coming from, whether it’s from search engines, websites, social media platforms or email. Also how people access your promotion, via Facebook vs. the web, or via a page embedded on your website. Or what device they used, a mobile phone, tablet or desktop, and what type of platform they came from.

So if you’re in the Williamsburg, VA, area starting next week be sure to check out the letters and take a photo. This is the first time that Colonial Williamsburg is including Instagram as an option, so we’re really interested to see how many participants use this platform and share their photos there. The letters, together with it being Virginia’s Historic Garden Week , should make for some great photos!  Can’t wait to see them. Welcome Spring!

Facebook hosted their annual conference for developers last week known as F8. This is where Facebook previews their newest and latest products and tools for developers. I always thought it would be really interesting to attend even though I’m not a developer. But this 2-day event takes place on the west coast, this year in San Fransisco, so it’s hard for me to justify the trip. This year I received an invitation to register to attend the conference via their live streaming site, so  I did. The site not only let you view the sessions in real time, but also view the videos of the major sessions anytime .

To kick off the conference Facebook first unveiled big plans for Messenger, the separate app that they spun off from the basic Facebook platform that allows you to message anyone on the platform. Facebook is now opening Messenger’s API to third-party developers, which means this extra app that you had to download on your phone is going to become a social network in itself. Facebook is starting off with 40 apps such as those that allow people to send GIFs from Giphy, order a cab, or even transfer payments to friends. Launch partners include ESPN, JibJab, The Weather Channel, Selfied, Stickered, Sound Clips and Meme Generator.

You will have to downloaded separately all these apps that work with Messenger which means I probably should have upgraded my iPhone last time to a larger storage capacity. So instead of Messenger just being another chat platform that you’re reluctant to use, instead it may soon be an extremely useful tool that you’ll use without thinking twice. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told F8 attendees “By opening up Messenger as a platform, we’re going to help people express themselves in new ways”.

Also previewed at the F8 conference was Business for Messenger that I find quite interesting. This tool “enables people to have rich and personal conversations with businesses.” The Businesses on Messenger program facilitates direct conversations between brands, businesses and consumers, and will provide a direct channel for updates and notifications. Initially Facebook is positioning this as a great tool for ecommerce where after a customer makes a purchase on the site they could opt to receive Messenger updates, including order confirmations, shipping status, order tracking or simply to ask questions. Partners include Everlane and Zulily and Zendesk will support the service’s live chat feature.

This opens up a whole new way for businesses to communicate with customers. Right now people can try to call a company and go through rounds of prompts to get to speak with someone live, or message a company on their Facebook page, or send them a tweet and then hope you’ll hear back from someone. Zuckerberg called the current state of customer service abysmal. “It just doesn’t feel like the future,” he said. In its place, “we’re making Messenger a place where [people] can connect with businesses.”

So if Business for Messenger does take off, it could have a huge affect on promotional marketing. Right now most businesses rely on their email database to communicate with customers. Some have been expanding their databases to include opt-in text message lists. However, here is a way to grow a new database where you can reach out to customers on their phone without having to even know their phone number. You can announce new promotions to people, such as sweepstakes and contests, and you can even offer support for these promotions as a way to answer any questions and include photos if needed. It could be a much easier way to notify winners without having to worry that your email might end up in a spam folder or your phone message was ignored and deleted.

I am curious to see what brands start to integrate this tool for promotional marketing in the coming year. I’m going to start to ask them about it. Any thoughts or plans you may have please share. Who knows, Mr. Zuckerberg may be right….the future just might be here.

Sweepstakes promotions help to build and grow your customer database, as well as to drive excitement around your brand, which are great reasons for running these types of promotions. However, sweepstakes can offer so many more marketing opportunities.

One important goal you can achieve with a sweepstakes promotion is to gather consumer insights. You can use this promotional tool as an opportunity to get to know your customers and prospective customers, their preferences and how they may interact with your products or brand. One of our clients, Kiss Nail Products, is doing this right now with their Dream Vacation Sweepstakes.

Kiss Nail Products recently launched this sweepstakes and are running it on their website and  Facebook Page.They are running this promotion for the second time in which they are including a brief survey in the entry form. There are a total of five simple questions on the entry form. First they are asking what age group and ethnic background the participant is from. Then they ask product specific questions such as “Do you use at-home artificial nail products? and if so please select which types you use from the below choices”. If the answer is yes, then the participant proceeds to answer the next two questions.

This sweepstakes if running through June 30. Once it ends we will draw one Grand Prize Winner who will receive a $5,000 Delta Vacations Gift card that they can use to book their dream vacation anywhere that Delta Airlines flies to (which is worldwide). We have recommended using Delta Vacations gift cards in the past as an easy way to give the winner flexibility on where, when, and with whom they want to travel.

As with the Zaxby’s That’s A Fact Zax Sweepstakes that I wrote about here a couple of weeks ago, we are also hosting and managing the entry form for this Dream Vacation Sweepstakes. So again we are using my favorite app for this, Shortstack. The app allowed us to install the promotion to a tab on the Kiss Nail Products Facebook page and also allowed me to provide the client with a code to embed the form directly on their webiste. Shortstack offers both these along with hosting it online on a separate micro site that the sponsor can link to.

Kiss Nails has already over 3,000 entries into the sweepstakes and it appears that the majority are answering the optional survey questions. So it may be time to consider running a sweepstakes for more reasons then just to drive traffic. Explore ways that you could integrate a sweepstakes promotion into your other marketing initiatives and turn it into a valuable marketing tool. We would be glad to discuss your needs and ideas to help make this happen.

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) men’s Division 1 basketball tournament, also known as March Madness,  is again upon us. This three-week event is a sure sign that Spring is here. This is when fans are placing their bets and filling out brackets, all with the hope of winning some money.

I’ve never been a big college basketball fan, but I did get caught up in the excitement last year. I was a in a local bar on a Friday afternoon in March after attending a funeral service of a close friend who had recently passed from cancer. So of course all the TV’s in the bar where turned on to basketball. This is where we witnessed one of the biggest upsets pulled off by a Cinderella team in an NCAA tournament…. the No. 14 Mercer Bears achieved a 78-71 victory over the No. 3 Duke Blue Devils! I could tell by the excitement of my friends in the bar and what we saw on TV that this was really a big deal. It almost seemed like a sign from the almighty that day.

So this year I thought I should read up on the teams and get a little more involved. My daily morning email from #theSkimm gave me a pretty good overview of the tournament and invited me to join the #SkimMadness bracket, which is actually part of the Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick’em brackets promotion. I went ahead and did what most of our co-workers and friends are doing now and filled out my bracket which Yahoo named for me “Donna D’s Glorious Bracket”. Yahoo provides a quick overview of each match-up along with each team’s standings and a percentage of who picked which team. So I picked mostly the favorites, but tried to include a couple of upsets.

The Yahoo Sports “Big March Promotion” is giving away prizes at the conclusion of the 2015 tournament in two categories. The first is for the “Best Bracket” with a prize of $50,000 that will be awarded to the bracket that receives the highest score (using Yahoo’s Default Scoring formula). The second category is for the “Celebrity Brackets” that invite people to join various celebrity pools for a chance to win the prize associated with that pool. All brackets must be submitted before the published tip-off time of the first tournament game on Thursday, March 19 which I believe is noon ET.

There are so many different bracket challenges that invite people to participate, not just this one. There’s this “Official NCAA Bracket Challenge” presented by Dove’s Men +Care. The participate of this challenge that has the highest score will win four trips for winner and guest to four sporting events of the winner’s choice that includes airfare, hotel and tickets to the events. There is also this “Official NCAA Bracket Challenge” present by Capital One that let’s you join many groups that they list or create your own group. I also found the Allstate Mayhem Bracket Predictor. I just read this article that states that the chances of picking a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion!

With all these bracket challenges it just proves that the NCAA’s March Madness is big money. According to this report in eMarketer, 2014 ad spending was $1,134 million. They claim that TV ad spending has leveled out and more and more of the corporate sponsors are putting their dollars into digital, with heavy emphasis on social media. A recent study by Catalyst states that 72% of US sports fans engaged with college basketball-related content last year on Facebook, and Twitter and Google+ were each used by around four in 10. While Snapchat wasn’t included in this study, they will play a part this year with branded sponsorships on its “Our Story” feature during the Final Four round of the championship.

There are 64 teams in the tournament which you can watch the games on TV, online or get the app. These teams compete to make the Sweet 16, the Elite 8, the Final Four and ultimately the Championship game that will be played on April 6 in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. You can watch the game on CBS and Turner Sports. At this point if you want tickets to the game, expect to pay top dollar and good luck finding a hotel room or airfare close to the city.

One of our clients, Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt, has teamed up with Hershey’s, who is a NCAA corporate sponsor, offering a chance to win tickets to the 2016 Final Four games which will be held in Houston, TX, on April 2 and 4, 2016. The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Slam Dunk Sweepstakes is open to the end of March and is promoting the new flavor made with real Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups offered only at Menchie’s. We’ll be coordinating the trip with the winner, so enter now.

Unfortunately we won’t be seeing our Syracuse Orange team in the tournament this year. However, we will be seeing the Buffalo Bulls in for the first time ever. Go Bulls. Could they be this year’s Cinderella team?

In our profession we’ve all attended a few conferences, some good, some just okay. But have you ever been to one where there are dogs and cats (and a few ferrets) attending with you? That’s my favorite part of the BlogPaws Pet Blogging and Social Media Conference. I have written about BlogPaws several times here and the BlogPaws 2015 Conference is now just a little over two months away!

This year it’s heading south to Nashville, Tennessee, for the first time. The conference is scheduled for May 28-30 at the Sheraton Music City Hotel. This will be my fifth time speaking at the conference. I’ve only missed one, which was last year’s conference in Lake Las Vegas. My friends and fellow blogging colleagues, Yvonne DiVita and her partner, Tom Collins,  introduced BlogPaws at the start of 2010 and held the first conference in Columbus, OH. Since then they’ve been very busy turning it into the premier online pet community and a leading go-to-resource.

Attendees are usually comprised of a large group of pet bloggers, online pet enthusiasts and marketers of pet brands. The conference sessions range from tips on creating great content, to SEO and WordPress web advice, to the business of blogging, to managing fund raising events such as “Twitter-pawties,” to running contest apps on Facebook and other social media platforms including Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and more. My session will cover the Key Legal Developments Affecting Sweepstakes, Contests and Social Media. While a majority of the attendees publish about — or in some cases AS their pets — the topics apply broadly to anyone who wants to learn more about effective use of social media.

The BlogPaws team just revealed their finalists for their 2015 Nose-to-Nose Pet Blogging and Social Media Awards. They received over 1,000 nominations this year in 12 different categories. I had the honor of being one of the judges this year in which I reviewed the entries in the Cause Category. It was such a hard category to judge. Each of of the websites nominated is doing a great service to help these animals find “forever homes” and to bring awareness to issues, such as how to raise a deaf dog in your home, Deaf Dogs Rock, and the life of some “Big Cats” at the Conservation Club.

The winners will be awarded at the BlogPaws 2015 Conference at a Red Carpet, media-covered ceremony that will take place on Saturday evening, May 30th. You can check out all the finalists here. You can also take a look at this video below shot at the 2014 Red Carpet awards. There is still plenty of time to register. If you’re interested in attending please contact me and I can offer you a special speaker discount. Would love to see you all in Nashville!

I am celebrating 8 years of blogging this week. My first blog post was published on February 27, 2007, on Donna’s Promo Talk which was my first real experience into the new world of social media. As a marketing professional my blog was to be written for other marketers to help keep us up to date on the latest promotions, trends and legal issues affecting the industry. As time went on social media grew and so did my number of posts on the integration of promotional and social media marketing. After 690 posts, the main focus of my blogging still remains true to my original mission.

I decided to write my first two posts on one of my favorite brands, Dove. The first post was about the Energy Glow Contest Dove was running and the next one was about a consumer-generated contest for Dove’s Cream Oil Body Wash. This contest invited participants to create and submit a video promoting the product which Dove would then run the winning video during the broadcast of that year’s Oscars. Now I’ve picked up a few traditions over the years that I follow, one which is to write about Dove each year on my blog anniversary. So this year is no exception.

Both of those contests were part of Dove’s “Campaign For Real Beauty” which they first launched in 2004 which now makes the campaign over 10 years old. Each year Dove has kept the campaign new and fresh and they continue to promote the campaign’s original mission which is to widen the definition of beauty and nurture the self-esteem of young girls and women throughout the world. Dove claims that they’ve made progress, but still have a way to go.

This year Dove introduced the #SpeakBeautiful initiative which builds on their Campaign for Real Beauty but in a real social media way. “With #SpeakBeautiful, Dove is asking women to consider the power of a single social media post.” states Jennifer Bremner, director of marketing at Dove.  “As a beauty brand … we believe it is our responsibility to inspire change for women on social media. Women today are 50% more likely to say something negative about themselves, than positive, on social media,” according to Bremner.

Dove started this initiative by posting this video featured below that also aired during the red-carpet coverage of Sunday’s Oscars. They’re inviting women to post on Twitter one thing that they love about themselves, or a friend, and use the #SpeakBeautiful hashtag. They claim that last year women sent over 5 million negative Tweets about beauty and body image and so now they’re asking women to join Dove and Twitter in this partnership for social change.

Dove’s video says that it “only takes one positive tweet to start a trend.” So they decided to take this one step further and tie it in with one of the most fashion-focused nights in television, the Oscars. As the stars hit the red carpet on Oscar night they encouraged Twitter users to go easy on the fashion and beauty advice. Dove ended up receiving nearly 30,000 mentions on social media, 91% of them positive, according to Amobee.

Using special technology Dove explained: “When a negative tweet is posted the technology sends non-automated responses to real women, which include constructive and accessible advice to encourage more positive online language and habits. Advice is coming directly from social media and self-esteem experts who are collaborating with Dove and Twitter to empower women to speak with more confidence, optimism and kindness about beauty online.”

I would like to thank all of you that have been readers and supported me over the years. I hope to continue blogging for sometime (and my coverage of Dove). My birthday celebration wouldn’t be complete without thanking my good friend and founder of the Lipsticking blog and BlogPaws, Yvonne DiVita, along with her business partner and husband, Tom Collins, for helping me get started. I’ll be joining them in Nashville this May as a speaker again for the 2015 Annual BlogPaws Conference. Check out the details about this great social media conference that includes many different sessions and speakers along with some adorable four-legged friends. If you’re interested in attending let me know and I can offer you a conference discount. Thanks again and thanks to all my old and new readers for sticking with me.