There were quite a few etiquettes which we followed while conducting the online contests.
Be professional
To maintain a professional touch to the contests, a dedicated mailbox was created for the social media team so that the participants could mail us the entries instead of commenting beneath the posters. The mails were acknowledged at the earliest which won the trust of the participants. A response template was created which simplified our work.
Building the audience
We projected the participants’ entries by preparing flyers with the picture and the text of each participant. The entries getting featured in the “Ovation 2013” page through personalised flyers grabbed the audience attention and thereby it helped build our audience. To cover the Toastmasters from other Divisions, each of us in the social media team got the access to post in other Division groups. Apart from posting in our page, we shared the posts in those groups which was instrumental in attracting crowd. During our initial days, we also shared the participants’ entries on their timelines since their friends would get to know about it. This in turn widened our circle of followers. Also for a month, an ad on Facebook was created which targeted Toastmasters and people interested in communication and leadership. This helped to build a bigger audience. So keep trying all possible combinations, you never know which might work. 🙂
Targeting non-hosts
The non-hosts are much more important and they need to feel at home. Since the participation of non host Divisions was comparatively lesser than that of the host Division, we projected their participation as much as we can. They were recognized via posters which were posted in the page and their Division groups. To see one’s buddy winning a contest / getting featured in a page, expanded the circle and increased the participation ultimately.
Track everything
As we started getting substantial posts, it became essential that we had to maintain a tracker to keep track of our posts. A Google spreadsheet was created which had the columns – date, posters for the day and the owner of each poster. Everyone could refer to the document anytime to know their deadlines. We made sure that there was a good blend of all the contest posts and not focussing on one particular contest alone.
Have a template
For contests like “I love my mentor”, “Signature contest” etc, a template poster was prepared. So when we got entries, it was easy for us to work since there were minimal changes to be done. This also facilitated new members to work with ease when they were assigned to design the posters.
Rewards and Recognition
For contests like “Pirates of Marina” and “Thajini”, a new question was posted every week and the answer of the previous question and the winner were announced. Special flyers were designed with the caricatures of famous personality wishing the winner of each week. These contests had a series of questions and the person to score the maximum points was awarded crazy titles like “Jack sparrow of Marina” and rewarded during the conference too.
Get feedback
Like I had mentioned in the previous post, we looked forward to hear from people for their valuable feedback. There were feedbacks from various sources – personal mails, casual chats, comments beneath the posters, etc. We welcomed feedback from anyone and anywhere and implemented all that were feasible. We also had plans to conduct polls to measure the difficulty level of our questions, but were not implemented due to time factor.
Stick to deadlines
Our tracker had the deadlines for each poster and we made sure that we stick to them. A couple of weeks before the conference, we started to wind up each contest. A deadline poster containing the last date for each contest was posted so that the participants could send their entries accordingly. Entries sent after the last date were not accepted and we politely replied back to the participants to check the deadlines and participate in the other available contests.
Keep up the brand image
We made sure that our posters maintained the brand image. All our posters contained the required logos and the mail id to which the entries were to be mailed. Apart from that the basic ethics of designing a poster like avoiding flashy colours were followed. Also the posters were not cluttered with too much text. If the text was big, it was posted as description above the poster.
Maintain a website
We worked with the webmaster team to get a separate page for the online contests in the website. As our Facebook page got updated, the posts were updated in the site simultaneously and everything was archived.
Now that I’ve shared the etiquettes and strategies which we followed, there were certain things which we failed to implement and that will follow in my next post.
Memoirs of Monisha 