Did you vote for me in Dairy Queen’s “Mini Blizzard Treatment” video contest? If so, thanks! I really appreciate the support. But….I didn’t win a Mini Cooper. And to be honest, I kind of knew my chances weren’t very good in this particular contest. (Some background: In the DQ contest, 24 finalists were picked and the 6 people who’s video got the most votes would win a Mini Cooper. The vote counts were hidden during the voting and the Top 6 videos were revealed last week.) Click here to see the 6 winning videos.

At first I tried really hard to get as many votes as possible. But after a few days I took the time to check out the competition. If you’re in a video contest where votes alone determine the winners, you should always do a little research about the people you’re up against. For instance, if the contest is being run on facebook (like the DQ contest was) then try and find out how many facebook friends your competitors have. Just search for their names and their profile will come up. And if it’s not totally set to private, you can see how many friends they have. I have a mere 220 facebook friends so when I saw that several of the finalists had more than 1,000 friends, I knew they’d be hard to beat.

Moving beyond facebook, I also checked twitter. I searched for terms like “Vote, DQ, contest, mini cooper.” And sure enough, I saw tweets from several people in the contest including one guy who had almost 4,900 twitter followers.  And after I did some more digging I discovered that this person was a semi-pro filmmaker with a gigantic and enthusiastic online fan base.  But as it turned out, maybe some of his fans were a little too enthusiastic.  To my surprise, this guy didn’t make the Top 6.  One of his teammates tweeted that their entry was disqualified for “getting too many votes.”  That could have been a joke but I don’t think it was.  I don’t know if they cheated or even if they really got disqualified.  But their entry recived hundreds of comments from people saying “I Voted!”  So I can’t imagine how they couldn’t have won.  Either they cheated and were disqualified or else most of the other contestants cheated in order to beat them.

But I digress.  After Facebook and Twitter the next place you should check is Google News. You can learn amazing things from google news. If you do a blog search you can see if any bloggers are promoting any entries. And if you search Google’s news feed you can see if any contestants have gotten the media to do a story on them.

The point of all this research is to help you decide whether or not it is worth it to try and get more votes in the contest. If you discover one of your competitors has 1,000 facebook friends, 3,000 twitter followers, and a blog that’s read by 20,000 people a month then you’ll know that you might be fighting a losing battle.

So after I did my research I knew that there were 3 or 4 finalists that could get in the top 6 without breaking a sweat. And it looked like there were 2 or 3 other contestants that had a really strong chance of making it too. Of course, I happen to run a semi-popular website (yes, this one) and I have A LOT of good contacts on the web that could help me get votes. So I was thinking I might be able to squeak into the Top 6.  I don’t know where I eventually ranked but I bet I came in 7th or 8th.

Even though I didn’t win a car, being in this contest was a really positive experience for me.  My campaign for votes had some very interesting and unexpected consequences.  I think this is one of those cases where a loss leads to an even greater (metaphorical) victory.  I can’t talk about some of the things that happened because of this contest but I will say this; the support I got from my family and friends and even the readers of this site really warmed my cockles.  It’s a very George-Baily-esque experience to have hundreds of people you’ve known for years rally behind you and wish you well.  I mean, people I haven’t talked to since high school voted for me.  Ex-girlfriends from 10 years ago voted for me.  Former employers and co-workers voted for me.  Random crew people I worked with on random projects 3 years voted for me.  Yeah, I know it only takes 20 seconds to vote in an online contest.  But it was nice to know that so many people I’ve crossed paths with cared enough to try and help me and then wrote me to let me know they still had my back.  So that was nice.  Plus, did you know that when you win a new car you get stuck paying like $7,000 in taxes on it!!  Pfffft….so man, did I dodge a bullet on that one or what?

As is the case with most voted-based video contests, most of the winning videos aren’t so great.  You can see all the results here.  But below I’ll post the best winner followed by the not-best winner.

One of Six Winners.  Prize: A Mini Cooper:

One of Six Winners. Prize: A Mini Cooper:

I have to say, I was totally shocked to see that 2nd video make the Top six. It was definitely not on my list of likely winners. The video didn’t get that many comments and the guy who made it has only 191 facebook friends. (only one vote per FB account counted, BTW) Also, no one blogged about his entry, no one tweeted about it and the media didn’t do any stories about it. So where the heck did all his votes come from?