The top prizes in this contest are $10K and $5K and I think I might actually have a decent shot.  There is a public voting phase to determine the Top 25 videos though.  After the voting is done, judges alone will chose the top winners.  I didn’t think I’d really need to hustle for votes for this contest but Ecos wound up getting almost 90 entries!  So if you’ve got 5 seconds to spare, I’d appreciate it if you could click on this image and vote for my submission.  And if you’ve got 35 seconds to spare, you can even watch it if you’d like.

Click to view and/or vote!

Today is the first day of voting which happens to be a sunday.  And that’s kind of unusual because most contests start and finish their voting phases on week days.  When the voting went live this morning I posted a request for votes on my personal facebook page.  But then I stopped and thought about the timing of my request; how many people would actually see it?  How many people are even on facebook at 10AM on a Sunday?  I don’t like to bombard my facebook friends with a ton of video contest vote requests so I only ask for votes a few times each contest.  (If all your facebook posts are about contests, you’re friends are just going to get annoyed and block or limit your posts.  So a ton of requests can really backfire on you.  Plus like I said, it’s just annoying and not cool)

So if I’m only going to ask for votes 2 or 3 times, I want to make sure I post those requests at the right time.  But what is “the right time”?  Basically what I want to know is, when is facebook busiest?  Unfortunately, Facebook isn’t saying.  And that’s not surprising because if they actually came out announced the best time of day to post something, every company would start posting stuff at that time. But it seems that this question does have an answer.  A social Network Management company named Virtue conducted a study of facebook activity about a year and a half ago.  You can read a breakdown of the study here but it looks like the best time to post a vote request (or anything, really) on facebook probably is…

2:55PM on a Wednesday.

According to the study, facebook is constantly getting a ton of traffic.  But there is always a spike in activity around 3pm on weekdays.  You should try and post just before 3:00 because a lot of people sign in right at the top of the hour.  (Maybe that’s when the TV show they were watching ended or maybe that’s when their afternoon break begins.)  This spike happens every day but Wednesdays are usually facebook’s busiest day of the week.

According to the study, posts that are done in the morning actually get seen/liked/shared more than afternoon posts.  But a vote request isn’t a typical facebook post.  In the morning people are signing into facebook right at the start of the day.  9:00AM is not goof-off time…it’s a time to sign in really quick to check messages and skim the news feed.  By late afternoon, people are signing into facebook because they’re bored.  So you want to get your vote requests in front of people who have some time to kill.

Keep in mind that if you live LA but all your family and friends live back in Chicago, you should probably post your requests at 3:00PM Chicago time.  Oh and by the way, as it turns out the weekend really is a bad time to post anything to facebook.  These days, only about 30% of employers block facebook so most people spend time on the site while at work.  So you can post a vote request on a sunday morning (like I did today before I saw the Virtue study) but it won’t get you too many clicks.

Oh and PS:  Happy Mother’s Day from VCN and Mark Wahlberg!

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Banner for getonlinevotes.com

I know that a lot of video contest filmmakers hate it when contests let online voting help determine the winners.  So do I.  I can’t even imagine how many contests I would have won if quality was the only thing that mattered to the judges.  But contest organizers LOVE online voting.  Every time a contestant asks for votes on facebook or twitter or on their blog, that’s free advertising for the sponsor.  And you can’t really blame contest organizers for wanting to get as much exposure for their company as possible.  After all, if it wasn’t for the publicity, most companies wouldn’t even bother running a contest in the first place.  So if you want to make money in video contests, you have just got to accept the fact that getting votes is just part of the game.  And once you do, you can start developing strategies to win vote-based competitions.

If you’re really serious about winning a contest, you’ll need to try and get votes from people outside of your social circle.   How do you do that?  Well I suggest you try the site GetOnlineVotes.com.  GOV is what contest junkies refer to as a “vote exchange.”  When a person needs votes in a contest they can post their link on GOV and ask for votes.  Then other people who need votes in other contests vote for that entry.  Then they post a comment that includes their own link and ask the original contestant to vote for them.  So basically, the whole thing is based on the premise, “you vote for me and I’ll vote for you.”

And it works.  It works great, actually.  I just learned abut the site recently but I’ve tried it 2 or 3 times now.  And if you really work the website, you can get dozens or even hundreds of votes from GOV.  But I’ve noticed a lot of people who use the exchange sabotage their chances by making some simple but key mistakes.  So I thought I’d make a quick list of tips to help you get more votes on GetOnlineVotes.com.

1. Before you post your vote request, make sure that swapping votes does not violate your contest’s rules.  Most contests don’t care where votes come from.  As long as they are getting web traffic or new sign ups or facebook fans, they’re happy.  But some contests prohibit offering “inducements” to get people to vote for an entry.  For example, I was recently in a contest sponsored by Excedrin and they had a “no inducements rule.”  Several contestants used GetOnlineVotes.com and all of them were disqualified!  So for sure, check before you post.
2. Keep it brief.  GOV gives you the option to say something about you or the contest you’re entering before you post your voting instructions.  You are required to fill in the space so keep it as brief as possible.  One sentence is all you need.  A huge explanation just makes it look like voting for you will be complicated.
3.  Make your instructions as easy as possible.  A wordy or confusing explanation will just scare voters away.  This seems like a no-brainer but a lot of people over-explain the voting process.  Just post the link, and present STEP 1, STEP 2, STEP 3, etc.  But be aware, if you really do have more than 2 or 3 steps, not many people are going to want to spend so much time on one vote.  The more votes people make, the more they get in return.  Just keep that in mind.
4. Promise that you will return all votes and ask people to leave their link.  This make other users feel like a vote for you will result in a guaranteed return vote.
5. Vote for everyone that leaves a comment on your post!  Some jerks will post their request, let people vote for them and then not return the favor.  So let people know that you are voting by replying to all comments.  If other users see that you are replying “I voted!” to every comment, they’ll know you’re good about returning votes.
6. Work the site.  Vote for other people and leave comments asking for return votes.  But try and focus on only voting for people who will actually vote for you in return.
7. Consider Re-Listing your Post after a few days.  GOV doesn’t allow you to post the same vote request over and over.  But for just $3.95 you can have your post put back at the top of the list of requests.

I was actually inspired to write this article because I just submitted a vote request to GetOnlineVotes.  So here’s what a nice, simple request looks like:

Click to view the actual listing

Granted, this isn’t exactly a typical GOV request because the “voting’ is done on youtube.  Most of the contests listed on the site are run through facebook.  Still, other GOV users are actually voting for my video.  All I need to do to win the $1,000 “Crowd Favorite” prize in this particular contest is get the most youtube likes.  And I think I can pull it off, fair and square.  I can get a lot of likes through youtube since I have more than 3,500 subscribers.  But GetOnlineVotes.com will probably be the thing that puts me over the top.  Of course, I’d certainly love to get some likes from you VCN readers.  So if you want to help me out, head here and give me a like.  Thanks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQAXJIuCS28

October 24th Update: I won the “Crowd Favorite” prize! Thanks for the votes everybody. I told you GOV works!

Grand Prize Winner.  Prize: $10,000 and a trip to Los Angeles:

Click to watch

Yep, the winner’s entry was shot with an iPhone.  But this wasn’t really a contest where quality mattered.  This was really more about shooting an audition for a Magic Bullet infomercial.  In the first round, the three contestants with the most votes got to go to LA and shoot a two-minute, mini-infomercial.  Then a panel of judges watched the infomercials and picked their favorite host as their grand prize winner.

Hmmmm….I feel like I should say more about this contest but there isn’t really anything else to cover.  I guess I could talk about the Magic Bullet for a bit.  Hey, am I the only person that’s creeped out by the name “The Magic Bullet?”  The “magic bullet” is what killed JFK!  I know it’s been almost 50 years since the Kennedy assassination but it still feels too soon to appropriate the phrase “The Magic Bullet” and turn it into a thing that makes guacamole.  I happen to think “The Bay of Pigs” would be a pretty clever name for a seaside BBQ place but that doesn’t mean I would ever eat there.

Today at 12pm Eastern, Gain detergent unveiled the 25 finalists in their million dollar, “Smell Like a Million Bucks” video contest.  But it’s not the “Top 25″ that anyone following this contest could have expected.  It now looks like Gain disqualified many of the entries that seemed like they were a safe bet to make the finals.

Gain was supposed to determine their finalists like this: each video would be given a creative score when it was submitted.  The score was based on a 5-star system.  Those stars were then converted to a percentage.   So if you got 5 stars, your score was 100%.  If you got 2 1/2 stars, your score was 50%.  Next, Gain took the number of views your video got during the contest-long viewing period and multiplied that number by your creative score.  So if you got 2,000 views and a creative score of 20%, your final score was 400.  According to the rules, this was the only method Gain would use to select their Top 25 finalists.

So if a video could get 5,000 views, there was no way it would NOT make the finals, right?  Even if a video had a creative score of 10%, 5,000 views would still give you a huge, final score.  But real views were actually tremendously hard to get in this contest.  For a view to be registered, a person had to log into facebook, accept the contest app, find the video they wanted to view and then watch it all the way to the end.  But while it was hard to get genuine views, it was really, really easy to generate fake views.  All a person had to do was create a few dozen or a few hundred fake facebook accounts and spend hours and hours watching their video every day for weeks.  And it looks like that’s exactly what a lot of people did.  But what those repeat-viewers didn’t realize is that it is really easy to detect that kind of cheating.  The third-party company running the contest application is able to see where views come from.  So if some idiot viewed their entry 50 times a day from the same computer, that would raise a big red flag even if they used 50 separate facebook accounts.  But it seems like there were a whole lot of idiots in this contest because for some mysterious reason, most of the “most viewed” videos did not make the finals.

Last Monday, as soon as the viewing period ended, all of the view counts on all of the entries disappeared.  I suspected that might happen so a few hours before the deadline, I took a screen shot of the 12 “most viewed” entries in the Gain contest.  The Red X’s indicate which of these “popular” entries did not make the finals and the Green Checks indicate the videos that did make the finals.

The (almost) final view counts of the 12 "most viewed" entries. I added the Red X's and Green checks to indicate the videos that did and did not make the finals

Take a look at those view counts.  Some of them are ridiculously high.  The video in first place has 8,449 views!  But out of the 480 videos that were submitted, only 22 had view counts higher than 1,000.  So 8,449 views is unnaturally high.  Now, many of these videos were actually pretty great.  And really, all of them are at least kind of decent.  But even if these videos all sucked and even if they recived a 10% creative score, 10% of 4,000 is 400.  And gain actually picked several finalist videos that had FEWER than 400 views.

So all of these Red X’ed videos must have been disqualified.  Gain of course can’t reveal WHY these entries didn’t make the Top 25 but there are only 3 explanations:

1. An entry could have gotten a creative score of ZERO.

2.  An entry could be disqualified for cheating.

3.  An entry could have been disqualified for breaking other rules like using “third party content” (music, images, SFXs) the entrant didn’t own.

There is no way any of these entries were bad enough to deserve a creative score of zero so reason #1 can’t possibly explain what happened.  Some of these entries do use “third party content” but a lot of the the videos in the finals do.  (Like this one)  So I don’t think Gain disqualified any of these submissions because they broke other rules.  So…that only leaves cheating.

I kept a close eye on the view count race in this contest and I can tell you, it looked like there was massive amounts of cheating happening.  Some videos recived 100′s of views every day like clockwork.  Others would suddenly gain 200 views in the middle of the night.  There was even one video that got just about 270 views every day!  What are the odds that the same number of people would watch the same video every day for several days in a row?  Or how about the video that was the 3rd Most Viewed?  That video has nothing in it that could possibly cause it to be disqualified.  That video was approved on June 22nd and by the view count deadline of July 11th, they had 5,150 views.  Does 257 views A DAY really seem realistic when most entries in this contest weren’t able to get 257 views during the entire viewing period?

So did all those people with Red X’s on their videos really cheat and fake their views?  There’s no way for us to know.  For the record, I’m not saying any of those people cheated for sure.  But the evidence suggests that they did SOMETHING to break the rules of the contest that got them disqualified.  I do want to say that I do NOT believe that the 2nd most viewed video cheated.  It was created by a reader of this site named Andrew D. and I know that he had an army of people working on getting him a lot of views.  But I do know that other contestants were trying to get him disqualified because he posted his video to youtube and that was sort of against the rules.  So, I think he might have been bounced on a technicality.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I actually entered this contest but I submitted my entry way too late.  I only managed to get about 400 views so I didn’t make the Top 25.  However, I absolutely have to applaud Gain and the company running the contest, Don Jagoda Associates for doing the right thing here.  It was against the rules to “view” your video over and over using fake accounts so anyone who did that deserved to be disqualified.  It’s nice to see that some companies actually care about running a fair, online contest.

HOWEVER…I also have to CONDEMN Gain for basically lying to contestants about how they were going to determine the winners. Even if Gain had to disqualify dozens and dozens of entries, there is simply no way that a video like this should have or could have made the finals:

Click to view

This video only received about 200 views.  So even if it got a perfect, 100% creative score, it still would have only had a creative score of 200 which wasn’t supposed to be enough to get it in the top 25.  But this video is so amazingly awful that there is no way it got a perfect creative score.  So how and why did it ever make the finals?

It’s clear that something seriously unethical did happen here.  Gain lied to their customers about how the winners would be picked.  So what can you do about it?  Jack shit, that’s what!  The finalists have been picked and there’s nothing you can do to fight Gain’s terrible decisions.

And so, the real contest now begins!  To be honest, I’m actually kind of relived I didn’t make it to the finals now that I know that Gain is willing to play fast and loose with the rules.  And on top of Gain’s shadiness, votes alone determine the winner of this contest.  So I can’t even imagine how horrible the next 2 weeks are going to be for the people in the finals.  If a finalist wants to have any chance of winning, they’re going to have to spend at least 60 hours a week begging for votes.  And if someone isn’t willing to work that hard on their campaigns, they might as well not even bother.  Because somewhere, among the finalists there are surely several people who ARE ready to take the next 2 weeks off from work and do nothing but scrounge for votes.  One of the people listed on this page is going to win a million dollars:  https://apps.facebook.com/gainmillionbucks. I can’t tell you specifically who the winner will be but I can tell you this, the prize will go to whoever is smart enough not to cheat and whoever is determined enough to dedicate every waking hour for the next 2 weeks to winning that million bucks.

Later this week I’m going to announce my picks and predictions for this contest.  So if you made the finals and want to let me know why you think you’re going to take home that million bucks, let me know:  VideoContestNews@gmail.com.

On Wednesday, Facebook made some important changes to their “Promotions Guidelines” that video contest filmmakers should be aware of.  Thousands and thousands of companies (and even individuals) have been running contests of all types using their facebook pages. That’s not exactly legal though so Facebook is cracking down and deleting unauthorized contests.  But this isn’t just a legal thing. If some small business runs a contest where voters have to “like’ their page and then vote by “liking” an entry, well…facebook doesn’t make any money off of that. So now if Joe’s Pizza of Akron, Ohio wants to run an ultimate fan video contest they need to pay a facebook-approved company to run that contest as an app. Here are some of the more interesting restrictions from Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines:

Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or an app on a Page Tab.

You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.

You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app.

These new rules probably won’t have any effect on most of the facebook-based video contests you may encounter.  But beware: If you come across a video contest where likes count as votes, don’t enter! Because that contest (and the sponsors page) could be zapped out of existence at any moment.

And that’s a good thing.  Unauthorized contests are sketchy and I personally don’t enter them.  On the other hand, I think video contests that are run as facebook apps are great. It’s easy to get people to vote since you don’t have to register.  Even better though, it’s really hard for people to vote for themselves over and over on facebook.  The big name in facebook-based video contests seems to be a company called Wildfireapp.  (http://www.wildfireapp.com)  So man, these new changes are going to be really good news for them.  Wildfire is running the Dairy Queen contest I’m in right now and I’m pretty happy with how it’s going.  Oh yeah….did I mention I’m a finalist in Dairy Queen’s “Mini Blizzard Treatment contest!?”  I have a 1 in 6 chance of winning one of six Mini Coopers!!  But I need votes to win.  If you haven’t already, please do me a major solid and vote for my video.  It only takes like 5 seconds plus you’ll get to see a real life App-run facebook contest with your own eyes!

CLICK THE IMAGE TO VOTE!

Voting is open until May 17th so vote while you can!  You only need to vote once though.  This is a really exciting contest and I swear, if I win i will be RETIRING from video contests that use votes alone to determine the winners.  Trying to get people to vote for you is just too much work!

One again, click here to vote:  http://apps.facebook.com/winaminicar/contests/98909

THANKS FOR THE SUPPORT EVERYBODY!!!

Onlinevideocontests.com is easily one of my favorite websites on the entire Internet that doesn’t feature boobs or captioned cat photos.  Until now they’ve pretty much focused on doing just one thing, really, really well; listing video contests.  The design of the site is PERFECT.  It’s clean, user-friendly and simply cool-looking.  You can even do custom searches for contests based on specific criteria like whether or not they use judges or public voting to determine the winners!  It’s just awesome and I can honestly say that the site has helped me find more than a few contests that I went on to win.

And the the folks at “OVC” have made a good thing even better by adding some great new features to the site.  Registered users can now post their winning videos in the “WINNERS” section and if a filmmaker needs votes to win a contest, they can post their video in the “UP FOR VOTE” section.  I expect to be making use of both features in the near future.  Follow the links to check out the new stuff:

http://www.onlinevideocontests.com/winners

http://www.onlinevideocontests.com/upforvote