Thank you to all who entered the “Write Out Loud® with Sharpie and Win!” Contest.
The voting phase is now OPEN!
We received fantastic entries and the judges have narrowed it down to 100 semi-finalists.
Sharpie needs YOUR help crowning the winner who will have a chance to attend a meet and greet with David Beckham! Vote for your favorite entry each day. You can vote once per day until March 15, 2009.
I’ll be attending SXSW Interactive from Friday, March 13th through Sunday the 15th. Hoping to learn a lot, meet some great new people, and most of all SPREAD THE WORD about Votigo. If you’re going to be there let me know and we can meet up.
-Jim
So far, so good! A report from eMarketer just came out yesterday estimating there were nearly 116 million US user-generated content consumers in 2008, along with 82.5 million content creators. Both numbers are set to climb significantly by 2013. 
We’re definitely witnessing this here at Votigo. Interest in our social media solutions, especially video and photo contests and galleries really heated up towards the end of last year and has continued so far this year. I think marketers have begun to fully grasp the impact and effectiveness of User-generated content for brand campaigns as well as for ongoing social media galleries that bring users back to their sites on a repeat basis. This design contest we’re powering for Victoria’s Secret PINK (our third campaign for the brand) has over 33,000 entries with 2 days left to go in the contest! And the Prismacolor Image Gallery we launched a couple of weeks back has had over 300 submissions with over 2,000 comments so far. That’s excellent user engagement!
Let us know what you think about social media and user-generated content and how marketers should be using it.
Recently Votigo helped Prismacolor, the maker of premium art supplies including colored pencils, art markers, pastels and graphite launch an online social media art gallery. The goal of the gallery is to create an environment for amateur and professional artists to share their art, receive feedback and learn new techniques while promoting the Prismacolor line of products.
This is a great example of a forward-thinking brand making strides to convert their traditional static, product-focused site into an engaging place for their customers to interact and share. The end result is that consumers are coming back to the site on a regular basis.
In addition to uploading their art users can rate, share and comment on the other art in the gallery. There are currently 1,441 images in 6 different categories. You can view the gallery here: http://gallery.prismacolor.com/
