We are constantly advocating that marketers should be platform agnostic and run their branded marketing and promotions across any channel where they may find their audience. Facebook continues to be a great centerpiece for any campaign, but there is great value in extending (or in some cases, dedicating) a campaign to other platforms- from standalone microsites to Twitter and Google+ to, of course, mobile.

We have had lots of fun working with our clients over the past few years on innovative campaigns that use mobile to tap into audiences on the go. The Champs Sports: We Know Game Scratch and Win is an example of a premium solution that lives on Facebook but has a dedicated mobile landing page (ChampsScratchandWin) and is generating a lot of buzz.

For Votigo Platform users, you may have also noticed that, not long after launching our first set of contest and promotions apps for Facebook, we followed up immediately with microsite and mobile publishing features. For no additional cost, marketers can publish their Facebook contest or Sweepstakes to a dedicated microsite AND to a dedicated mobile site, where their audience can enter.

So while we prepare some additional resources for this incredibly important new feature, here are 3 quick tips on how to make the most of it:

1) Publish it! Once you are finished designing your Contest or Sweeps, click “Publish.” Publish it to Facebook if you want. But then click “Publish” for Mobile (and for Microsite, too.) You can also snag the URL for each, to be used for spreading the word.

2) Cross post it. You are probably already using multiple channels to tell your audience about the promotion (if not, check out this post). Don’t be shy about sending a Tweet or adding a Facebook post geared straight toward mobile viewers- especially if you know that your audience is highly mobile. For example, if you Tweet once about the contest, tweet again soon after something like, “Mobile audience: you, too, can enter our contest straight from your mobile phone by clicking here.”

3) Email it. Whether in a dedicated email blast- with a subject line the specifically mentions the chance to enter a competition from a mobile and win- or just in your standard email marketing to your customer audience, call out the mobile contest or sweeps entry.

4) Advertise it: Google AdWords and other advertising networks offer incredible flexibility in targeting pay-per-click ad campaigns to mobile users. Take advantage of that and set up a mobile-only campaign with a clear call-to-action (Enter our contest from your mobile!) that directs to the mobile page.

5) Set up a custom URL and redirect: Depending on which ways you’ll promote your campaign, you can set up a dedicated web address for the mobile promotion (see Champs example above) and redirect it to the mobile URL provided in the platform. You could even use a URL shortener that allows you to set up custom URLs and simply redirects while offering additional metrics.

So don’t just publish a promotion to Facebook.  Take it mobile and make sure your mobile audience knows about it.

We’re often asked for “the key” to success in social media marketing and promotions. It’s a complex answer and there isn’t a single key but a series of essential steps, from building the foundation of an active audience across social platforms, through aligning an incentive that fits your brand and the promotion. We have written and tweeted and spoken about all of the above and we mean it when we say: don’t skip a step (and we’re happy to help).

But there is one element of a great promotion that is easy enough to overlook, to disastrous consequences.

You have to tell people about it.

To kickstart the viral effect, to draw the critical early adopters, to cultivate the Godinian Sneezers (or the Gladwellian Mavens) who influence their networks to pay attention, you have to promote the promotion.

Fortunately there are plenty of tools to spread the word. You can tell your existing social media audience by:

1) Post messages and updates about it on your Facebook page (and make sure to “Like” it yourself)
2) Tweet about it
3) Post about it on your company’s LinkedIn profile page, and on the status updates of your individual employees
4) Post about on Google+ (and make sure to “+1″ it from your own account)
5) Create a video about it and post it on YouTube
6) Write a blog post about it on your corporate blog
7) Announce it in your email marketing messages, newsletters and even the footer of day-to-day emails
8 ) Tell your clients about it directly
9) Post signage about it in stores
10) Broadcast a consistent message about it in your traditional media (radio, TV, print) advertising
11) Point PPC ads from AdWords to the promotion home page
12) Set up a display advertising campaign on Facebook and AdWords
13) Contact industry associations to message their members about it
14) Tell influential bloggers and Twitterers about it
15) Put out a press release about it

Check out how GORE-TEX updates its Facebook audience on the “YOUR-STORY - OUR GEAR” contest currently running on its Facebook page.

It’s a simple blend of old and new tactics for spreading the word, but you might be surprised by how many brands fail to lay the groundwork of their promotion from the beginning.

Also, a few quick nuts and bolts. Any time you promote your promotion, you should:

1) Include a link directly to the website, mobile landing page, YouTube channel or Facebook tab where the contest or sweepstakes is live
2) Use simple calls-to-action, such as “Tell your friends about our contest…”
3) Be responsive to users who reply, comment or re-post your messages

While you can’t always expect a glut of entries at the beginning of a campaign, if you tap into the cross-channel reach of all of the social and traditional media channels above, you can expect the viral effect to kick in and generate awareness and participation. You’ll increase your “Likes” and expand your overall social media audience, collect a great opt-in mailing list of potential customers, and (for UGC contests) inspire great content that you can use for future branding.

What strategies have been most effective for you in promoting your own branded promotions?

If your business sells anything to anyone, there are some stats of interest within this week’s early returns on Cyber Monday 2011. IBM and eBay reported $1.25B in total Cyber Monday sales (29% more than on Black Friday), and found that more than 6% of consumers shopped online via mobile. Over half a percent of cyber buyers came from social channels- mostly Facebook. All bigger numbers than years past.

What does this all mean for brand marketers? Consumers are as responsive to great deals as ever. They are spending. And they are using their digital tools- especially the social and mobile combo- to find and buy great deals.

So with these seasonal trends in mind, how are you planning your 2012 social media marketing and promotions?

To do this annual planning exercise justice in an explosive growth channel like social media, you’d want to know what the trends are heading into the year, what consumers are responding to, and what may be resonating best by December 2012- the next Black Friday. Even amid this year’s holiday season, agencies and planners are deep into planning the next cycle.

A few things to consider:

1) What is your planning cycle based upon? Is it seasons? Or calendar milestones (like Black Friday?) Or is it geared toward new product launches?

2) What is the internal turnaround time for launching a marketing campaign for your brand? From setting a campaign strategy to budgeting to getting everyone internally on board to designing key ad units and graphics, how long does it take to pull off a big idea?

3) Follow the huge trends: mobile, including mobile access but also check-ins, instant offers and coupons, QR codes and everything else mobile can do. And, cross-platform in general. Facebook continues to be a tremendous anchor for your social strategy, but don’t neglect the other platforms that are great for different reasons.

4) Allow time to get great outside guidance on best practices for your promotion or campaign. From coming up with the big ideas to filling in all the fundamentals- prizes, fulfillment, legal, complying with all social channels’ promotional guidelines- to executing under a short or extended timeframe, it pays to have a third party partner.

What are your goals for the year in terms of social media marketing and promotions, and what cross-channel campaigns and big ideas are going to get you there?

When it comes to creating a winning social media promotion it’s all in the details, and no detail is too small. One seemingly small detail that can have a huge impact on the success of your campaign is the use of a custom graphic. When you create your own campaign with our new self-serve tool, you have the option of uploading a custom graphic into your header. You’ll want to take advantage of this feature, as it can help generate more entries and ultimately more fans for your Facebook page.

So, what makes a great graphic? The best graphics include your campaign details in a clean and straightforward design. This allows fans to get a general idea of what’s required to enter your promotion and what they have a chance to win, quickly and without having to read rules and details.
Here are a few ideas for creating a winning graphic:

1. List the steps required to enter your promotion so that people can see how easy it is to win
2. List the prizes at stake to get your fans excited
3. Take advantage of the space. You can upload large graphics with a maximum width of 520 pixels and a maximum height of 900 pixels

Create a great graphic and you’re well on your way to a successful promotion that grows your audience and engages your fans. Need more ideas for creating a winning promotion? Here are 5 tips for making your contest a success.

It may seem like a no-brainer to connect your social media promotion to an event. That’s because events have, built-in, some of the most important components of a successful, audience-building, awareness-generating social media promotion:

1) The definitive, time-sensitive attention of an audience
2) An easy-to-integrate theme
3) And often a logical prize that goes perfectly with the occasion (tickets, access, a timely discount or gift)

Sporting events…concerts…product launches…conferences and conventions…even social media milestones (”Our 1,000,000th Follower!”)…these are all great events that savvy marketers effectively tie their promotions to.

Holidays- and the frenzied weeks that precede them- may be the single best sort of event to serve as a promotional anchor.

This week we read that Americans will spend close to $7B on Halloween by October 31- or 18% more than we did last year. Not surprisingly, recent use of our newly-launched self-service platform reflects a HUGE emphasis on Halloween promotion. Seemingly every other sweepstakes launched over the past week is Halloween-themed, from ticket giveaways for haunted houses to best dog costume photo contests. Some of these contests have engaged hundreds of entries almost immediately. And some great ones have come out of our full-services, like this costume contest from The Children’s Place.

So as a social media marketer, what do you turn your attention to once the Halloween rush subsides on Tuesday?

Holiday retail. While the holiday bonanza official kicks off in the wee hours of Black Friday, Nov. 25, when throngs of Early Bird shoppers line up for morning-after-Thanksgiving specials to OFFICIALLY launch the retail spree that runs through Christmas Eve and, really, New Year’s, the reality is that holiday commerce is already underway.

Votigo clients are well on their way to an impressive variety of contests, sweepstakes, mobile promotions (including check-in and coupon-based giveaways) and much more. Some are keeping it simple: a Facebook photo contest asking fans to submit a snapshot of them demonstrating their need for / favorite use of / funny drawing of a newly launched product or holiday favorite gift item.

Others will get more sophisticated with a cross-platform campaign that first captures audience attention on Facebook OR Twitter and a branded microsite, then drives them to a store for a chance at a mobile instant win or a coupon offer, and finally invites users to spread the word for additional votes (for a photo contest) or sweepstakes entries. These strategies work especially well for retailers, from mom-and-pop shops to national chains.

So even though it’s nearly All Hallow’s Eve- and that means Black Friday is a mere month away- there is still time to create your own promotion in our self-service tool or call our full-service team to get started on a premium promotion.

Earlier this week Votigo officially announced the launch of self-service access to our social media promotions platform. We’ve been asked, with our background of providing full-service, flexible, cross-platform social media promotions for major brands since launching our first promotion for Victoria’s Secret PINK in early 2007, why launch a self-service platform now?

We strongly believe that brand marketers, and technology providers like us, are just scratching the surface in the realm of social media marketing and promotions. Think about it: Facebook has only been open to brands for a few years; Twitter for about the same short time and YouTube a bit longer. And even though a lot of the other social tools we frequently provide- like interactive microsites and user-generated content galleries- have been in use longer for 10 years or more, that’s no time in the big picture of marketing, where promotions (like contests and sweepstakes and offers) have proven effective over the course of decades.

As many social media marketers know, Facebook recently announced a big time offer to small businesses, hoping to greatly expand the already 9.2M small businesses who already use the platform. To us, that is another sign there is a world of businesses that are essentially just getting started when it comes to marketing and promotions on Facebook and other social networks.

So we built a do-it-yourself platform that we could offer to all the businesses who couldn’t yet make the budget and time commitment of our full-service offerings (even though we now have full-service tools starting at $2,500.) We designed it with small- and especially mid-sized businesses in mind and set out to get great feedback from our early users and so far the feedback- and the promotions launched- are impressive.

One of the cool, unexpected things that has happened when we started inviting beta users to try the platform, and showcasing it at different events for the past few months, is seeing bigger brands, like Brooks Running, and even start-ups start using the platform, in addition to the small- and mid-sized businesses for whom it was designed. They have shown us what they need in enterprise editions of our self-service platform, whether it’s the ability to sanction promotions at local (retail) levels within corporate brand standards, or to launch various promotions for different brands within their portfolio, or in an agency context, to launch promotions for multiple clients. Some major brands will use the platform simply to launch friction-free promotions between their bigger, more integrated campaigns.

And of course you can still tap into Votigo’s full-service solutions when your needs include promotions across social channels (beyond Facebook), advanced features, flexible design and tight timelines.

Our self-service platform completes our full spectrum of service levels, apps and features, and we’re excited that it allows us to serve a whole new set of brands and businesses.

After a painfully unlucky month of dealing with the DMV in Colorado, service is on my mind. It got me thinking about one of the first things I noticed when I joined Votigo earlier this year: clients routinely choose Votigo for our full-service approach to social media marketing.

We are not an ad agency or a social media marketing agency. But it is easy to confuse Votigo for one because of the level of service that, we are often told, is one of two major reasons why clients return frequently. We work with agencies- some of the best in the world- as often as we work directly with brands, and the experience is seamless- because Votigo is transparent and expert in providing powerful social media promotions applications for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, mobile and the web.

Even in a week in which we are launching a self-service platform, the constant dialogue in our office is “How we can provide legendary service even in a self-service channel?”  At first it simply means a brute force effort- lots of late night emails with new users; but by the way, that’s also the best way to learn about our new customers.  (Side note: If you are trying to decide which level of service you need from Votigo, start here.)

What does full service mean? It’s different in every case, and it often means “whatever is needed to launch a campaign in time.” A few things come to mind:

• We don’t often pitch our design chops, but our clients aren’t afraid to entrust design to our in-house design talent when their resources are thin.
• There are companies out there that do nothing BUT contest or sweepstakes management- but we are able to package these services, from legal oversight to moderation to winner selection.
• Delivery. While youn won’t see us pitching our ability to launch a promotion FAST, we know it sometimes seals the deal for a client to know that we have a powerful platform from which we can seamlessly customize and launch a new promotion. Having a talented team of 30+ developers - mainly in our Hyderabad, India, office- makes it possible for us to quickly adopt new platforms, add new features and hit tight deadlines with quality marketing apps for Facebook or any channel.
• Expertise - the knowledge and best practices accumulated over five years of powering cross-channel promotions that we can draw upon when needed - is certainly in the mix.
• It may simply mean the security we offer with a dedicated project manager and 24/7 reliability and support from the Votigo team.

The next time you are sitting at the DMV and trying to kill an hour or two, think about what makes for a great service experience. And remember it when you are choosing your social media marketing partners.

It’s the end of a busy mini-roadshow week of previewing our self-service social media promotions platform at  DEMO and BoulderBeta. Here’s a quick recap:

DEMO was a high-energy two-day event centered on great pitches from a huge group start-ups. They ran the gamut from web and mobile apps for consumers to new ecommerce and search technologies to robotics. Votigo was a proud sponsor of the event.

Some of our favorite pitchers: OLogic, LUMOback, Gust , Aurasma, and Unrabble, and for solo presentation dynamics, GumHoo. Other highlights included Aaron Levie, Box.net founder, on stage with a typically high energy level on day 2.

You can read the Twitter stream of the show here. Here are TheNextWeb’s @Chikodi’s 10 Favorite Startups From DEMO. And of course, a ton of VentureBeat coverage (DemoBeat) by Matt Marshall, Jolie O’Dell and the crew that hosted the event.

Also check out the Startup America HD Social Lounge video of Votigo co-CEO Jim Risner talking about Votigo’s full-service business and our newly-launched platform for self-service users.

If you want to request an invitation to the private beta of our self-service promotions platform- where you can launch promotions apps for Facebook for exactly $.02 through mid-October- please click here.

Back in Boulder last night, part of the Votigo team previewed the Votigo Platform at the latest Boulder Beta.  It was our 2nd year attending, first time showing off a beta offering.  A very high energy crowd was highlighted by 8 great start-ups, including our neighbors on the Beta floor, mobile commerce provider MShopper and the very recently launched community-powered news platform CrowdSpoke.

The start-up energy was contagious and we were able to gather some feedback for the Votigo Platform beta. A huge thanks to Tim Falls from Sendgrid, and Christian Perry, the maestros behind the Beta series, whose next stop is the Boston Beta Launch on Oct. 25 in Beantown.

The summer months can traditionally be a tough time to get something good going in marketing. Brand managers throttle back spend to ensure they don’t overshoot their budgets by midyear. Media planners and creatives head for the coasts for well-deserved holidays. Traditional media programmers broadcast a season of reruns and (admittedly riveting- don’t tell anyone that some Votigo people are captivated by this) reality fare. In short, July and August are historically surrendered by marketers.

But social media changes everything, enabling a year-round calendar of opportunity to engage your audience and reach potential new customers. Launching a summertime Contest or Sweepstakes on across social media- from Facebook to microsites to mobile platforms to Twitter to YouTube- is one effective way to harness social media and jumpstart your audience.

Make sure to check out the Summer Social Marketing Sweepstakes Powered by Votigo - a preview of our Sweepstakes app and an opportunity for you to win a $5,000 credit to run a social media promotion through the Votigo platform.  Meanwhile, here are 4 reasons that Social Media Contests and Sweepstakes are a great way for businesses and brands to burst through the dog days of summer.

1) Contests Are Opportunities to Engage Customers And Tell Your Story

The best contests generate repeat audience participation. An ideal lifecycle for a participant in a Photo Contest on Facebook, for example, would look something like this:

User receives an email from a friend to vote on friend’s submission -> He visits the Facebook Brand Page and “Likes” it -> Casting a a vote for his friend’s photo, he gets swept up by the contest’s stunning graphics or compelling incentive -> He decides to enter, finding a great picture to submit or taking a new one -> He shares his entry via email, Facebook, Twitter and more to friends, asking for their votes -> He checks back frequently to see how many votes he has or whether he made the Final round…

Contests give your brand’s audience relevant reasons to engage, or check-in with your frequently.  They are opt-in by nature- participants choose to submit, comment, or vote- always a more powerful form of engagement. And they help tell the story of your brand.

2) Contests Put Your Customers In The Spotlight To Create Content

A well-designed contest conveys your brand message quickly and effectively…and then gets out of the way, allowing your audience to take center stage, tapping their creativity and asking potential customers to share their favorite picture or produce a clever video. American Cancer Society does just that with it’s Create More Birthdays Contest & Sweepstakes, asking participants to submit art or music inspired by the organization’s life-saving work.   Flipping through the early submissions is already inspiring as entrants tell their stories in visually or with music.

Similarly The Drummer of Tomorrow Video Contest, presented by Mapex and other percussion and music brands, continues to generate soul-thumping videos from hardcore and hobbyist drummers alike, all competing for over $50,000 in prizes.

Why is having your own content important to your brand?  Major brands are finding that producing and publishing their own content increases not only brand awareness but also subscribers and leads, writes Shane Snow on Mashable.  Snow points to inbound marketing expert Hubspot’s recent study that shows that a content-driven marketing strategy can drive a 4x increase in leads within a few months. There is no more authentic way to get creative content for your brand than asking your audience to generate it. So contests that drive UGC can be an important part of a content marketing strategy.

3) Contests Are An Effective Way to Connect To Big Events

There are few better ways to motivate an audience than with the possibility of winning a trip to a huge championship, VIP access to a major concert, or an expenses-paid dream vacation. Great contests capture the buzz of the destination or event they’re tied to. Check out the Four Points Score Tickets Sweepstakes, where Starwood Preferred Guest offers the chance to win a serious travel experience to anyone booking a room by July 15: an all-expense-paid trip to the 2011 Major League Soccer AT&T All-Star Game in New York City.

Contests are an effective vehicle for offering an authentic incentive for customers to spread the word.  Nothing is as authentic as getaway travel to an event or destination that reflects the message of an aspirational travel, hospitality or luxury brand. What would be a fitting giveaway for your brand?

4) Contests Can Easily Involve Babies and Adorable Animals

It’s been said time and again: you want participation?  Ask for photos of babies and pets.  Not only do social media audiences simply respond to these adorable submissions; participants generally have such photos or videos handy on their laptops or mobiles- removing a barrier for quickly entering to your contest.  Zulily- the daily deals site for moms and babies- has a simple branding rationale to ask for photos in their Zulily Cuties photo contest, which features a gallery full of adorable pictures and rolling monthly winners of shopping credits.  But even for brands that don’t center on gear for babies and kids, tapping into parents’ affinities for their children (and pets) is a proven tactic.

There you go- 4 Good Reasons that you can get social media contests working for your brand- even in the summer months.  Stay tuned early next week for 4 More Good Reasons.  Have a great weekend.

If you’re like us and made the near-cross country trek last week to join the citywide festivities at Internet Week New York, your head was still spinning into the weekend from the abundant content, impassioned speakers and spirited meet-ups that marked the 4th annual Manhattan pilgrimage for thousands of laptop-toting, mobile checking-in, tsotchke-collecting, iced coffee-swilling, sweltering heat suffering, blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking mavens of the digital realm.

While our schedule was jammed from jackhammer-on-10th Avenue sunrise through OMMA Social on Thursday (which we proudly sponsored) to rooftop-party sundown, we had time to take note of certain recurring themes  that strike us as shareable. With a heavy nod toward social media promotions, and generous paraphrasing, here are 5 gems on doing social just right, as heard on the streets last week in New York.

(Note: So good was the word-on-the-street that we’ll break it up over two days…)

1) “…Roll out the welcome mat…”

Not simply because new users are visiting your microsite, reading your Twitter feed or logging on to your Facebook page for the first time should you spend an inordinate amount of time on your landing page . It’s been the rule of the internet for almost two decades, and the same now applies to your social media presence. Carefully design and test any destination page to your sites or microsites. Nail the description on your Twitter home. And on Facebook, invest in great tabs.  It may be the difference between a quick bounce and a return visitor, but more important, it’s as much a representation of your brand as your logo, your ad on TV, or your booth at the trade show. See an example in the home tab for Craftsman’s Finding American Treasures photo contest landing tab on Facebook. It’s visually striking, to the point, and an authentic homage to the timeless tool brand.

2) “…Define your audience…”

Know your audience…target your audience…understand your audience…cultivate your audience…  You’ve heard it so much  that it’s almost cliche.  But it could never be more true.  Social media is not mass media, despite the opportunity to reach a vast audience.  Every component of a social channel can be geared to a carefully defined audience.  The narrower the target, the more interactive their response will be. Great promotions- like great brands- don’t try to be all things to all people. This theme comes up repeatedly in a forum like OMMA Social- so much so that we can break it down further:

(part 1): Address an Affinity

Identify the affinities- professional interests, personal passions- that unite your audience and center your social media efforts on them. We are not all drummers even though we all may wish we could channel an inner John Bonham. But percussion & music publishing brands Mapex, Remo, Zildjian, Vic Firth and Alfred didn’t worry about targeting the whole universe when they launched the Drummer of Tomorrow user-generated video contest. They simply targeted the whole universe of drummers with a relevant call-to-action (and extremely relevant prizes).  The reaction from the community has been a robust and heart-pounding flood of entries from drummers laying down their beats over the downloadable soundtracks.

(part 2): Multiple Channels for Multiple Audiences


Not all customers share the same perspective.  Hopefully they all end up at the same cash register or check out page, but they arrive at your brand with very different attitudes and motivations.  Whichever audiences you are pursuing, interact with them uniquely.  Case in point: not only is  Mercury Marine’s Mercury Film Festival a well-integrated user-generated video contest microsite (with complimentary coverage on the brand’s homepage) and again, great prizes for entrants; the “celebration of all things marine” also offers a sweepstakes with additional prizes for the voters, the company’s partners and dealers, and even its employees.  These other parties- not typically eligible for an open contest- are often the best advocates for spreading the word. Mercury Marine is giving all segments of the audience their due in this contest.

Tune in tomorrow for Part II of Heard on the Streets in New York: How To Do Social Media Marketing

Further reading: SmartBrief just published a follow-up Internet Week / Social Media recap written by Heidi Cohen of Riverside Marketing Strategies.