Picture Contest Idea For Member Engagement

[Speed Racer]

I know this isn't for all networks, but some, it may be fantastic, fun, and get you alot of traffic on it.

 Has everyone heard of this new fad, planking? If not, in a nutshell, you lay face down, arms to your side in some sort of public setting, have someone photograph it and post it online. Here are some examples. It's quickly becoming one of those strange fads, kind of like flash mobs.

 for alot of networks, this could be a very fun and engaging contest, that members will enjoy viewing pictures, maybe participating, increasing your site traffic and member interaction! You could even have a contest for the best planking picture, tracked by facebook likes (or network likes for those who have private networks and are not connected to Facebook) and give the winner a prize. Wacha think? could be alot of fun! We could even take our network's winning pictures, have a contest here for Best Of Creators Plankers.....

[Speed Racer]

oh, personally, i wouldn't allow photoshopped entries, just real ones, those are the best!

[Lisa Eidson]

I recently did a photo contest, though not of planking of course, on my network and it worked really well. We provided guidance for contributors--gave them 3 categories to enter photos into via tags. I announced the contest on our home page slideshow and in the semi-monthly email broadcast digest newsletter I put together for the network. We had almost 200 submissions (good for a small network of about 700 people). We announced the winners on our network; published their photos in several other places outside the network (advertised as "winners get delicious notoriety"--read that phrase in a book recently and just had to find a place to use it); and sent them small prizes. It was great because we got a lot of nice images and people talked to one another about the images they entered.

[Speed Racer]

that's awesome! i like the "delicious notoriety" comment too, pretty hip!

[George Chaltas]

Lisa- we are new to Ning and would like to know the easiest way to run a photo contest. May we ask you to share your thoughts and experience?

 

[Lisa Eidson]

I was out all last week so sorry I haven't replied until now. For our photo contest we created a directions page and featured it prominently on our network (in both tabs and on our home page slideshow). The directions page told people how to submit their images to the contest and how to vote. In the directions, we instructed people to upload images to their profile and tag them with "WAG2011" and any other relevant information including the wilderness name and category (wilderness work, wilderness use and enjoyment, wilderness character). Our contest was to target images in these three categories, rather than just have an open contest, and this seemed to work well by providing some guidance as to the types of images we wanted the contest to harvest. Our motivation for offering the contest was to round up a greater collection of images, not just to find a few winning images. To vote, we had people visit the contest images page (we just linked to photo search results for "WAG2011") and rank their favorites with 1-5 stars. One of the problems with this is that there's no way to both search for a string and rank the results (i.e. search results for "WAG2011" ranked by most popular). So there was some work in judging to find the winners. We also had a committee that selected the winners, so they were selected only in part by their ranking. We ended up selecting 3 winners in each of the 3 categories. We also offered prizes to the winners including some small stuff like water bottles, stickers etc. plus having their images published in a prominent newsletter and on the home page of our main public site http://www.wilderness.net in the slideshow (only 1 from each category). We found that this whole thing worked well since we set proper expectations and provided explicit directions and sideboards for submissions. I think if you do this you can have good luck using the tools Ning already has in place. If you do multiple photo contests on your site, however, I think you will find that some of the comments that others have made regarding difficulty with tagging and not having a public album will apply. Since we've only done 1 contest, however, these didn't seem to be issues.

[George Chaltas]

Thank you for your reply Lisa. We are going to run our contest by creating a new 'Group' for submissions, that way contestants can enter by posting submissions on the group wall. A memebr name is always associated with a posting, so it will be easier for us to keep track of the entries.

[Caribso]

Cool..