As we wave goodbye to 2009, Strutta high-fives 2010 for an awesome start!  While we settle into our new digs, we're already taking on new projects and challenges.  It's been such a busy first week that Ben, our CEO, had to seek refuge in Vegas and help host the "Rat Pack" Penthouse Party at CES this weekend...

We just moved into a beautiful new space in the Flack Block, at the corner of Cambie and Hastings in Gastown.  Instead of looking out to the majestic North Shore mountains, Strutta's HQ now oversees the many interesting exchanges at Victory park (come by and visit us to witness them for yourself, or check out the virutual tour)!  We've got plenty of space to work/play, and are looking to furnish and decorate.  If you've got some cool design ideas or any suggestions as to how to fill our space, let us know.

Our first contest launch of the year is Portuguese! Diário de Notícia's photo contest is fully functional and translated in Portuguese.  In a few short days, this contest has already garnered over 650 great entries.  Is Portugal the home of the most enthusiastic contest participants? Did I just come up with a worldwide Strutta contest idea? Maybe.

Adorama's photo contest that is now live, and open for submissions next week includes a great new Strutta feature, e-mail upload.  This means contest participants simply send their photo to the given e-mail address to have it uploaded to the contest site!

Thanks to everyone who we've had the pleasure of meeting and doing business with so far.  We're looking forward to a successful and innovative 2010!  If you have a great contest idea or feature you'd like to realise, let's talk. Contact us at: info@strutta.com.

These photo and video contests seem quite popular, of all of a sudden. Why do you suppose so many marketers are choosing to brave the waters of social media and user generated content?

Because it works. And to illustrate that fact, here are ten reasons why video and photo contests are such a great marketing investment:

10. You Start a Dialogue With your Community

For many, a photo or video contest is their first foray into social media. The first time that they have publicly reflected any online participation with the public at large. And that can be a little scary. But when you consider that people will be vying for the attention (and prizes) of your company, and you have the option of moderating entries before they go live, there really isn't much to be afraid of. So give it a shot! It's a great way to start. Bonus Example: Barkbusters, whose photo contest was immensely popular with pet owners, and even got them some air time on a morning tv show.

9. It's Fun

If your contest idea is a good one, people will enjoy entering and collecting votes. What's more, you will enjoy seeing the submissions come in. The quality and quantity of entries may even suprise you. Tourism Vancouver's video contest (still live as of this writing) has collected some fantastic images of the city.

8. They're Good for Traffic and SEO

The kind of activity that photo and video contests attract are great for SEO. You get loads of new and returning visitors who have meaningful interactions with your site. The added traffic will boost your search juice.

For bonus points: Link people to other areas of your site from the contest page, and track their activity in your stats.

Jazz Sudbury's contest now appears on page one in a search for the festival, sending more traffic to the festival site for info, while simultaneously scouting talent who could win a chance to perform.

7. The Public Has Good Ideas

With apologies to your advertising agency, the best idea they could pitch to you this year would be to accept ideas and submissions from your community. A video or photo contest could yield some world class content that is better than you expected. You'll never know if you don't ask. Sex Panther, the hot new scent licensed from ther popularity of Anchorman, the movie, now has a plethora of excellent "spokes growlers" to choose from, after their fun video and audio-based contest.

6. It Gives You Plenty to Talk about on Facebook, Twitter

Often, your company blog, Twitter account and Facebook Page can go a long time with no updates. An exciting contest of this kind mixes things up, attracts new people to the fold, and provides you with many small 'wins' that you can announce. "Check out this great entry!" or... "Only two weeks left to vote..."

Contestants from Ypreneurgene.com and PropertyGuys.com have been lighting up the Twittersphere with their video contest, where the prize is a $100,000 PropertyGuys.com franchise.

5. You Look Cool

We're giving you permission to have some fun with your contest campaign. If your corporate website and marketing materials tend to skew towards the more 'functional' side (read: boring), then a contest gives you a chance to spread your wings outside of that stuffy box, for once. Splash some color into your campaign, and make it stand out from everyhting else you do. Make it looks as cool as you want. This stuff is meant to be fun and engaging, so pull out all the stops.

BCIT cut loose, had a bit of fun and got some great student video submissions with their 3BlogNights event and video contest.

4. You Make "Fans"

You already have fans. You just might not know it yet. A photo or video contest will reflect that community, and bring them closer to you. The ones who place as finalists, win prizes or interact directly with your company will be left with a positive impression. They will become brand ambassadors on your behalf.

From the author's own past: When I was 13 years old, I won a trip to Toronto to attend a (Coca-Cola sponsored) hockey camp with none other than Wayne Gretzky himself. Today at lunch, I ordered a soda with my fish my and chips. Can you guess which brand? (I promise to update this post with photographic proof of my meeting with His Greatness).

3. It Keeps Getting Easier

Each subsequent contest gets easier, for a number of reasons. First, you will have a better understanding of how people respond to contests. You may have thought of an even better idea for the next campaign. You also have a database of people who entered in the past, whom you can invite to participate again. You may even have design assets that can be re-used for future campaigns, limiting your costs to start another contest.

Launch Party Vancouver has used Strutta to power the last several startup competitions, using video, popular vote and judges. Each time, they get a larger number of submissions, votes and views- as more and more community members already have voting accounts, and know exactly what to expect.

2. Find Out More About Your Customer

With the option of adding survey questions or customer-specific contest requirements, you can ask and obtain more information from the folks who enter your contest. Choose carefully what you ask, because each form makes entering a little bit more difficult. But there may be questions that your marketing department would love to learn: ie. zip code, profession, preferred breakfast cereal. If you're on the ball, you'll also ask for permission to send updates about your company, or about future contests.

1. 'Free' Marketing

Yes, this is number one for a reason. There simply is no better way to spread the message about your campaign than to have the masses do it for you. And if your video or photo contest has a popular vote element, people will be climbing all over themseves to spread the word on your behalf. Think of all the tweets, Facebook wall posts, and personal emails to uncles and aunties that will bear your name and brand. When you look at it that way, it's easy to see why contests (especially those with user content and popular vote) are such a great marketing investment.

Family Video's "Hotel for Dogs" photo contest generated an average of over 100 votes per entry among their top vote-getters, creating a voting frenzy among proud pet owners. This month, Family Video published a new contest- this time it's a movie review video contest. They know from experience that with a fun and topical contest, the community will do a lot towards spreading the word about the campaign.

Contests are a great marketing tool. Like any other tool available to you, it can be extremely effective when handled properly. If you reflect on the above list, you will likely realize your own reasons why contests will make sesne for your company. And that's the beauty of a contest promotion- it can be very unique and specific to your message, be fun and engaging for visitors, and still accomplish your overall marketing goals.

We hope this helps you see the value in using contests in your marketing, but we understand if it doesn't answer all of your questions for you. That's where we come in.

Contact us at 1-877-477-5717 so we can chat about how to make a contest part of your campaign.

We've published a new version of our FAQ, one that explains many of the questions that people have about video and photo contests, and how to use the Strutta platform.

We've divided up into two sections; one for contest creators, and one for entrants/voters. We expect that it will see many revisions and additions, based on your feedback. Hope you like it. If you don't see your question, submit it to us using our contact form.

Of all of the services that we offer as part of our online contest software, it is our secure voting process and user verification that set us apart.

Settling on a user-friendly, safe and easy voting method has not been easy, though. In fact, since our launch in late December, we've made two major improvements to it, and completely redesigned the "look" of the process twice as well.

We thought it would be fitting to share a little "behind the scenes" of how our newest voting flow came to be. First, a little history, provide by our Senior Architect, Steven Wittens:

All of Strutta is built on top of the open source Drupal system. This is a popular platform that runs some of the most trafficked sites on the web. In particular, we use the Drupal Voting API module to tabulate our votes, which is a tried and true solution. The code for all of this is freely available at Drupal.org for review.

On top of Drupal's own high quality code, we add some additional measures to ensure fairness.  Firstly, we require all accounts to be signed up with a valid (and verified) e-mail address, and we have several safeguards in place to prevent abuse of common e-mail services. Secondly, our entry browsing system equalizes exposure for all contest entries, regardless of when they were added. When we present random entries to content voters, our system prioritizes those entries that have been viewed the least. Thus everyone gets a fair share of exposure, and the benefit you get from submitting early is minimized.

With a few notes about how this has been implemented on our site for the latest version of the voting process, here's Senior Developer Mike Holly:

Our users are required to verify their accounts (by clicking an activation link sent in an email) before voting. In an effort to streamline the registration process as much as possible, and provide "instant gratification" to our users, we initially decided to record all votes immediately. However, as users often failed to verify their accounts, unconfirmed votes were removed from the system after a certain amount of time. Unfortunately, this led to a great deal of confusion amongst our users, as decreases in vote counts were perceived as errors in the system.

We're glad to announce that we have resolved these usability issues and have run the new system through extensive usability tests. With the new system, anonymous users must still register when voting or submitting entries, but, this time around, all new votes and entries are kept in a "pending" state until the user clicks the email verification link. When the verification link is clicked, the user is notified that their votes have been made permanent and finally redirected back to the contest site. Once at the site, the user can clearly see that their vote has been recorded. We're hoping that these changes help make our system as transparent and usable as possible.

Thank you Mike, for that very clear and candid explanation. Even with all of this carefully considered development and execution, our system still needs a "front end;" what we in the internet business refer to as the "user experience. Tha masterful artist behind what you see in this most excellent voting process is none other than Ross Howard-Jones. Here's "HoJo" with a few words about the look and feel:

We really wanted to clean up the login/register iframe (the registration box that appears) within our competition platform to help with user flow and clarity. The first version wasn't quite as flexible as we needed it to be. We kept on running into issues of the size of the iframe, so one one the first things we improved was to have the iframe expandable.

The second was the look of the iframe. The design was simple, but still felt out of place when initiated within one of the unique themes that our users had come up with. We needed something that would work well across the board with all of the themes. We came up with a even simpler design that incorporates transparencies to blend with the theme behind it. This seems to keep the user's experience more seamless.

The last thing was to improve not only the language within the iframe but also position of the copy to make everything more obvious to the user. The user's actions now flow together to make everything feel a bit more linear and supported.

So you can see that a great deal of work and preparation go into something that is meant to seem intuitive and easy. That's the challenge; building a tool that is accessible to all levels of internet users, and that is low-friction for people to enter contests and cast their votes.

We've also been asked several times about "single sign-on" for member sites, and other methods of verifying identity  and we are exploring all of them, especially for our pending API.

We're pleased with this latest iteration of the voting process, but we know it's not likely the last change we'll ever make. As always, we invite your feedback. Let us know what you think in the comments, or hit us up using our contact info below.

And as always, you can follow us on Twitter at Twitter.com/strutta.