voting

Last night around dinner time we launched a voting widget for BostonPizza.com's Designer Pizza Sale, where voters choose their favorite of six new pizza recipes and are entered to win free pizza for a year. You can also receive a free appetizer from Boston Pizza if you join their email club.  

In a later post, we'll dissect the functionality of everything we built, and for now I'll simply say that the whole thing is hosted by us, and is nested on the Boston Pizza site in an iframe.

In the meantime I thought I would just share these screens along with a few words about voting, because if you're reading this before November 8, 2008, there's still time to enter! Oh, and don't miss the "Share with a Friend" button on the bottom left. 

When you first visit the voting "page" you see the six pizzas rotating around in a circle, with changing perspective as they come into the foreground. I know what you're thinking, but no- there is no flash, and you can tell because it loads almost instantly (We'll have the smart dudes explain the javascript magic later.When you click any pizza, it rotates to the very foreground, along with a description for that pizza:

When you're convinced that you've found your fave, you click the "Vote for this Pizza" bubble and then you see the form:

For me, the best part happens AFTER you vote. A colored pie chart showsyou the results of the nationwide vote. At the time of the posting, the Canadian Classic was enjoying a healthy lead, but not a majority government. 

This is the first of many examples of Strutta-powered contests that we'll be featuring over the next little while, and I will make good on that promise to share more details of the technology that makes this all possible very soon, with the help of one of our (presently very busy) developers. 

Thanks for voting! If you have any feedback about this or future contests sites, feel free to leave it in the comments below. 

Do you remember checking under the cap of your pop bottle to see if you'd won?

Those contests and promotions did exactly what they were meant to do; they motivated you to open the bottle. But like mass media advertising, the system was flawed, in that it couldn't be accurately measured. Sody pop companies could tell you exactly how many lid liners were returned for prizes, but not how many were checked overall. I know this, because as a young convenience store employee, I would fill the slow time checking under the caps of the returned empties in hopes of winning a cash prize or a Dr. Pepper sweatband. Worse yet, they didn't know how many went unchecked; junked or recycled without a last minute intervention by a greedy gas jockey with dirty fingers.

Big soda pop has adapted though, and now has the wisdom to use the bottle caps to drive traffic to the web, where every unique contest enterer can be counted and graphed, thereby giving the advertiser a better idea of the reach and success of a promotion. Now, with this new "social web," technology has lowered the barriers to making user-generated content (can we rename that term, please? Srsly) a part of the DNA of contests. Photo contests, video submissions and countless other media-related entries (design your own pop bottle, anyone?) have taken the place of the "25 words or less on a plain sheet of paper" of old.

With this new territory comes new challenges as well. Not everyone has the know-how to submit a video to an online contest, but opting into a web form and casting a vote is easy enough, if the motivation is there. Ensuring that only humans have the ability to submit to these promotions presents another problem- if the system is gamed by bots, then the integrity of the promotion is comprimised. 

Building a platform for these kinds of promotions that satisfies all those needs is the hard part. How does an advertiser best open themselves up to user-submitted media, online voting and marketing of its contests? What technologies should they use, and what kinds of steps are necessary for the legal and fraud prevention side? How will hosting be handled? Voting, judges or random draws? And how can you "get it on Facebook and the blogs?" 

Strutta's upcoming feature-set release aims to answer all of those questions right out of the gate, and here's why we're confident that advertisers and marketers will embrace it:

(Because) There is a lot more value in having some level of lasting engagement with the people opting into your promotions, especially when they are willing to create media on your behalf in order to participate.

The finalists in a photo competition, for example, would make for a more interesting and deeper site visit experience for an entrant than having no reason to check back with a contest site at all. It's with this in mind I'm sure that companies started asking us about when Strutta would be made available for them to structure promotions on their own terms. We listened, and now that technology is just a few short weeks away from launching.

If you're curious about what's "under the hood" of this latest release, I'll explore that (and touch upon a few feature details) in an upcoming post. If you have questions you'd like to ask now, feel free to hit up the commnent form below or email me directly: jordan[at]strutta.com.

Image source: Pop bottles by Dawn-ny.

All is quiet at Strutta HQ these days; it is reminiscent of a few months back when were all pushing to release our initial beta.

Long periods of focussed quiet are contrasted periodically by high-energy whiteboard sessions, as the talented development team and the dilligent (and handsome!) marketing staff work together in blissful harmony toward a common end goal. It's enough to bring a tear to your eye really, or maybe I just love what I do too much. 

The research that Mark has conducted on Strutta's behalf has turned up some interesting patterns and similarities between the new product we're building, reality tv shows and even the current US Presidential race. 

Actually, the differences are more telling. The finale of American Idol on one night draws more votes than any one presidential candidate on election day. Meanwhile, our research around online contests has highlighted the importance of prizes for both participants and voters, with the former seeming easier to attract than the latter. There is very little at stake for a voter that calls or texts their support for a reality show candidate, so why the huge numbers there? 

We're willing to conclude that technology is a major factor. Proving that mobile technology is the way of the "future," text messages are almost certainly tipping the scales considerably. In actual fact, the ability to vote from one's home, regardless of the technology, makes it a low threshold to participation. So the comparison isn't fair, but it's still fun to make it.

The participants of the current election aren't foolish enough to ignore this fact, either. As I write, I'm waiting for word of Barack Obama's running mate; an announcement he has vowed to make via text message. Not on TV, or on the front page of a printed newspaper, but on your cell phone. Even that crusty old John McCain is riding this new wave of technology and has started reading emails; I've heard he entertains a digest of them in printed form from his advisors each morning. Careful there, future boy!

So what does this mean for the new version of Strutta? It means that we recognize that companies, their fans, contest enterers, agencies, marketers and everyday web surfers have a slieu of different needs and interests when it comes to online contests and competitions, and we have to be prepared to accomodate them all. Additionally, we've had to prepare ourselves to advise as to what formula is most likely to work best with any one market, based on the trends we've noticed in the habits of participants.

As part of our Fall launch of what we're unofficially calling "Version 2," we'll be announcing a list of "Launch Partners," a number of companies whose online contests and promotions will be released along with our new software. Each will have its own unique approach to prizing and participation, and should help to exhibit the flexibility of what we're building. We've already made arrangments with a number of partners, but there's still time to be a part of this program (in which we are waving the cost of development for participants). Just fill out the form at the end of the post where we announced it, and we'll follow up with you.

If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to leave them here in the comments. 

Image source: Noise to Signal by Rob Cottingham.