I had a great idea. I would tap into a group of 16 women’s networks and competitive spirit by holding a tournament style photo contest in which the contestants would get “Likes” as votes, and the woman with the most votes among the two matched-up each round would advance to the next round until we had one lady standing. Simple enough right?

The great beauty of this contest is the way Facebook works as far as “liking” photos. In order to “like” a photo, you MUST be connected to that page. So in order for these girls to win, of course they would be bringing new people to the page, and these new people would have to “like” the page in order to vote, so it was guaranteed to do great things in building up our number of fans. This was great, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, I assumed everybody participating would be upstanding citizens such as I am, so it did not even cross my mind that a contestant would create dummy accounts to add to their vote total. It also didn’t cross my mind that either some contestants, or their loyal friends and fans, would go so far as to “flag” photos as “inappropriate” in order to get them deleted! While certainly sexy, none of these photos were any worse than what you would see on the Victoria’s Secret Facebook page. I wonder if they are getting their photos removed by Facebook…

So, nonetheless, with these interruptions attacking the legitimacy of the contest at its core, why do I not consider it an utter failure? Because at the end of the day, though there were clear obstacles, the process did exactly what it was meant to do, and that is add fans to the page. Prior to the contest, we were adding about 150 fans per week. The first two days of the contest we added 800 fans, and the following days averaged over 200 per day! Outsiders suggested taking the voting off of Facebook to a site we could have more control over, and while it all made sense from a contest point of view, my #1 priority was adding fans, and an off-site vote would severely limit our effectiveness in doing that.

I want to be clear that “adding fans” is not some empty goal we were chasing because it’s an easy social metric. The value in fans is it is a database that we can market to. Just like postal addresses or Email addresses, having fans allows us to reach that database at will with marketing and sales initiatives. We can promote, engage in conversation, provide customer service, advertise, and so much more with our database of fans. On top of the value to the company itself, we are able to add value to the sponsors of the company’s event by providing access to our social database. While an off-site contest would still create some buzz (though likely not as much because of the propensity to comment, share, etc. on Facebook that wouldn’t happen to the same degree off-site), and we could show page views and other analytics as proof of our popularity, you would be hard pressed to find as innocent of a database builder as this.

So we persevered through round 1 of the contest. The dummy account creating contestant ended up having those accounts unverified and removed by Facebook apparently (and thus she lost her votes). While she was certainly none too happy about that, karma and justice were served and she eventually went silently into the night. The deleted photo scandal turned into a one day “like-off” where each contestant got 12 hours to get as many votes as they could to advance to the next round, winner take all. While perhaps a bit annoying to the fans who had to be asked in some cases to vote 3 times in one round, it ultimately left everybody feeling like we were trying to be as open, fair, and accommodating to all parties, and creates even more activity for the page!

Certainly, a lesson was learned in not assuming people will behave, and to thoroughly consider all possible bad turns an innocent promotion can take. But like the song goes, “If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.” So at the end of the day, even knowing what I know now, I still don’t see a better way to build this wonderful database. Do you?