Designing and building social media infrastructure for brand campaigns demands serious engineering. Very few people realize the quantum of investments, desirable time-lines for delivery and depth of technology expertise needed for the same. Specially when brands tread into the "contest" territory and there are prizes to be won, one needs to be extremely careful and vigilant about the processes, audit mechanisms and regulations. Else, such campaigns soon degenerate into a farce and consumers abandon their enthusiastic participation with a negative perception of the sponsoring product, service or brand.

I received an email from Dr. Gaurav Chhabra, today. Gaurav was participating in an international contest run by ExchangesConnect in the USA, and he brought this to my attention. Apparently the organizers of the contest have been unable to deal with technical challenges at their end, that led to "false voting". To resolve the issue, they backed off on fulfilling the promise made to deserving winning participants; Dr. Chhabra was a winner with his video "The mudcake" in Week #1.

In full disclosure, I have met Dr. Chhabra as a contestant in a campaign run by EC, on behalf of Mitsubishi, which met with a modest success in 2009. Titled the great driving challenge (TGDC), this campaign brought together thousands of amazing couples across India who all shared a common passion for driving and long trips on the road. Gaurav was one of the finalists and he was competing to raise money for donation to Mudcake

Gaurav has been a fan of Experience Commerce ever since, and has always been extremely appreciative about our efforts to run the campaign and contest in a transparent manner. His email today reminded me of similar issues we faced while running TGDC. For those of you who are interested, please read some of our posts here, here and here, which will give you a fair idea of how we pulled up fraudsters, and managed community issue during those turbulent days, as the campaign peaked.

For those of you who are yet to see the amazing mudcake video, I urge you to take a break and watch the movie here.


and finally here is the full transcript of the email exchange, Gaurav forwarded to my attention.
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Dear ExchangesConnect Community:

Earlier this week, we posted a message about recent attempts within the community to manipulate votes for specific videos through the use of fake or duplicate member accounts. When we planned the video contest, we took time to carefully create a sophisticated voting system that would be fair for all contest entrants. We hoped this system would be difficult for individuals to manipulate, but no online voting system is perfect. Therefore, we designed methods to identify fraudulent behavior and prevent it from having a significant impact.

Unfortunately, the recent fraudulent voting activity is so pervasive that it compromises fairness in voting and determination of legitimate votes for the weekly Flip Video Voting Challenge. Therefore, we have regrettably made the difficult decision to no longer award a free Flip Video camcorder to the entrant with the most votes each week. We feel this is the only option that is fair to all contest participants, especially those who have not manipulated voting to increase their number of votes.

The ExchangesConnect community was created to promote mutual understanding and encourage cross-cultural sharing and cooperation. We strive to create an online environment where all members can share their opinions and views of the world respectfully and on equal terms. In the spirit of this goal, we encourage you to continue rating and commenting on all the videos over the next two-week voting period. These comments will be taken into careful consideration by our judges as they evaluate each contest entry. Due to the vote manipulation, the number of votes and rating for each video will not be the deciding factor in determining the Top 40 finalists for the grand prizes, though they will still be taken into consideration. We also reserve the right to disqualify the video entry of any individual member found to be tampering with the voting process or operation of the Contest, or to be acting in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner. Please be sure to read the full contest rules.

Sincerely,
The ExchangesConnect Team

{ The reply from Dr. Gaurav Chhabra follows.. }

Well! I don't know how your Justice system works ! In our country No innocent is ever punished by the law...even if the culprit finds an escape out of such system. I think that is the true spirit !
Of course I have no regrets for not getting the Flip Cam which I won... in the first week, but i do have regrets for the fact that I promised some Amateur film makers that I will keep the camera for their usage . And and on that front, they feel cheated and me too.

Having participated in best of India's Online contests, the technology exists to find out any possible fraudulent voting. You haven't been possible to do so either due to lack of planning or lack of enough knowledge to hold such a contest. With due respect to the spirit behind your Contest , I would like to withdraw my film 'The Mudcake' from your contest, due to the very fact that your contest needs to grow up a bit to invite genuine films and filmmakers.No offenses meant to anyone. Needless to say, its not just about a 100 $ camera , its about ethics and management of the contest.

Peace n joy,

Dr Gaurav Chhabra
Director - The Mudcake( 1st week winner )
India

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In closure, like to offer my 2 cents for brands and agencies all gungho to get on-board the social media band wagon.

IF YOU CAN'T HACK IT, DON'T TOUCH IT.

Meet Tani. I have been following her profile on Facebook, this past month, part out of curiousity and part academic interest. I stumbled on her public profile page, by accident, as I browsed Brand Pages, for which I had received request to "become a FAN".



I was intrigued by her behavior, as she acquired friends briskly, 99%+ males, consistently approximately 30 at a time (or per day, I am not sure), but mostly did nothing else - very occasionally joining a group/page. Her URL pointed to a survey/poll site among others (not a personal blog or even company site, as is usual). The profile exhibited many of the characteristics of a social media spammer, BUT she was not spamming. ( For the newbie to social spamming, it is well known that many online marketeers, employ real staff to create fake profiles which are treated as marketing assets (i.e. profiles with a lot of friends). Such assets can be leveraged later to launch brand pages and show quick acquisition of fans.



Tani broke her silence lately and shared her favorite page - a page dedicated to a website titled FriendsNet. This was her first move in a while. "Aha - so this is the new service, she was waiting to market" - I thought! Loyally, I followed and clicked on the link she peddled.



More surprise was in store, as I clicked on the url for friendsnet and it redirected to some other link (do a WHOIS to find out the common lineage) before re-directing further on a page trying to acquire new members for Fropper.



Now that is some obnoxious affiliate marketing, huh? But, why was the spammer not advertising Fropper in the first place? Why was it talking about this fictitious FriendsNet, when it did not exist?



Maybe they just wanted to sneak in Fropper after getting the skirt-chasing, testosterone driven males all worked up about the possibility of finding 10,000 new friends, on a brand new site. Anyway, just out of curiosity, I checked out how Fropper is doing on Alexa, and the results were not surprising.



Maybe their brand manager is sleeping at the wheels, or trying to take the shorter cut? Or maybe it is acquisition time and desperate measures are needed to give their sagging traffic some filip. Or, maybe it is just 3rd party marketeer, innovating new ways to make money from Fropper's affiliate marketing program.

You decide.

Experience Commerce is a regular participant in the Digital Marketing outlook study conducted by SODA. Periodically this society, invites leading Digital Agencies around the world, for comments and inputs on market trends. SODA just published their 2010 report, which I believe is the finest collection of ideas and opinions from some of the most effective practitioners of the trade.The inevitable question: Do these trends necessarily apply to India, today? My answer would be an emphatic NO.

As I am writing this post, I refer to the statistics of a current running popular campaign from EC for Legrand-Arteor. This was a campaign targeted only at the creme-de-la creme, and designed to reach the evolved internet consumer. I find that over 45% of my traffic is still stuck using browser IE 6.0 and below and less than 42% of my traffic is arriving via broadband/DSL. Pardon my french, but we are really screwed both at the front and at the back. In such a primitive environment, reading about trends such as interactive story telling and the rush for augmented reality (@SODA 2010 report) seems so out of place.

YET, we must sift through such trends and remain inspired to do good work, fully cognizant of the constraints. We must find out smarter ways to crunch our code, distribute load, render quality graphics, so we can catch the attention of the elusive audience within split few seconds of landing on-site.

The Legrand Arteor Campaign delivered over 124,000 unique customers to our door, and we managed to convince over 80% of them to ring the doorbell and enter. Over 50% of those entering exhibited the patience to complete the tour of Arteor smart home. That is quite a phenomenon, given the statistics I just shared above, and calls for a round of applause for the amazing engineering from the EC Tech team.

At EC, we like to benchmark our work against the best in the world. We are not there yet but someday, we are certain, we will arrive.

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

Campaign India carried an article contributed By EC in their issue dated January 15, 2010. You can read it here, or directly in the scribd widget embedded below.

Campaign India Facebook Article

I have been digging through our archives of cool stuff done in 2009, and discovered some jewels that I felt were worth sharing on EC blog. The static images on our gallery do no justice to their awesome coolness. All three picked for this post come from the genre of "messaging" and are examples of social tools used by community members to exchange posts/messages. Hope you enjoy them - the ORKUT community users certainly did.

(a) Meetha Messages - an uber-cool way to scrap your friend on Orkut.

This work is from a social media campaign we launched for Cadbury Eclairs. Meetha message was one of the two applications which became a runaway success in the summer of 2009.

(b) Seedhi Baat - when you cannot come up with the right words, just say it straight.

This work is for a similar campaign we did for Sprite.

(c) And finally here is a sample from SuperScrap, a social application that has been resident on Page 1 of the ORKUT Application Library since the day of launch. Over 10 Million superscraps have been exchanged between ORKUT users in the past 1 year alone.