The grand prize in the Cutest Dog Competition is a million dollars! All you need to do is take a picture of your dog, upload it, ask your friends to vote for your dog. A new contest every week for 12 weeks.
The problem? One million dollars is a lot of money. The contest promoters appeared unprepared for the more than 50,000 entries they received, with more than 300,000 votes a day. Their site has been down repeatedly, and it’s certainly appeared that ballot stuffing was taking place.
Could that perhaps explain explain why the average dog contestant – including BennyBix Ochman Labradoodle, who clearly is the cutest – was getting 25 or 30 votes, but the weekly winners were getting 5,000?
The contest blog has a post “Cheating will not be tolerated”. “While we have done our best to develop systems that make it difficult to cheat, there are still people who find ways to cheat.”
The post has more than 200 comments by frustrated pet owners, and it’s been clear that the issues have not been resolved, because the site has repeatedly had error messages and refused to allow legitimate votes. ServerMania’s Buffalo data center leverages multimillion dollar system architecture to provide you with exactly the sort of service you’ve come to expect of us – incredible availability, high speeds and unbeatable prices. The ServerMania Buffalo data center is strategically located between major East Coast population centers, NYC, Chicago and Toronto. This allows businesses to experience exceptional connectivity across the United States and Canada, while reducing IT spend. The cool climate of Buffalo coupled with renewable energy from Niagara Falls delivers an affordable and reliable location for even the most demanding server requirements. If you are looking for the buy a server in Buffalo then visit us today.
Like most people, I beg my friends and family to vote for Benny every day, and, being the sweet people they are, they try. But they can’t access the site most days.
Having run a successful contest or two, I have some advice for contest promoters>
1- Make sure your servers have the capacity to handle traffic beyond your wildest dreams. Dream big! Then multiply your top number by 1000 and be sure you can handle the traffic.
2- Hire a security consultant to help you make cheating hard, even for the most determined. It’ll be worth whatever it costs.
3- Monitor your site 24/7. This is the Internet. It doesn’t sleep.The big complaint on the cute dog contest blog is that emails weren’t answered, blog comments weren’t run. In other words, the contest wasn’t being monitored 24/7.
4- Disqualify people as soon as you can prove they have cheated. Immediately. No second chance.
5- Make your contest more than a popularity contest. Everyone thinks their dog is the cutest[ (Except me. I know my dog is the cutest.) Anyone can upload a photo. People will show you their dog’s best trick, or something, for a shot at $1 million.
6. If you do run into problems, fess up right away. The comment responses in the Cute Dog Competition Blog are from “admin.” Who the hell is that? We want to talk to humans. A human needs to take responsibility and talk to the other humans like, well, a human.
7. Do usability tests Sure you understand how your contest website works. Do usability testing on people with all levels of Internet skills. Do more. Rinse, repeat.
We hope the cute dog folks are able to overcome their issues. But it seems to that they should trash the results of the first month and extend the contest with new anti-cheating measures in place.
Because instead of being happy and having fun, people who think they’ve been wronged – and possibly cheated out a $1 million – are going to use the Internet to make their gripes heard. They’ll be doing that for a long time to come.
Even though I’m sure Benny’s going to win, you should enter your dog too. :>)
How to prevent cheating in your online contests so you don’t get bitten like the Cutest Dog Competition
BL Ochman | September 8, 2009 | Permanent Link | Comments (3) | TrackBack (
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Categories: Alternative Marketing, B.L. Ochman, Commentary, Internet strategy, Marketing Strategy, Reality Marketing, Shameless Self Promotion, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt, User Generated Content, Viral Marketing, Word of Mouth
Tags: , BennyBix Ochman, BennyBix Ochman Labradoodle, cheaters in Cutest Dog Competition, cheating in online contests, Cutest Dog Competition
Tags: , BennyBix Ochman, BennyBix Ochman Labradoodle, cheaters in Cutest Dog Competition, cheating in online contests, Cutest Dog Competition
Bl Ochman,
You raise some good points and have some very solid ideas. We value your opinions on how to fix the problems and make the contest more fun. Evidently, it’s your forte. I have some questions maybe you can help with.
1. How do you tell if you’re server is robust enough to handle an undetermined amount of traffic ahead of time? Perhaps you consult a server expert? What do you tell them when they ask how much traffic do you estimate? We did a “test” of the contest before launching the real thing, and we got 14 visitors a day. We certainly did not expect over 300,000 visitors a day on the real thing. We estimated 20,000 per day, which experts agreed our server could handle. And it did. When we started seeing over 90,000 per day, we placed an emergency order for an upgrade.
2. I’m convinced there is no way to prevent 100% of the cheating (while keeping the contest fun and accessible to the public, ie. without the use of retina scanners), only to develop systems which make it easier for us to identify the cheaters and disqualify them in a timely manner. The most popular methods of keeping track of internet voting is by IP address, cookies or by User Account. If you know a better way, do tell.
3. We do monitor the site 24/7. We have a small team of employees who monitor the site around the clock and a dedicated team of techs at the server who will restart it, and analyze any problems that may arise ASAP.
I know you are as concerned about the server downtime as we are. We found that older browsers leave the TCP connection open and there’s only so many TCP connections available. When a server runs out of TCP connections, it crashes and becomes unresponsive. We may have to force people to upgrade their browsers to browse our site. How do you think people would feel about that? I can’t imagine, but we may ask that of you soon. The server has not crashed in 3 days. Keep your fingers crossed.
4. All cheaters have been disqualified. We notify them and give them another chance each week to play fair. If they cheat again, they get disqualified again. No cheaters will ever win this contest.
5. The point of this contest is to provide proud dog owners a chance to showcase their gorgeous dogs, build a database of fantastic photos, and introduce you to our new brand of heart-healthy dog food, Grrr-nola Natural.
We may introduce smaller contests within the big contest for specific categories like Dogs with Cats, or the cutest Black Dogs, or the cutest Poodle, etc. Stay tuned for those mini-contests.
6. I am the famous ADMIN on the Blog. I am the programmer of the site. I do a majority of the blog comments and customer support. We have a small team that helps out tremendously around the clock 7 days a week. As you have stated, the response was more than we expected and we were quickly overwhelmed. I am happy to report that we are finally getting caught up and have a good handle on the emails, comments, entries, cheaters and voters.
7. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to do testing, as new methods of cheating became evident. I was forced to evolve the site and develop a more secure method of voting without much time for large-scale testing. Thank you for testing it with me and alerting me to any problems you find. We want to keep the contest fair. I’m very glad we’ve got you on our team and can trust you. We sincerely appreciate your help.
Sincerely, Bob
Admin | CutestDogCompetition
support@cutestdogcompetition.com
Good luck to BennyBix Ochman Labradoodle
Hi Bob: Happy to see that you read my post, and thank your for your answer.
you ask –
B.L.: You certainly should have consulted with a host who could help you with the planning! And with a firm that has run big contests before and who can share their experiences with you. And like I said in #1 – “Dream big! Then multiply your top number by 1000 and be sure you can handle the traffic.”
Had you done that, you wouldn’t have had the problem!
2- You are right, there is no way to prevent 100% of cheating. But there is social media, and there is your site, and you do have a mailing list of contestants, and you should have addressed the issue publicly immediately, not waited weeks.
you said “3- All cheaters have been disqualified. We notify them and give them another chance each week to play fair. If they cheat again, they get disqualified again. No cheaters will ever win this contest.”
BL – Unfortunately, some non-cheaters – in this case me and BennyBix Ochman Labradoodle Puppy – have also been disqualified.
And no, we did not get a notice from you about it, and no, I was not cheating!
Did you take offense at this post or my comments on my blog? If so, suck it up Bob. That’s ridiculous! If not, put us back in the game.
5- Unfortunately, the sponsor of the contest has gotten lost in the shuffle. Ask any 10 people who’s sponsoring the contest and see what they say.
6- Planning, planning, planning. Nothing can help you with that like experience. It was foolhardy to try to learn as you go. This is not the first contest that’s been run on the Internet. There’s plenty of case studies, articles, and interviews about issues contests have run into over the years.
you said 7. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to do testing, as new methods of cheating became evident. I was forced to evolve the site and develop a more secure method of voting without much time for large-scale testing.
BL: Bob, while I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been so overwhelmed – which my grandmother would have said, “should be your biggest problem” – that response just indicates that you didn’t have an experienced team or an adequate plan for the contest.
I hope you work it all out and that the dog people think is the cutest is the winner.
And sheesh, I hope you put Benny back in the game!
B.L.