HP, Cisco, no-knead rising twists and sling monkeys posted by Bret Clement at Monday, December 15, 2008

Contests have been a fun marketing tool for decades. Take Theodora Smafield. In 1946, Theodora was the first winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition.

Decades before Jeff Howe at Wired or the folks at Dell got excited about crowdsourcing - Pillsbury saw the power of mobilizing a community around its product through a contest.

Pillsbury wanted to excite a generation of homemakers and chefs about its flour - so it invited people to submit their best recipes for the chance to win $50,000. Theodora won for her “No-Knead Water-Rising Twists,” which involved a unique process of wrapping her dough in a tea towel and submerging it in warm water.

At Page One, we have seen the value that contests have with our clients - especially those eager to take advantage of social media strategies.

In 2008, we managed a number of contests for our clients to help excite and grow targeted communities. A couple of examples:

• SourceForge - When SourceForge, the world's largest repository of open source software, needed to increase their interaction with their community, they turned to Team Social Media at Page One PR. Before contacting Page One's social media group, SourceForge's major award of the year, their Community Choice Awards (CCA) had maxed-out participation at 38,000 people. After launching several contests including free tattoos and yes, a free sling monkey - Page One's integrated PR, Twitter and YouTube video campaign more than tripled voting participation in the SourceForge CCA contest. More than 150,000 community members submitted ballots.

• Cisco - Shelly Milam and the team at Page One are currently managing the Cisco Developer Contest. Strategically, Cisco is promoting the concept of the network as a platform. So they are offering up big money prizes to have developers build applications based on the Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP). Much like Pillsbury looked for creative recipes - Cisco is looking for creative software applications for their routers.

These are just two of the exciting contests we ran at Page One in 2008.

As we look around the technology space, we continue to see fun contests that others are doing. Intel is running its "What's Inside You Campaign" and HP/Microsoft are running the "Magic Giveaway".

We don't know who is behind some of the projects we see out there (such as Tac Anderson at HP or Ken Kaplan at Intel?)

But we'd be happy to meet with you and talk about the opportunities that contests and social media will bring in 2009.