Cathay Pacific nicely illustrating the power of Facebook pages and enthusiasm by brand fans this week to have a bit of fun when an incentive is dangled in front of them.
The Hong Kong-based airline launched a competition this week, hosted and promoted purely via social media – and appears to have succeeded, at least in terms of gaining entries.
Called “Where In the World Would You Go For 80 Days?”, users are encourage to produce a short video, send pictures or simply write where they would go around the world if they had 80 days to use up on the Cathay Pacific and DragonAir network of flights.
Hosted on Facebook, users submit their entries via the fan page and then each is put into an overall pot to be shortlisted by mid-March 2011.
Other Facebook fans can also view the videos and photos and vote for their own favourite.
Shortlisted entries are then invited, expenses-paid, to Hong Kong to take part in a series of challenges in the city. The overall winner takes off on their 80-day trip during June, July and August of this year.
Cathay may have 60,500 fans to its Facebook page, but the competition has clearly struck a chord, with over 400 entries in its first 24 hours.
These are working well for brands generally but if they go wrong they can be pretty bad PR. Check out Intrepid Travels recent comp. To begin, very few people seemed to be able to enter. Long threads on their page sprang up with users desperate to enter but unable. Intrepid blamed some tech teething troubles. Then they published clear instructions which still didn’t work for a lot of people. There are still people trying and failing but Intrepid (to their credit) are persevering.
They got a lot of buzz from the comp but a fair amount was less than positive… Lesson; make sure you test implementation of any Facebook app/page functionality thoroughly before releasing it into the wild! Or get a reputable developer/agency to do the work.
400 entries in the first 24 hours. Given that the competition is a “creative” type, it takes time and effort to enter. So… makes me wonder what factor multiplied in entries there would have been if the entry method had simply asked entrants to either Like their Facebook page or connect with other Social media. My guesstimate is a factor of 20 times as many entries.
There’s an amazing contest application that you can put on your Facebook page, simple, cheap and easy to use: http://toptabapp.com/?r=4, my favorite!