TVloop Blog

You’ll see that one of the common themes on this blog is the never-ending quest to drive user engagement via product features, content, and fan contests.  We spend a lot of time analyzing user behavior and developing new product features for the specific purpose of getting fans to visit our communities more often, but also to do more things when they’re there.  Both will then lead to more friend invitations which leads to more users and so on and so forth.

One of the easiest ways to drive engagement is to set up fan contests.  We’ve done this numerous times at TVLoop and FanSection, and the opportunities are virtually endless.  Users lover to participate in the community and love to share their opinions, photos, etc. - and they of course, love to win cool stuff. In short, fan contests can be successful ways to accomplish the following goals in a social community like TVLoop:

1. Content - If you’re having trouble getting users to create or upload content, fan contests represent a great opportunity to provide incentive.
2. Partnership/Advertising - Advertisers are often very interested in getting users to interact with the brand in new and creative ways.  Contests provide a good opportunity because users will associate the brand as the provider of a great prize.  This also places a premium on the need for a contest to be flawless - you don’t want a positive turning into a negative.
3. Engagement - Contests are a great way to involve users in the community, and an even better excuse (not that you always need one) to communicate with users.  And in many cases, such as voting, contests can lead to new users as existing ones invite their friends for the explicit purposes of generating votes.

So, with those general goals in mind, we decided to run a Best April Fools prank contest in the Addicted to The Office community on Facebook.  For those of you that don’t watch The Office, we chose that show because pranks are a common theme - generally when Jim pranks Dwight.

The contest went over very well as we received over 200 entries.  This is the first written submission contest we’ve run in a while, so we weren’t sure what to expect.  It turns out that users like to write about their successful pranks and some were extremely detailed…and long.  But the time spent reading the submissions was well worth it as we received some fantastic stuff.  In the end, the winner was unanimous.  Below are the top 3 submissions beginning with the winner

1st place: The Rollercoaster

So the funniest prank I have ever done is to my dad. we went to a theme park and we were going to go on a rollercoaster. I sat next to him and brought a screw with me. When the roller coaster took us up to the first drop I leaned over, pretend to pick up the screw and said,”where the bloody hell did this come from?” and I watched his face drop!!

2nd place: The Alarm Clock

I set my kids’ alarm clocks ahead an hour after they went to sleep the night before April Fools Day.  I couldn’t wait for them to get up and get ready for school a full hour early … only to tell them as we were rushing out the door that it was only 6:30 (instead of 7:30).  As I retired for the night, so smug and proud of myself, I set my alarm for shortly before 6:30 … didn’t plan to get up any early than necessary myself! When my alarm went off, I crept out of my room ready to greet my kids as they bounded down the stairs to load into the car.  It was very quiet!!  As I poked my head into my children’s rooms, I discovered them sweetly and soundly asleep!  Their clocks reflected the ACTUAL time!!!  How did that happen????  I had forgotten that we purchased alarm clocks for the kids that updated the time according to a satellite (mine did not)!!!  Their clocks had corrected themselves overnight! The joke was on me!!!

3rd place: The Zoo

I work as a paralegal, so as you can imagine, attorneys are ALWAYS looking for new clients.  I gave a phone message to my boss with the title Possible New Client, and the persons name was Harry Lyon.  However, the telephone number was for the local Zoo.  The attorney actually made the call, and asked for Harry Lyon.  The Zoo’s receptionist responded that there was no one there by that name, and the attorney insisted that he had a message to call this number. Finally he caught on.