There is a whole industry out there dedicated to winning contests. ContestMob is just one website I found that writes about "Tricks of the Trade for Entering Online Sweepstakes". At this site I found a blog post about "100 Ideas on How to Get Votes for Online Voting Contests" among other very interesting posts for every aspect of this contesting world. It seems to me like this would be as time consuming as a full-time job. Contesting is not for the impatient or weak at heart. This is serious stuff.
Vote exchanging seems to be the biggie when trying to win a contest such as the one we are all voting for right now. There is a whole host of websites dedicated to helping you find voters for your cause. Get Online Votes turned out to be an interesting site to peruse. Just typing the word aviva in the search box on this website made the investigation easy. Finally, it started to make sense to me how some of these groups in the lead were amassing so many daily, and inconsistent, votes. Another website I found with some rather interesting posts is the smartcanucks forum. Hmmm...now it's all making sense to me why some groups come out of nowhere and within a few days are near the top of the leader board.
Initially, I was angered by what seemed to be blatant cheating by some groups in this contest. I searched every one of the Top 18 groups to see what I could find. That was also an eye-opening experience. Some of the groups near the top are doing an exceptional job of getting their cause out to the world using all the typical methods that are considered legit, such as lots of media coverage, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. And some are using the vote exchange option. Some are using sources like Kijiji to ask for votes. There's even bot-automated voting websites that can be utilized, at a price, to up the number of votes, but I've read that these are always considered illegal...thankfully!
What I was glad to see was that Seats @ Meets was not involved in any vote exchange websites...at least not that I could find anyway. What I did notice was that some of the groups that are ahead of us tend to use Twitter much more than do the voters for Seats @ Meets. The power of the social networks is apparent here. There was one blog post that anaylized and detailed how many votes you might expect from your contact list...simplified, if you have 4000 contacts or friends you can expect only 80 votes. Wow, who knew? What this also tells me is that Seats @ Meets actually has a pretty good base of about 500 legit voters...consistent voters...well, with the exception of weekends! We will definitely need to work on weekend voting in the Final Round.
The more I thought about what I found, the more I wavered back and forth about what to do. Do I tell Aviva what I found? Are they aware of what is going on out there? Do they even care because, really, the more people that log onto their website the more people become aware of them and the good thing that they are doing for the community. They would have to pay a whole lot more than a million dollars to get that kind of reach with any other type of ad campaign. Don't get me wrong. I think what Aviva is doing is fantastic. It's the weirdness that overtakes some people when this kind of money is at stake that is worrisome. You should read some of the stories that have happened in the contesting world over prizes worth a measly fraction of what Aviva is giving away. People can get downright nutty at the thought of something free!
Disheartened would be a good way to describe how I felt when all this came to light for me. I even considered not voting anymore because what's the point...we'd be left in the dust of the vote exchange users. But I'm not a quitter and I started to think about how to adjust and continue competing. And then the most amazing thing happened!
As I mentioned at the top of this post, I have been recording the daily votes of the Top 18 since the beginning of Round 2. I record the accumulated votes at around 11pm each night. I do this to see who to watch out for and also to see how many voters each group has. It has been interesting to watch the votes progress. Some groups plug along with a consistent number of votes each day, and believe it or not, Brockville is not the only group to suck at weekend voting. Some groups are all over the place with their daily votes...one day they will log about 500 votes and the very next day will log over 1000 votes and the day after that about 600 votes. This kind of voting makes me wonder. Just so you know, Seats @ Meets logs about 470 daily, with the occasional 500+ day and then our 300+ weekend days.
Here's the amazing thing. Last night, as usual, I recorded everyone's dailies. Each morning I also check to see how many votes happened overnight just before I place my vote. Well, low and behold...didn't 12 out of the top 15 groups have votes taken away from them! And Seats@ Meets was NOT one of the groups with votes taken away. Some groups had some pretty substantial numbers of votes removed. Ha...that disheartened feeling started to leave me! Aviva is at least aware of what's going on, to what extent I don't know. The dust from the groups in the lead is starting to thin!
So why have I told you all this? Maybe to level the playing field? Based on what I found online this past week I gather there are not a lot of "contesters" in Seats @ Meets group of supporters otherwise I would have found some evidence of it. And isn't it always better to know what you're up against in a contest like this? You can bet if I ever get involved with another voting contest I will make sure everyone knows what they are in for and to win it they will have to work just a little harder to get the recruits necessary to stay in the running. I'm not sure if vote exchanging is legal in this or any contest and I'm certainly not advocating anyone do this, especially at this time in the contest. But when you think about it, vote exchanging is no different than asking people you don't know from Facebook or Twitter to vote for us. As long as the vote exchangers are using their legitimate email addresses and following the rules, is this any different than asking a Facebook "friend", whom you may not actually know, to vote with their legit address? Only the sponsor of any given contest can answer that question. I think Aviva has spoken. I take it that they are not sitting back and letting the votes come in from any wild and wooly source. It has to be hard to weed out the riff-raff in a contest of this magnitude. I can't even imagine what Aviva must see if I'm seeing what I've seen with only 18 groups on my radar.
I also tell you this to encourage you to keep voting right to the last day. The world is a crazy place with all kinds of individuals willing to do anything to get what they want. I believe that Seats @ Meets is a great cause and our voters have been true and loyal, albeit a little forgetful at times! I also believe Aviva is running a fair contest. If we just stay the course by continuing to vote and recruit more voters until the last minute on Wednesday at noon, we will reach the Finals! Seats @ Meets meets all the judging criteria that Aviva will be looking for. We just need to get ourselves in front of their judges in the Final Round to prove it.
Keep voting...it's not over yet. Not by a long shot!
