Sweepstakes are all the rage

There was a time when sweepstakes and other similar competitions would fall out of your morning paper, but nowadays companies are falling over themselves to launch one on Facebook.

Facebook is already full of discounts and deals from companies trying to entice people to their Facebook pages, so its rare that a company comes up with an idea that is newsworthy. It seems though that starting today, Expedia is upping the ante: It has created a sweepstakes that offers more than $1 million in prizes, including five trips that cost more than $100,000.

Expedia launches ExpediaFriendTrips

Expedia FriendTrips is as much a game as a sweepstake.  The rules are fairly straightforward: Fans of Expedia can start a plane (becoming its pilot) and point the plane toward one of the 13 destinations offered as prizes. Pilots can then invite their friends to join them on the plane, each of which holds five passengers. Being a passenger or a pilot on the plane makes you eligible to win.

The prizes, called “trips of a lifetime,” include a $160,000 trip for the winner and five friends to go on a luxury tour of South America, with stops in Chile, Peru and Foz do Iguaçu, a natural paradise that spans the convergence of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay; a $100,000 trip to Las Vegas that covers the winner and five friends’ stay at a hotel suite, transportation by limousine, a shopping spree and $25,000 in cash (for gambling, of course); and a $100,000 European cruise for the winner and five others to fly (first class) to Venice, then stay in a 6,000-square-foot garden villa on Norwegian Cruise Line’s Jade.

To increase their chances of winning, fans of Expedia can merely start more planes and recruit more friends to join them on their journeys: 25 friends doubles your chances and 50 friends triples your chances. And to give everyone a sense of urgency, the competition ends in six weeks time.

If you would like to start your own Facebook Sweepstake, but want a bit of imagination put behind it, get in touch with Whadda Media. We’re good at thinking up and creating innovative marketing ideas.

How to measure the ROI of social media

Social is definitely in fashion.

All of a sudden everything from search through to e-commerce is proceeded by the word ’social’. Of course, the leisure industry knows better than most the power of social, after all personal recommendation is still the most powerful form of advertising, with word of mouth contributing to a large part of any venue‟s customers. Our collective desire to know what our friends are doing has fuelled the meteoric rise of countless social networks from MySpace and Bebo, to Facebook and Twitter, not forgetting Youtube and Flickr. It is no wonder that every business has scrambled to benefit from this new form of digital recommendation and climb on board the social bandwagon.

Now in 2011, as everyone takes long hard looks at their budgets, the need has never been greater for leisure groups to validate and measure the benefits delivered by their increasing investment in social media and digital marketing. However, before going headlong into number crunching, it is important to realise that whilst the size of a company’s online social reach is a reflection of the level of social media participation, it is not symbolic of brand stature, resonance, loyalty, or advocacy, nor is it an indicator for business performance.

Social media marketing delivers a wide range of benefits to organisations that are beneficial in the short term and long term in both quantitative and qualitative ways. To properly value the impact of its social media marketing investments, leisure groups must align their objectives, metrics, targets, and strategies across four perspectives:

• Financial – has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased?
• Digital – has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?
• Brand – have consumer attitudes about the brand improved?
• Risk management – is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or problems that affect reputation?

Marketers must learn to evaluate a diverse set of short and long-term benefits and not concentrate solely on the financial aspect.  This approach furnishes several benefits, such as aligning measurement to all corporate objectives and not just sales, providing a means for gaining consensus from diverse stakeholders and avoiding short-term gains at the expense of long-term brand health.

Whadda Media launches

So much has been happening here, that we thought it was about time we updated our blog.

Since the launch of Whaddado.com we’ve been researching how best we can help the leisure industry promote themselves and their events.

Your audience is tech savvy, are you?

We commissioned research to discover how people currently find things to do and to what extent they are influenced by their friends. Of particular interest to us was on people’s use of technology to stay informed and plan their social lives.

It is not surprising that 87% of the people we questioned used Facebook on a daily basis and that 48% of people actively used Facebook to organize an evening out. We were however, a little taken aback to discover how many people already have a smart phone (55%) and the percentage of people that regularly use Google as their primary means for discovering ideas for things to do (30%).

Now in 2011, as everyone takes long hard looks at their budgets, the need has never been greater for leisure groups to validate and measure the effects of their marketing efforts. Shouldn’t leisure companies now be looking to Facebook and Google for ways to promote their businesses, rather than the more traditional media? And surely it is time to make sure that every printed ad does a better job of promoting a company’s website, Facebook Page and Twitter account, than the usual tiny mention placed discreetly at the bottom of the ad?

So we’ve decided to make it our mission to help every leisure group get more fans and followers and learn simple tricks for engaging with their increasingly tech savvy audience.

Today we’re delighted to announce the launch of Whadda Media and our accompanying website whaddamedia.com, a social marketing company with a difference. We’re all about transforming leisure company’s social marketing efforts through cost effective online tools. Our service is affordable to all, from single venues to the largest chains. We promise to save you time, increase awareness of your business online, give you some handy marketing tools, teach you a thing or two and most of all, we’ll keep you ahead of the game, giving you ultimate control over all your social media.

Please keep an eye on this blog as we will continue to post our thoughts and advice on how the leisure industry can really take advantage of social media. More to follow soon…

preBeta Launch – 2nd Sept 2010

Finally the time has come to open the pre-Beta to the world.  We have had lots of testing with our test user group and now feel we are ready to give you all an opportunity to feedback.

As part of the Launch 48 showcase, whaddado will be one of the 18 exhibitors to some top investors and the web startup community.  It will be held at the London PayPal office and promises to be a great day to launch the Whaddado pre-beta.

Make sure you get your ticket to come along, free beer and pizza.

http://showcase.launch48.com/exhibitors/

And of course some check out the new site, login via facebook, add some whaddados, create lists and share with your friends.  The more followers you get the more points.  And points means great things to whaddadoers.

The Whaddado Team

Let me in

Hold onto your hats folks, we’re nearly there; yes Whaddado is finally about to take to the world stage for our dress rehearsal. We’ve labored long and hard these past months to bring our vision to life and now we’d like to start by inviting a few ‘nice’ people to give us some feedback, point out any errors they come across before we’re ready to release Whaddado on an unsuspecting public.  Expect to see our lovely holding page replaced by what we term a preBeta release.  Return soon to participate and join in sharing great ideas with the Whaddado community.

So What is Whaddado?

It’s pretty simple really, it’s a new way for finding and sharing ideas for things to do.

I’m sure you’d agree that ‘what shall we do?’ is a common enough question, yet inspiration for ‘what to do’ comes from a whole host of different sources: listing guides, holiday brochures, reviews, flyers, posters and most importantly friend’s recommendations. There is no shortage of information out there, but there is still no effective way of sharing this, keeping friends up-to-date with what you’ve found to do and seeing who’s up for doing things with you.

That’s where we come in! Whaddado is a new social bookmarking service that helps you collect together all the good stuff you’ve found to do from any source (on or offline) and share it easily with friends and those with similar interests. Through Whaddado there is a ready made suggestion for every ‘what to do’ question.

How it all started

Back in May 2008 one of our founders was enjoying a drink with a group of friends and discussing what each had got up to the previous weekend. Everyone had gone somewhere or done something that at least one other would enjoy – yet no-one had bothered to share their plans with the rest of the group. In most cases these activities were not events that could be listed in local newspapers or listing magazines, but they were things such as a cookery class, an amateur play, a visit to Borough Market, a cycle ride, a game of tennis or a lunch at the pub by the river.

So several drinks later It became clear that despite the emergence of social communities such as Twitter and Facebook and community based event listing sites; there still was no adequate way for groups of people to let their friends in on their plans or share their knowledge of what’s ‘good to do’. The main problem seemed to be a lack of an easy way to collate all the information around that everyone collects in their daily lives from event listings, posters, flyers, friends recommendations and of course websites. So Whaddado was born to make it all easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Sentiment analysis

Many industry leaders are beginning to talk more about sentiment analysis and how it will effect the way the web evolves over the coming years.  As such Whaddado will be investing considerable time and research into this emerging field looking at how we can create not only a better user experience but to enhance the quality of the content for our users.

Once created we will be able to provide more than the usual standard rating about an event or venue but will be able to reach into the underlining detail that effects why a place is popular.  This will encourage more UGC and set off a chain of understanding trends and movements in real time that will fine tune dynamic recommendations.

Although not our key product we will be expecting to begin development on the bases for a new and unquie sentiment analysis system in 2010.

For more information try

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

Twitter + Facebook Connect

So would you prefer Twitter or Facebook to login…

Well why not both?  It would seem that to give the 2 options for sign in and register we can extend our reach and at the same time capture the ability to publish onto 2 networks, Twitter updates (Tweets) and Facebook (news feeds).  This is now going to be our preferred choice while allowing email registration.

This will greatly reduce spam by having real facebook and twitter accounts as the standard login.  For the alternative email registration we will implement a capture.  The capture will be based on our own custom random questions such as “What is 7 x 1 + 2″.  Hoping to avoid the many capture issues we have seen develop with other sites such as StumbleUpon.

Sign in and registration will go into development over the next month which will help nut out some of the issues we have been trying to overcome with so many profiles and passwords to remember.

Facebook Connect or openId

Its an ongoing battle to see who will win the war of single sign on across the web.  Despite the early start of OpenId and the hype surrounding it there has been a formidable contender on the sidelines.  Yes with Facebook’s launch of FB Connect there has been a flurry of new integrations.  Its enormous penetration and ease of use makes it the obveous choice for aspiring web applications and start-ups alike.

Its for this reason Whaddado will be implementing Facebook connect as its primary registration and sign in app.  In addition we will allow Twitter sign in due to the fact we are linking all accounts with Twitter its a simple second choice.  Linked In connection may follow shortly after that.