Results from Twegather Contest

April 10, 2010

Chris Schmitt

Twegather contest? What Twegather contest?

An important part of TeamCamp is learning about startups – and sharing ideas that work and ones that don’t. I think this particular experience fits into the category of an idea that didn’t work.

Although I’m relating a story about something that didn’t work, I’m am extremely proud of the Twegather team and how much Twegather application has grown. We’ve come a long way from the first prototype last June. We have hundreds of users and tons of potential.

My Dismal Attempt at a Promotion

At the end of February I launched a contest around the Twegather service with the following objectives:

Promote the much simpler event creation capability
Encourage more people to create events using Twegather
Determine is an element of “game play” had any effect on usage
Determine if a restaurant promotion would encourage more usage
Testing out the new event creation interface

The idea was simple: give 5 points for every event someone created and 1 point for every event RSVP (i.e. yes, no or maybe). The winner would be the user with the most points at the end of the month. The winner receives a $50 gift certificate for a restaurant in the Ottawa area.

I thought it was brilliant. Surely, people will create events and provide responses (if only to say they’re not coming). After all, 50 bucks is 50 bucks. Plus I’d kill 5 birds with one stone.

It was the biggest month ever for Twegather – we had more events and more people RSVPing that any other month; but it wasn’t because of the contest. The results for events created from the promotion were disappointing: there was no significant increase in use attributable from the contest. Most of the increase in use came from referrals, not from the contest.

Lessons learned

Promotions annoy people, especially Twitterers – Tweeting about the contest seemed to have little or no affect – no replies and only one re-tweet. I discontinued promotional Tweets after the first week on the assumption that I was likely annoying people more that anything.
It takes a lot of time (and skill) to do a promotion right – you have to find a the right channel(s) and you have to find the right promotion. Then you need to spend a lot of time getting the word out. I didn’t spend nearly enough time promoting the contest.
I did a poor job of notifying users about the contest on the Twegather web site – in hindsight, the notice was much too small

However, I did learn one important thing: promoting a service is not something to be underestimated. Next time, when the time is right, we’ll get the right expertise and do it right. And as they say, “nothing ventured, nothing gained”.

Announcing the Winner of the Contest

The winner of the $50 gift certificate to Boston Pizza was @filipmares – congratulations Philip. Actually, I think we’re really the winner because Philip decided to join the Twegather team. Runners up were @chris_saunders, @tekcast and @littlerandy.