You’re the Next Contest-ant

Posted on September 23, 2008, by Harvey Kirkpatrick 
Filed Under Kingstonist

Last June, we gave away a pair of tickets for the Confederation Trolley Tour as a part of our regular comment contests. We’d been holding these contests for a few months to reward readers with prizes including gift certificates to locally owned businesses and restaurants. These competitions were a quick and easy way for us to encourage audience participation, and in my biased opinion, we were quite successful. The Kingstonist team never had to moderate a comment that wasn’t relevant to a given topic of discussion, nor were we inundated with massive amounts of comments from any one person. But a strange thing happened when we put the breaks on our contests over the summer. Your comments kept flowing in just as much, if not more than the days when we offered locally flavoured incentives. Just what does this mean for the future of contests at Kingstonist?

Rest assured, we still want to give stuff away to you. That said, as I mentioned above, we’re not totally convinced “comment contests” are entirely necessary to stimulate your feedback. So, with your help, we want to explore a few new ways to reward our audience for their participation. It is not our intent to solely rely on one of these concepts until the end of time, as we may change it up from month to month so that it’s exciting and less repetitive. Here are some of our ideas in no particular order:

  1. User-Generated Content Contest: submit your photography, poetry, or whatever we ask, to show off your creative chops. This would be juried or possibly voted on by the public rather than the random draw format of our boring comment contests.
  2. Caption Contest: this really needs little explanation. We take a picture, and you insert a funny caption, (mis) quote, or even explanation. Just like the user-generation content contest, winners would be best determined by the readers in a poll.
  3. Geo-Caching(ish): not everyone has a GPS-enabled cell phone, or devoted hand held device to participate in a city-wide treasure hunt. Instead, Kingstonist could take a photo of something and have people guess where, or even what they’re looking at.
  4. Rewards for Hot Tips: we get a load of email, and suggested stories each and every month. For those not offering us free Cialis, Viagara, or the keys to our long lost fortune, we’re considering recognizing the best of the best with prizes. The only problem is that some of our tipsters want to remain anonymous.
  5. You’ve Already Thought of Something Better: if none of these ideas strike your fancy, perhaps you’ve already got a sure fire way to help Kingstonist connect with and reward readers. If so, we want to know.

Please tell us which of these formats is a hit, and which one’s are lame-o-rific. Hopefully, we’ll get enough responses to kick start another Kingstonist contest in October. Thanks for reading, and a preemptive thank you for commenting.

Comments

4 Responses to “You’re the Next Contest-ant”

  1. Ian Jackson on September 23rd, 2008 12:38 pm

    Captions and where’s waldo are my faves, but they all sound pretty good.

  2. Krista on September 23rd, 2008 6:49 pm

    Where In Kingston? should be a contest: post a photo of something special in Kingston and we have to guess what and where it is. Rule is it has to be something very public, and not invading of someone’s privacy.

  3. Matt Pedlar on September 24th, 2008 8:43 pm

    I love caption contests, and the where in Kingston thing is a good idea too.

  4. Duke Smythe on September 25th, 2008 10:12 am

    They’re all pretty neat ideas, and agree that the who, what, where contest is the best. I think a photography contest would be pretty cool as well.

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