If you’ve been looking for a way to draw visitors back to your site, to get users engaged and to build or strengthen a community of customers, you’ve got to try a contest. Set up a poll to capture votes, have users submit photos, questions, or stories, or you can hinge the contest on niche-related trivia. Contests are a great way to build interest, excitement and connect with your audience.

Elements of Success

First, you should know that in some states, sweepstakes are actually a form of illegal gaming. Just in case your hometown frowns on that form of promotion, you should know what constitutes a sweepstakes contest.

There are three elements to a sweepstakes: Something of value is given away, the winning is selected by chance, and the contest entry must provide consideration. Only if all three elements are present is the contest a sweepstakes.

You can make sure your promotion isn’t a sweepstakes by including ‘Free Entry,’ or ‘No Purchase Necessary,’ in the conditions.

Reward Sharing

You can also use a different form of contest completely. Polling, voting, and trivia are great ways to engage your audience and reward users for contributing, and they aren’t considered sweepstakes as the winner is not selected by chance or at random.

You can set up a poll for your users to vote on brand preferences or product uses. If the user’s selection wins, they get a prize. Polling and voting is used by big brands like MTV, Pepsi, and Levi’s.

Personalized Promos

You can also ask your users to submit their stories or photos as a part of the contest. Maybe it’s the top five best uses for your product, or it’s an inventive photo of the customer and the product, or an imaginative ad campaign suggesting a new way to see the product. Whatever the setting, you are asking users or customers to connect with you, your product and your company. This will give you a better sense of what your audience is thinking and enable them to connect with your business in a meaningful way.

You don’t have to worry about this promo being a sweepstakes because any winners won’t be chosen at random. You don’t even have to select just one winner, if the feedback is fantastic, you can pick a weekly winner, or award the prizes to as many contestants as you’d like.

Prize Ideas

You can give away all sorts of things as prizes; coupons, discounts, reports, eBooks, products, etc. Be creative and resourceful, but consider the level of engagement your contest requires and try to match that prize-wise. This is a chance to build up your brand and business reputation, so make sure contestants get something they deserve.

What contest will you be testing out?

Say It in Style

You need to be responsive to your customers and potential customers. But you should be responsive in a way that further established your brand. Now more than ever, with social media and social networking, you can stylize your communications.

Here are some models for you to see what we means and help you figure out your own engagement style:

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Of course, you’re not going to give anyone a million dollars, but this customer engagement model hinges on contests, giveaways and freebies. Take a look at Virgin Atlantic’s Twitter for examples.

Remember, the giveaway engagement works best when you’ve established a trustworthy relationship with your audience; otherwise you can seem like one of the multiple marketing scammers out there. So alternate your contests with substantive tweets or useful information.

Customer-Centric
This customer engagement model is pretty standard. It fits folks who are using social networking and social media sites to monitor customer satisfaction and answer any questions. This is more of a response style than a statement. Staples’ Twitter is a good example of this style.

Remember, if you’re going this route, answering all (real) tweets, pings, comments and questions is essential. The responses should feel personal, so skip the cut and paste. Be prepared to handle bad reviews and complaints diplomatically and publically, which means being polite and professional. This style is all about diplomacy and personability.

Social-izer
This customer engagement model hinges on thinking of your customers and contacts as like-minded people who need a place or a way to connect. That’s where you come in.
The idea is to engage your audience by talking about something you and your audience cares about and establishing a link to your company’s brand by doing so. Timberland’s Earthkeepers is a good example of this style. Going with the outdoorsy aspect of their audience, they focus on environmentalism and establish a connection between sustainability and positive environmental action and their brand.

Remember, with this style, it’s not about you per se; it’s about the issue generating the community sentiment. That means the content from your should inspire a response, be valuable, and thoughtful.

These are just three styles to get you thinking. What customer engagement styles do you notice? What are some favorites? Tell us in the comments below,

Tracking Tweets

There are a few FREE applications you can sign up for that will help keep track of Twitter. Each has it’s own spin on it, but the main service is monitoring Twitter for when your @username is mentioned, and then sends you an email with the tweet. This way you can keep track of questions, comments or complaints without having to watch Twitter 24 hours a day yourself.

Try Twitstra

Twitstra is a Twitter app by jaapvee, so the sign-up is through Twitter. All you need is an email address for the notifications to be sent to. Since you have to be signed into Twitter to get the app, it automatically knows what your @username is.

Pull more with Pu.ly

This app offers a bit more. Besides the @username mentions, any @reply or direct messages are monitored and emailed to you. You can reply via your email to the messages, and Pu.ly will transfer the first 140 characters to a tweet for you. It’s a little like being signed into Twitter, without being signed into Twitter.

Catching Keywords

Twilert and TweetAlarm expand the @username service to include keyword monitoring. With TweetAlarm, after signing up, you select the keywords you want watched, then whenever a word is used, you receive an email with the tweet, and a thumbnail image of the tweeter. You can also set a list of users to ignore, so your inbox doesn’t get packed with notes from people you don’t care about.
Twilert offers the same but with timing options, so every day at 2pm EST you’ll receive an email updating you about the keyword use. You can also choose to receive the updates every 15 minutes. Twilert sends you a list of the twitters that have tweeted the keyword or mentioned your @username, and a links to view the full tweet or reply to it.

Being better connected is great, but it can also feel like a full-time job. These four apps can help you stay social while staying on schedule.

Mahara started as an ePortfolio program for educators and a school system in New Zealand, but it’s gone beyond students now. It’s a great system to use to create an online community.

Select Your Artefacts

The information – documents, blog post, marketing materials, videos, pictures, etc – that you want to share with your community are called Artefacts. Once you’ve uploaded your Artefacts, you arrange them in Views.

Create Your Views

Views are how you display and share your Artefacts. You can make multiple views, and share them with specific users, or Groups. You can pull together whatever combination of Artefacts you‘d like to create a View – you can use documents more than once, include RSS feeds, blogs, and more. Think of a View as a profile page or webpage.

Network Your Groups

Then there’s Groups. Groups are the online communities you can create. You can invite other users to join, and share Views. This is the social networking aspect. You can also message people, create a Watchlist, which is like a Facebook status update, and will send automated notifications of changes or updates to the View. You’ll maintain a list of Friends, or other users, with whom you can share Views and join Groups.

You can watch a demo of Mahara and learn more about the platform by visiting their site. Mahara is a different sort of networking platform, but the ability to share select information makes it worth checking out. You’d be able to customize each View to a specific set of customers, test out different design or marketing approaches and see the reaction, or use it to create ‘exclusive’ memberships.

And since it’s all Open Source, it’s free to test out and play around with. What have you got to lose?

What does this mean?

There is a grace period of one month for you to switch your existing Ning network to one of the new programs. By August 20th, you must select Ning Mini, Ning Plus or Ning Pro.

Here’s a breakdown of the new products:

Ning Mini
Cost: Just $2.95 a month or $19.95 for the full year.
Member limit: 150
Features: Blogs, photos, forum and videos. It also enables Ning’s ‘run your own ads’ advertising.
Customization: Basic customization
Support: Community-based support

Ning Plus
Cost: $19.95 a month or $199.95 for the full year.
Member limit: Unlimited members
Features: Blogs, photos, forum, videos, events, groups, chats, pages and Ning Apps. It also enables Ning’s ‘run your own ads’ advertising, and gives you control over branding and member experience. You can use your own domain and remove Ning links.
Customization: Advanced customization, include CSS, JavaScript and Ning’s language editor.
Support: Help Center support.

Ning Pro
Cost: $49.95 a month or $499.95 for the full year.
Member limit: Unlimited members
Features: Blogs, photos, forum, videos, branded music and video players and upload ability, events, groups, chats, pages and Ning Apps. It also enables Ning’s ‘run your own ads’ advertising, and gives you control over branding and member experience. You can use your own domain and remove Ning links and add bandwidth and storage.
Customization: CSS, JavaScript, Language Editor and API access upgrade.
Support: Premium support.

For more comparisons, you can check out Ning’s comparison page.

What should I do?

You have a month to decide if you want to start paying for your social network. Take a look at your numbers, if you have fewer than 150 members, Ning Mini is a pretty great deal. $20 is a small price to pay to have your own social network, and you’ll be able to transition pretty seamlessly.

If you have more than 150 members, or are planning to, then testing out Ning Plus for a few months isn’t a bad investment. You can see how active your participants are, how crucial the network is to your business and your brand, and if you want to maintain the site.

There are other free social networking site platforms out there, like Mahara or People Aggregator, so if you don’t want to pay to stay with Ning, you can take your business elsewhere. Transitioning sites won’t be the easiest thing to do, but if you give your members enough notice and links, you might be able to retain your numbers.

What you need to do first is some number crunching. Once you know how important your social network site is to your business and your brand, you’ll know if you want to spend $3 a month, $20 a month, $50 or nothing at all. We’ll spend some time looking at the social network site platform options over the next few days, so you can learn more about your options.