Vocino Labs

The folks over at Tap Tap Tap are doing it right. The layout and function of their new Twitter campaign for a contest to win a Stealth MacBook Pro is clean, well thought out and well… functional.

What am I winning?

Present the visitor with a crystal clear appreciation of what exactly they’re playing for. This seems like an extremely simple idea but I see a lot of these campaigns half-ass this part with pasted copy. This might just be because the product they’re pitching is of little interest to me in general (like winning a toaster) but it’s also largely due to the fact that they fail to really get me excited about it.

Keep in mind that you’re asking me to essentially spam my faithful followers with your product placement. If you want my help with that, I need a clear roadmap to the potential return on my investment of taking my Twitter stream down a slight notch due to spamminess.

What do I have to do?

Make your call to action mind-numbingly, brain-fartingly easy. Fortunately, with Twitter it’s not too difficult since all you’re doing is requiring the user to click and hit submit.

If it were me, I would have even forgone making “Follow us on Twitter” step one and instead presented it as an optional step two. This has a significant con in that if people follow you, your account now has the opportunity to market to those people over and over again. The benefits of your trending #hashtag might outweigh that though.

My only issue is that it requires to the user to click, open a new window, follow, close the window, then click again and tweet out the actual contest message. It’s probably somewhat of a moot point since anyone dumb enough not to follow two easy steps probably can’t follow one step either. Thinking further, a decent option might be writing a real API hook that follows and tweets the message on one click.

Who else is doing it?

Lastly, you can see who is currently participating in real time. This is my favorite part. A great idea and an excellent execution.

Showing me how many participants have entered overall actually gives me a window into the odds I’ve got to win your contest. It also presents the “everyone is doing it” vibe which is great for any campaign. An added benefit is that social media douchebags will spam it just to get on the list, which dramatically increases your exposure from being a trending #hashtag (I just hope a real person wins—maybe that’s in the fine print).