Guest Blogger: Julia Stewart is the Inbound Marketing Coach. She helps small business owners stop chasing success and let it find them online. She also owns School of Coaching Mastery and hosts the Best Coaching Blogs contest every year. She’s a huge Mattison Grey fan.
I’ve been hosting the Best Coaching Blogs Contest on my School of Coaching Mastery website for 2 years now. Yep, if you’re a Mattison Grey fan, you probably voted for her this year and you may have noticed that Grey Matters Blog was in the lead for most of the contest and finished with the highest number of popular votes and comments and…lost!
Boy, was I naïve when I started this contest! What I’ve learned about online contests, winners, cheaters, last-minute upsets and the venomous backlash of outraged fans has made me well…philosophical.
Don’t worry. If you’re one of Mattison’s fans who sent me hate tweets on the day I announced the winners, you’re forgiven. But you might be curious about how it all came about…
Let me back up and give you a very quick history on how and why this contest exists. The reason I run it is to highlight some of the awesome coaching blogs out there, bring coaching bloggers together, galvanize the blogging public and host a short list of the very best coaching blogs on my site, because people are searching for them.
And yes, this is an inbound marketing strategy for my website. My selfish reason for hosting it is that it brings thousands of people who are interested in coaching to my site each year. It’s easy, free and fun for me to sponsor the contest, because I already have the voting software via some marketing tools that I bought.
Here’s where things get murky. Although I was thrilled with the tens of thousands of hits to the contest in 2009, the situation turned suspicious almost immediately. It happens that the security of the contest, which supposedly prevents people from voting multiple times for the same blog, is pretty easy to ‘game’. Geeky coaches with a criminal bent and their misguided supporters were cheating like crazy!
Things came to a head when one blog got more votes in a single day than the total number of visitors to my entire site! I threw out offending blogs and closed down the contest. The final winners were then chosen by a run-off vote by the semi-finalists on a very secure survey system. That was 2009.
After that sobering experience, I scoured the web for secure contest software and considered a customized solution, so I could run the contest cleanly in 2010. I found that security is frequently a problem and to solve it, most online contests use some type of final judging to determine the actual winners.
After consulting with experts and weighing all my options, I realized that I had already stumbled onto the best solution, which was to run the contest with the same software, including the final run-off survey vote between semi-finalists.
This keeps the contest free for everyone and encourages popular voting and now that I know what to look for, I can find and eject cheaters pretty fast. Since the finalists, themselves, choose the winners in a very secure method, it helps ensure that nobody wins unless the other contestants think they played fair.
By the way, Mattison ran a very clean race, as did all of the Top Ten Winners, including the 1st Place Winner, Rhonda Hess.
So why didn’t Grey Matters win in 2010? Some folks have suggested that it’s a classic case of ‘crabs in a bucket’, with lesser contestants pulling down the clear leader out of jealousy. But there’s another explanation…
Just before the closed-vote between semi-finalists began, Mattison posted a provocative article called, Fingernails, Fitness, and the Demise of the Coaching Profession, which questions whether coaching is a legitimate profession or is just a service. She raised critical points with this article and I love that she put it out there just when zillions of people, including influential coaches, would read it.
Mattison concludes her article with, ‘Coaching is no longer a viable profession, and just maybe……. it never was.’
Here’s what I think happened. Semi-finalists read that line. Then they went to vote. The voting instructions say, ‘Above all, consider coaching blogs that you would feel honored to be represented by.‘
Would coaches feel honored to be represented by the blog that says coaching isn’t even a profession? Apparently not! Hardly any of the semi-finalists voted for Mattison’s blog. In fact, as a coach who believes coaching is a profession, at least the way some coaches practice it, if I were a contestant and my first introduction to Mattison was that article, I probably wouldn’t have voted for it either.
But Mattison is one of my best friends. So why didn’t I throw out the vote when she didn’t even make it into the Top Ten? Because she’s one of my best friends. If I had declared her the winner, it wouldn’t have just looked biased, it would have been biased. That’s no fun and it doesn’t serve the purposes behind the contest. So I let the vote stand.
If you think you wasted your vote, all I can say is, of course you didn’t. You helped spread Mattison’s message to hundreds if not thousands of new readers. Those who ‘got it’ I bet are still reading. But let’s not judge the others too quickly.
Going forward, I’m going to shorten the final round so fans aren’t still voting, thinking they are helping their favorite blogger win. I’ll also remind contestants frequently that popular votes can get them into the final round, but in the end, reaching out to fellow bloggers, commenting on their posts and developing relationships with them is a good strategy for successful blogging and for winning, particularly if your blog challenges the very fabric of coaching.
I’ll also remind coaches that the final vote may reflect what other coaches think, but look to the popular votes to get a glimpse of what non-coaches think about us.
Regardless of the explanation, this whole thing reminds me of the saying that it’s always easy to spot the pioneers, because they’re the ones with the arrows in their backs!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I suspected that it was because the winners are frequent and consistent bloggers. Five posts in one year (with one being a guest post) is more of a newsletter online.
I voted for her because I think Mattison is awesome.
And as you wrote, blogging is about “reaching out to fellow bloggers, commenting on their posts and developing relationships” as well as giving readers something they need and can use.
Everyone can’t be great at everything.
Mattison is a great coach. Technically she could run a great blog – perhaps by sacrificing coaching or by hiring a blogger. The latter seems like a good idea.
Julia – Wow, There’s a lot to navigate behind the scenes when running an online contest. Thanks for the insight and for your pioneering.
Thanks Sarah – And Bon, that’s another good theory, that without a lot of blog content, the other contestants just didn’t see the value behind Mattison’s writing. Those of us who know her, think she’s amazing. The others may just need more evidence.
Bon
You know how I love distinctions. I think you may have stumbled on a great one. That is, bloggers that coach vs. coaches that blog. As you have noted, I will always put my clients and coaching first, maybe that is why so many people like me and voted for me.
Interesting to read about the behind the scenes machinations Julia. Who would have thought that something that started out as a simple contest could get so complicated?
Wow, Julia, that was an incredible post and I had no idea there was so much controversy last year. It’s eye opening how these fun and engaging social contests can get so competitive. I feel even more honored to be among such incredible bloggers. Seems to me we all win with the beautiful way you’ve designed this contest. Many Blessings to you and all the contestants & voters.
Rhonda