On our Auto Trader winner blog we suggested that winning picking should be more transparent so a big round of applause to Applause Store who decided to pick their latest competition by video. They were giving away tickets to The X Factor Live when they hit 100,000 followers – which they duly did. Here’s how they chose the winner. If you’re unable to see the video basically the “voice of Applause Store on Facebook” shows a list of sharers and then indicates that his eyes are shut and covered. The winner is then picked by briefly scrolling down and pointing randomly at a lucky winner. There are cheers all round – unless of course you enter competitions and wonder what the heck are they up to!
Scroll Down & Pick A Winner
The scroll down with your eyes shut and point at a name method to pick a winner is probably not exclusive to Applause Store, but blimey how wrong is is to choose a winner in this way. The way to enter the draw was to share their post from 7th October, however that post says “If you’ve shared before, just share this one for a second chance” – so we scrolled down and found another post from 3rd October. Now the winner is picked from the 7th October list (469 shares) – so everyone who shared on the 3rd (499 shares) surely hasn’t been included in the draw. The scrolling method is ridiculous – but even allowing for that the chooser doesn’t even scroll through the whole series of entries. This means that everyone who shared early on in the prize draw – pretty much wasn’t included in the hat…. and that’s not good practice.
Poor Compliance
We don’t want to be too harsh on Applause Store simply because they’re on video record doing this – and there’s probably far worse things we and you guys don’t know about – but it does highlight just how rubbish prize draws/competitions are which don’t comply with Facebook Guidelines for Contests. Had this promotion been done within those guidelines it’d have been via an app and the winner should have been chosen randomly from a database of entries… not picked by a bloke with his eyes shut and a quick scroll through a handful of sharers. The only consolation we can offer to those of you who entered and didn’t win is that they were only X Factor tickets.
Thanks to Hayley Deakin for the heads up via Facebook.