Working my social media networks

I spent the weekend spamming my family, friends, acquaintances, and more than a few random strangers, grubbing votes for the “Send a Blogger to BlogHer” contest. Since I work(ed) in social media, I’ve got a pretty good idea of how to run a social media campaign, and that’s more or less how I’ve been approaching this.

So far, I have:

• sent notes to my Facebook “friends” – from the near and dear to the ones who I vaguely remember from the third grade;
• skimmed the 657 contacts in my gmail account and spammed a goodly number of them with an e-mail;
• sent out a few tweets on twitter;
• posted notes to just about any forum, bulletin board or online community I could find my user-ID and password for; and
• set up a table at the grocery store beside the Girl Guides selling cookies and the pee wee hockey team selling apples.

(Okay, so that last one wasn’t true. But I did think about it.)

Too much?

You guys have been great in supporting me. Nadine and Mad re-tweeted my message, Cooper and Emily endorsed me on the Motherhood, and Sara wrote a whole blog post encouraging people to vote for me. *smooches* Some of my girlfriends even figured out that you can vote more than once from different browsers, so I managed to vote for myself six times: once from each of IE, firefox and safari on the desktop and the laptop at home!

Any other ideas on how I can grub for some votes? I noticed that some of the other finalists were holding giveaways (i.e. “Vote for me to get entries into this draw! Retweet or blog to get multiple entries!”) and at first I thought, “Oh, I could do that! No doubt, everyone loved the iTunes giveway, and it would be a small price to pay to trade a $25 gift card for a free trip to BlogHer!” But to be honest – not to cast disparaging remarks at the competition or anything, but – the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I was with the idea of “buying” votes. How is that different from asking you to leave a silly comment in exchange for an entry in any other giveaway? I don’t know — it just seems not quite right to me. What do you think? Would it make you more likely to vote, or would that be a line I shouldn’t cross? (I kind of hope you’ll vote for me regardless, but I’m also curious as to your opinion.)

Aside from accosting random strangers with BlackBerries – and there’s no shortage of those around here! – to beg them for votes, any ideas how I can drum up a few more votes and still love myself in the morning? I realize it’s a fine line between proactively campaigning for votes and annoying the hell out of my friends and “friends” alike, but when’s the next chance I’ll have an opportunity like this?

(And if you haven’t already, for goodness sake VOTE!)

Author: DaniGirl

Canadian. storyteller, photographer, mom to 3. Professional dilettante. View all posts by DaniGirl