Appbistro

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This week we’re excited to highlight the team behind Votigo — one of the premier social media contest & promotion platforms available on Facebook. Having first launched their platform to serve the Fortune 500 (working with such brands as Coca-Cola, Southwest Airlines, Sharpie, Folgers, & Victoria’s Secret PINK), they have built a reputation in the industry as one of the most trusted partners to help brands build awareness and increase revenue through user-generated contests and sweepstakes. Early last month they announced a new self-serve platform aimed at SMB’s, making them a perfect fit for the users of Appbistro! If you haven’t already done so, please take a moment to check the recently launched Votigo Sweepstakes and Votigo Photo & Video Contests applications. Both are 100% worth the value and come stacked with a ton features to make sure you have all the options when trying to draw Fans into your promotions on Facebook.

Special thanks to Mike, Jim and Shayna for all their help with the interview and bring the new Votigo platform to Appbistro.

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Launch Date: November 1, 2011 

How large is your customer base and how many clients do you serve? Votigo has worked with dozens of Fortune 500 brands since our launch in 2006. Ford, Intel, Starwood , AOL, Jeep, Fisher-Price, AMD, ESPN, Folgers, Chipotle, Kohls, Coca-Cola. We are now launching our self-service platform where brands and businesses of all sizes and stages can create their own social media marketing and promotions.

Favorite use or example of client using Votigo to power a campaign? Brooks Running just launched a great holiday promotion where they are asking fans to share awkward family photos. It’s fun and engaging and people love sharing their holiday photos.

So what is Votigo? Votigo is the leading social media marketing & promotions technology company helping businesses to attract, engage, and retain customers on the Web, Facebook, Twitter, and Mobile. Founded in 2006, the Votigo platform helps businesses better engage their customers, build brand awareness, and increase revenue through the use of user-generated photo and video contests, interactive sweepstakes, and online promotions. Votigo is a Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant.

Why and to what benefit would a small business owner gain from using Votigo? Votigo’s new DIY solution allows small business owners to create their own social media promotions utilizing the same technology that dozens of Fortune 500 brands use and trust. Based on more than five years of developing and powering cross-platform social media marketing campaigns for premium brands, Votigo has designed a platform with the essentials features, functionality, and pricing that enables small business owners to publish their own promotions and brand apps across Facebook, Twitter, mobile and the web.

What can customers expect in the next 3-6mths from your product? In the coming weeks we’re adding some exciting new features, including cross-platform capabilities. In the next 3-6 months customers can expect even more features and a slew of new apps – for Facebook but also for other social platforms- and additional pricing options. Subscriptions, bundled packages, and additional cross-platform promotions are some of the features you can look forward to.

What trends are you predicting for the fall/holiday shopping season? Any special sweepstakes we should know about? The 2011 holiday season is shaping up around a few key themes.  First, consumers are still looking for great deals and real-time offers directed straight from brands to them.  There is still no better way to engage customers directly than to cultivate an audience, carry on a meaningful dialogue with then,  and then give them a chance to win merchandise or obtain offers that activate their purchase decisions- from gift cards to coupons to discount codes and more. To do this, brands obviously need to be very focused on Facebook, but because users have adopted a number of other social platforms across the web, brands also need to reach consumers in other venues- from Twitter to YouTube to Google+ to dedicated websites, and obviously also via mobile.

Which leads into the other key trend of this year’s holiday season: mobile activation.  Reaching consumers on the go affords brands so many opportunities to convert social media audiences. At a bare minimum, any promotion that a brand runs on Facebook or another social network should have a mobile component to capture that chunk of the audience that isn’t available via Facebook.  And beyond that, brands can tap into QR codes, Foursquare check-ins, coupons and instant-wins, and all sorts of other interesting mobile activation devices.

What do you think of the latest product changes on Facebook: timeline, news feed, real-time ticker? How will these changes alter/influence your product for brands and marketers? There is plenty of speculation about what the future of brands on Facebook will look like. But what we do know about how consumers engage with brands on social platforms has not changed.  That is, consumers are willing and eager to engage with brands when the brands represent themselves authentically and making meaningful offers in exchange for their audience’s attention.  Where ever the new timeline and other features takes us as users, brands will be able to maintain and even expand their audiences on Facebook simply by sticking to the basics.  Be responsive to the audience.  Be authentic and have a two-way conversation.  Ask for their feedback and for their user-generated content- and then feature it (their photos and videos) Give them compelling reasons to check back in with your brand frequently.  Reward them for their time and attention. 

Anything special/unique/out of the ordinary you want to share with the Appbistro audience? We are excited to tap into this very savvy audience; to provide a very high-level and premium social media marketing solution that is based on our experience in working with major international brands- but also simple, affordable and effective for businesses and brands of all sizes. We believe that our core expertise in flexible, cross-platform promotions is more relevant for brand marketers than ever and we look forward to the feedback and interaction of working with Appbistro’s audience.