Want customer involvement? Keep it simple

One of the best tests of a good brand:  Does your mom know what you do for a living? (Mom, I teach word of mouth marketing.)

Get Satisfaction is one of the smartest companies in the user-generated feedback business. But their model is a little unusual.

That’s why I love this contest:  “Describe Get Satisfaction to Your Mom. Win $150 Zappos Gift”

To enter, just reply in a topic they’ve set up.

Too many companies are over-complicating this “let’s get our customers involved” thing.  They do crazy-viral video contest, create a recipe contest, jump through hoops contests.

Here’s how to know if your social media contest is too complicated:

• You need an ad agency to run it for you
• It costs a lot of money to put it together
• It takes more than 30 seconds for a fan to enter the contest

The best social media contests are:

• Simple
• Fast
• Cheap
• Fun

Here’s how you know your contest is a success:

Social media contest success = New fans / Cost

I’d rather get 1,000 new fans for free then 10,000 fans for $100,000.

P.S. Here’s the text from the Get Satisfaction Contest.

We love working at Get Satisfaction. We’re building this cool Web site and trying to change the way companies do customer service, while helping loads of customers get the informal, authentic help they’ve always wanted.

Because we’re building something that’s never existed before, we sometimes have a hard time explaining how our system works — especially to our moms. Not all of them have experience with social networking or the conventions of the Internet. Some of our moms are savvy enough to follow us on Facebook (yikes!), but some of them wince when we utter the phrase “Flash movie” in mixed company. Maybe you can help.

Let’s make this a contest!

Your mission: Describe Get Satisfaction so our moms will understand what it is we do — and why they might want to try using us the next time they need customer-service help.

One entry per person, please.

How do you enter? Super easy. Enter by adding a reply to this topic.