As you may all be aware we were in a Competition with Mercedes Vans, Made for the People.com
A dreaded Voting competition... which I do not normally enter, I have mentioned before about competitions and my love hate relationship with them and the greed and moral dilemma's they bring up.
But I do love a creative competition, I love to be creative and everyone likes it when someone rewards you for things you do, so this competition which although boiled down to votes, was also a creative competition, with only 10 people being shortlisted into the voting round, shortlisted on merit.
So we entered with good spirits and had good fun making a song up which we wrote and sang ourselves, we entered and were happy to be shortlisted, we rallied support and gained votes from genuine loyal friends and family.
However we had concerns from the off that something wasn't quite right, our votes were being matched to the exact number every night, then suddenly the other contenders jumped up 300+ votes in one day, we were hitting a bit of a brick wall our supports were slowing in numbers, and although my friends were still sharing with their friends the other contenders were flying up in votes fast. We googled to see if we could find anything out about how the other contenders were gaining votes, were they rallying support in local newspapers? were they on local radio stations? no....
What we uncovered was a much murkier world of voting contests!
Initially we found them on vote exchange sites, like getonlinevotes, and we emailed Mercedes, no response, we pondered we watched, we assumed this must be allowed due to the no responce from Mercedes, even tho we were assured they HAD recieved our emails. So we posted on Getonlinevotes, we watched to see if the votes would fly up now and match the other contestants votes.. but no, our votes remained still, we received 3 replies to our post on Getonline votes, 1 said they could not cast the vote as the site would not load, we puzzled about this, and went back to getonlinevotes and figured out this site only works if you are actively swopping your link, voting on other peoples and asking for a return vote, simply posting on their site will get next to no interest, this found out we quickly realized that was unattainable and certainly would be far to much effort and time taking, and would not be the way the others were gaining their 100's of votes in a matter of hours.
So we googled again, this time finding out even more murkier practices!
What the others were doing was buying votes online, on sites such as www.fivesquids.co.uk and www.microworkers.com
And joining in vote exchange websites where people offer to exchange 100's of votes from mutiple fake accounts.
We resisted joining in and continued to rally support genuinely talking to friends and family,managing to gain over 500 votes yet we were increasingly frustrated when our friends votes were not counting, when friends were reporting they could not load the website, or register their votes.
We messaged Mercedes at two different email address and received no response, we plodded on hoping that eventually they would sit up and take note... but no nothing, deathly silences from the organizers, increasing votes from the contestants. who were now on over 900 each
We decided to make a facebook page and try and rally support that way, with over 200 likes in less than a week, we also noticed that the leading contender had a facebook page with no likers at all!
Today I decided enough was enough and I rang Mercedes, spoke to a lovely man called Tom, who listened to my queries and reassured me they would look into it and get back to me.
They did indeed get back to me, but their response was disappointing to say the least. They Said:
the voting system allows visitors to vote once which is the only stipulation....
The approach the others are using does not break any rules and will not be disqualified....
So with that response we were thrown into a moral argument, what to do? join in... in the hope we can buy more votes? or refuse to be apart of that and hope that by taking a stand Mercedes will either stand up and take note, or other companies will not make such drastic mistakes!
The only way we could keep up would be to act in a manner I concider is cheating.
If you agree with us andwould class buying votes as cheating then all we could ask you do is email Mercedes here: competition@madeforthepeople.com
or phone them here:
0845 602 4321
and join us by saying we do not agree with buying votes, its not fair that Mercedes are allowing this activity to win so openly, buying votes is NOT an option at all and we will take a stand against this!
Close the competition and Draw a winner out of a hat or pick on merit!
Surely voting contests means what the public deem as the best entry to win, buying votes completely undermines any such structure and really there would be no point in having the voting contest at all.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additional Note:
We pulled our video from the competition to take a stand, because we disagree with the voting structure, and had said on several occasions to Mercedes we would if they didn't help us sort this out. we were proud of our entry and were thrilled to be shortlisted, but do not agree in buying votes we don't want to compete with this sort of vote gaining but would love for Mercedes to reconsider how they are picking their winner and make it fair!
Also we gained our support in a number of ways, I did not spam my blog with beggs to vote, I asked my friends on this blog post here: We really need your help and that was the only mention on my blog, we also asked karaoke friends to help here : singsnap (notice we did not beg and plead or comment under everyones response asking for votes, the majority of the people here who said they had voted actually didn't register, or didn't mention voting at all just saying they liked our tune - we were happy they liked the song, as these are not 'friends' just people who appreciated the music) and we mainly rallied support on facebook, always conscious of spamming and begging and never forcing people to vote. We campaigned hard to spread the word and did so because we were proud of our video and with the contest shortlisted to a top10 thought we had proved ourselves worthy of votes. Our genuine campaigning got us over 500 votes. But we will not continue campaigning to try and compete with vote buyers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update------------------------------------------
After our successful campaign and with every bodies effort in bringing this to Mercedes attention, they finally listened and promptly amended their Terms and Conditions to disqualify vote buying, proving that Mercedes-Benz has a strong moral and ethical code. So strong indeed that they went on to disqualify us!!!!! want to know why? click here :Lessons well and truly learnt
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 comments:
Post a Comment