Round 2 of the Startup50-Network World 10 Hot IoT Startups to Watch competition is the Online Voting and Social Media Amplification round.
Voting period: Online Voting will open at 10 AM PT on Wednesday, April 4 and run until 5 PM PT on Friday, April 6.
Online Voting Rules of Engagement
- You may vote once per day.
- Please vote for your 3 favorite startups. Votes will be weighted (5 points for 1st place, 2 for 2nd, 1 for 3rd).
- Please feel free to encourage your employees, supporters, social media followers, and anyone else interested in your success to vote for you 1 time each day. Promoting yourself via social media, your own email lists, your website, press releases, etc. is acceptable and encouraged.
- However, please do not resort to automated votes, bots, the hiring of overseas SEO factories, etc. to cheat your way to the top!
- Do not vote more than once per day. Technically, it’s not that hard to get around SurveyMonkey’s 1-person-1-vote/day restrictions, but please do not! While SurveyMonkey doesn’t make it easy to block cheaters, it does capture enough metadata to make it easy to spot fraud patterns after the fact.
- Any startup found cheating will be eliminated.
9 ways to improve your startup’s chances of making it into Round 3
1. Get out the vote internally.
Encourage your startup’s internal employees, partners, supporters, etc. to vote for your startup. Send out an email or a Slack message; post a social media update or a short blog post, etc.
Remember, voters will pick their top 3 startups. The vote is weighted, so make sure you tell people to put you in the #1 position.
2. Use social media to amplify your GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts.
3. Take advantage of my networks to amplify your appeal.
Follow @Startup_50 and @JWVance on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn.
(I’m not using Facebook for this competition – or much at all, anymore, for that matter — so invites there will be a waste of your time.)
I will be RTing startups who connect with me on Twitter.
5. When posting about the competition, be sure to include the competition hashtag, so your posts are easier for us to find and RT.
The main hashtag for this vote is: #HotIoTStartups.
I will RT followers promoting themselves (and the vote) on Twitter.
6. Or simply click on the Click-to-Tweet that will be embedded above the voting window on our Online Vote Page, but be sure to include your startup’s name and Twitter handle in there!
7. When encouraging people to vote, encourage them to only vote ONCE each day.
8. Please actively discourage your followers from cheating. Cheaters will be disqualified from the competition.
9. Map your efforts.
Smart startups think of my competitions as content amplification challenges. They approach the vote as they would a mini-PR campaign. They come up with GOTV strategies, create social media content templates, and test amplification tactics.
Map out your efforts, so you can evaluate them, refine them, and reuse the best tactics for future social media campaigns.
10. Have fun!
Don’t take the vote too seriously, and don’t stress out trying to win. This is a friendly competition, so have fun.
Put a little elbow grease into getting your employees, partners, supporters, and followers to vote for you, and you should be in a pretty good position to get into Round 3.
Good luck!
Come back to Startup50.com tomorrow at 10 AM PT to for your favorite IoT startups!
