WHY I NEVER WANT TO DO A GIVEAWAY AGAIN: When it comes to community, I have learned a lot in the past few weeks. If you’re unaware, I recently was able to offer a giveaway of 5 LG G3’s to my audience. The giveaway started before the phone had even been officially released yet, so I was pretty happy to be able to give back to my community in some fashion. The stipulations were simple, however we really werent given the chance to do it any other way. Viewers had to subscribe to the channel and comment under the video that we posted specifically about the giveaway. I expected people to get excited and I expected people to ask me about it here and there. What I did not expect was to become flooded with spam comments on absolutely everything Ive posted online since then, whether it pertained to the giveaway or not. That’s a minor annoyance compared to what eventually happened… A couple days ago, we stopped accepting new entries so that we could gather up all of the usernames manually, which was time consuming in and of itself. For whatever reason, as soon as we stopped accepting entries, people had in their heads that we had promised to announce the winners as soon as we had stopped accepting new entries, which wasnt true. But this started a flood of angry tweets, messages, and emails about how I should stop lying about when we were going to announce any winners. You know, complaining about when and how they could potentially win FREE stuff... People even accused us of faking the giveaway, entirely. Ive been online for long enough to know that I can expect this from people, but I would NEVER expect this from my community. Hundreds of these messages have been coming to me on a daily basis and sometimes it’s hard for me to sit there and not respond to any of them. There are some that I can’t help but reply to, but for the most part, I just try to keep in mind that the majority of these people that are lashing out at me arent even engaged in my community. They simply heard about a giveaway of a nice phone and they spammed the hell out of us in hopes to win. They made fake account after fake account, just to increase their chances of winning. The sad part is, I can’t just assume that an account is fake and disqualify them. I have to just let it go and give that person the benefit of the doubt. I know that the majority of the people complaining arent watching the content that we’re producing, they’re just looking for a video titled “Giveaway winners”. So for that fact, we never made such video. We simply announced the winners during today’s show. That way, the people that truly paid attention would be the ones to know. What truly upset me, is that after LG emailed over the list of the five winners, I didnt recognize any of the names. I’m fairly certain that they were all fake accounts and I have no idea who “actually” won. I honestly feel like I wasted my time… I wanted to give back to my community and in the end, my community got nothing. I understand that having me actually address this is kind of controversial to some of you, but I have to stand up for my community because they’re the ones that truly care about the content that we produce. They are the ones that deserve an opportunity like this giveaway - not the people that come, try to win, and then leave. So from now on, I’m going to give most of my attention to the people who truly respect me and care enough to give me their attention every single day. Those are the people that are engaged, those are the people that allow me to do this for a living, those are the people that deserve these kinds of opportunities. So from now on, if and when I do another giveaway, it will be simple and directed at the people who are actually paying attention and are engaged. If you’re part of my core community, thank you and just let this show you that I have your back.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 23:06:29 +0000
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