'Write More Good' Giveaway

As part of the March/April edition of Quill magazine, my communications director interviewed the Bureau Chiefs of Twitter's @FakeAPStyleBook just prior to their release of the phony, humorous writing guide, "Write More Good." As part of the interview, SPJ received a copy of the book. As the book was about to release in stores, my director asked me to create, develop and implement at free giveaway of the book. To help promote the SPJ brand with external audiences, I designed the giveaway contest to reach across multiple social media channels to include Facebook and Twitter.

To add the element of engagement, each entrant in the competition was asked to tell us about his or her journalism pet peeve. They could do so by replying to the official Facebook post about the contest, by commenting on the original blog post the promotion was announced on, or by using SPJ's continuing hashtag, #jpeeve. The hashtag #journalism was also used periodically to target and raise SPJ awarenness to new Twitter audiences. At the end of the giveaway deadline, all of the entrants were placed in a raffle to draw the winner of the book.

By promoting the giveaway through Facebook, Twitter and SPJ's membership newsletter, the contest drew in 99 journalism pet peeves by 83 participants (not including the pet peeve tweets of those affiliated with SPJ in an official capacity). As a result of the project, the Facebook analytics page showed a higher, consistent increase in new fan page likes.

You can review the giveaway online by following these two links:

The Official Contest Giveaway (with full details) on the SPJ Blogs

The Facebook Post used for the Giveaway

The following series of graphs show positive tracking during the time period for the contest. The fan page data showed both a more consistent number of new likes and a grossly higher number of overall page views (including those who do and do not follow SPJ on Facebook). That figure is represented at a total of 358 views over the course of three days via the dark blue line in the first graph.

The promotion's URL tracking also showcased a strong number of Twitter and direct clicks to the original blog post the contest was announced on.