Turning Mega Millions Mania Into Facebook Marketing

Yesterday, the $640 Million Mega Million lottery jackpot created a bunch of winners long before the numbers were ever picked. Sure, there were three winning tickets when the numbers finally were drawn, but in the mania that lead up to the drawing a lot of media outlets were using their lottery tickets to buy Facebook likes, shares and eyeballs.

Almost all at once, they popped up all over Facebook yesterday. I personally saw two radio stations and a newspaper using the tactic and heard of many others. The method to their madness? Some variation of "share this post before the drawing and if we win, we'll share our jackpot with you." Each post had a picture of some lottery tickets they bought – although in many of them you could only see the numbers on the front one in a stack. Some said we'll give a portion to one random person who shares this. Others said we'll pick 10 people and share it with them. Another said one random sharer would get 150 million of the loot.

Low Cost. Big Gain?

So, basically for $10 – $20, these people bought a lot of Facebook traffic. The chances of them winning were practically zero. And then if the company running the contest did win, you had to beat the odds of however many people shared the post and were in that drawing. The odds were really long. Yet, I saw a lot of people caught up in the mania, sharing the posts.

Were these companies brilliant or doing it all wrong? On one hand they got their pages in front of a whole lot of new eyeballs, probably got a whole bunch of new "likes" and can probably show some amazing "engagement" analytics. It follows the theory of David Meerman Scott's latest book, "Newsjacking" in that they took a hot topic in the news and created content around it, drawing off the buzz already being generated. But, most of Meerman Scott's examples had more meat and creativity than this.

What did they really gain, though? Are any of those new fans going to stick around or even start listening to those stations or reading those print mediums? Is that engagement worth something? Or is it like empty calories, good at the time but with no real benefits in the long term? And besides that, I'm pretty sure all these contests were against Facebook's own contest policy, which states you need to run contests on your page through one of the Facebook apps. Although they were in and out so fast, I'm sure Facebook can't really do anything about it.

Did you participate in one of these promotions? Did they change your perception of the company who ran one – for better or worse? I'm really torn myself. Part of me applauds them for the quick thinking and initiative (unless they were just copying the others they saw doing it). Another part of me is shaking my head, thinking it was wrong and probably ineffective. But, even if it was, it didn't cost much and social media is very forgiving, moving from one thing to another and forgetting the bad moves quickly. What do you think? How do you feel about this tactic?

Mike McClure, Didn't win, still working as Yaffe social guy.