It’s Time To Blow The Roof Off This One, Take Off The Gloves, Guns Blazing, Etc.

The Facebook contest ends today at 2 pm MST. My wife’s birthday is at the end of this month and I’m trying to win an iPod Touch to give to her. I finally told my wife about the contest, so we can go no-holds-barred. To win, I just have to have the most “likes” for the AMAZING cow-riding picture. As of 10 am, I am behind by 35 votes. We need to tear this up!

I need you to do two things, in order:

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/milkdrinkingcow and “Like” the page. (Milk Drinking Cow makes iPhone photo apps)

2. Then go to http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=8351482&l=4ab8ce0101&id=577001351 and “Like” the picture.

And you’re done! Please share the photo and instructions, a link to this post, or get your friends or family to vote.

By the way, don’t feel obligated to remain a fan after the contest ends.

I don’t usually ask publicly for help with something like this without offering incentive. If I do end up winning and can give this gift to Kathy, I’ll follow it up with 5 marketing book giveaways on this blog in the next month and I’d love for you to enter and win. If it matters to you, the books are the following, in new condition:

1. The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith (hardcover)
2. The Dip by Seth Godin (hardcover)
3. Social Media Marketing by Liana Evans (softcover, signed by author)
4. Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (softcover, ARC)
5. World Wide Rave by David Meerman Scott (hardcover)

Thanks again for your help! I’m gunning for some serious wife points here.

January 13 Update – Insults & Deleted Posts

Contests are supposed to be fun and competitive, especially when the prize is good like this. But they can turn ugly in a flash, as I found out today.

Since shortly after entering the contest and starting the promotion, I’ve been neck-and-neck with another competitor named Anita. We’ve traded leads several times today. While her style of filling up the whole Facebook wall with her messages isn’t the way I do things, I can handle it. It’s competition.

But after I posted a wall message in Spanish early in the morning on Friday (1 am my time, 4 am Anita’s time), she didn’t take too kindly to it and started posting her own replies to my message calling me unethical (because she has a lot of Puerto Rican friends), followed by more of her own posts on the wall with similar insinuations. See the exchange below:

Not more than 10 minutes later, I checked back and saw that this entire thread had been deleted. I couldn’t believe it at first, but sure enough, it was gone. Luckily, one of my tabs still had everything up so I took the screenshot.

The rest of Anita’s follow-up wall posts were still there, calling me unethical, so it was obvious without the above conversation thread that there was a gap somewhere – that something had been removed. I didn’t think to screenshot that. I wish I would have, because a few minutes later, all of her follow-up posts were gone too (including those you see above and below the conversation in the screenshot)!

Now obviously I have my suspicions about who deleted all of these threads. Under normal circumstances, if I were Anita, I’d be livid that many of my postings were gone and I would suspect foul play. I’m certainly ticked that stuff I took time to write in my own creative attempt-at-humor way was erased. What you see is very telling about the kind of attitude that Anita has.

So the question now becomes what the heck am I supposed to do?

I certainly haven’t solicited help from many friends and friends of friends just so I can walk away from this because it feels like a dirty contest now. After all, I was leading at several points today. I’ll contact the organizers, but I don’t know what they can do.

What do you think? Should I back out now or should we just blitz and get a ton of votes and win this thing?

January 14 Update – Even More Insane!

It was very quiet online for most of the day. I messaged the contest organizers. Got some more votes and took a small lead. No more wall posts from Anita. Kind of unusual.

This afternoon, a strange sequence occurred.

1. Anita messaged me, apologizing for the remarks, affirming that Milk Drinking Cow (the company) had removed all of her posts for being inappropriate. She said she admired my persistence and wished me luck. I figured we were cool.
2. Milk Drinking Cow posted a message on its own wall reminding contestants to keep the messaging positive.
3. A MDC contest moderator messaged me, saying they had accidentally removed my wall posting while removing Anita’s inappropriate comments and that I was welcome to repost them. Viva la vaca!
4. The kicker: Anita manually BLOCKED me on Facebook. Because of this, I can’t see her image or how many votes she has, what she’s posting, etc. This is seriously messed up and should get her disqualified.

We’re blitzing! We are going to take it to her and any other challenger who tries to get away with crap like this.

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