Share a Story Contests – Too Many or Too Few – Your Thoughts?

Posted by Chris on Jan 29, 2010 in Fired Up Friday | 0 comments

From here on out, every Friday is going to be an opinionated blog. Let’s call it, ‘Fired Up Friday’. During the week I typically blog about things that are going on in my life, hence the Life of a Diabetic blog name. I try to detail things that can go on while living with diabetes or living normally with diabetes as I call it. There are a lot of things out in the D world that you may or may not agree with. In the case of some of my Friday blogs, you may or may not agree with them, if you don’t I would really appreciate your feedback and comments. The way I look at every situation is this; I may have an opinion on something because I don’t know enough about the other side to form a positive opinion.

Today’s idea came about because of noticing how many different diabetes story contests there are out there. STOP!

There are enough story submission, share your story, whatever you want to call it contests and sites around, don’t try to create another one. This is more geared towards companies than it is the d-bloggers. I am all about d-bloggers sharing their story; in fact I think that part is awesome. I think guest-blogging is one of the greatest ideas in the world (I am starting a weekly guest blog on February, so don’t be surprised if you get an e-mail from me soon), but all these contests need to stop. Find a more creative way to engage us diabetics and your “customers”.

The first share your story type of post I saw was on Kerri’s site. I submitted my story to her when I first started blogging and she published it on her site and I, still to this day, am very grateful and appreciative of that. These are the type of story submissions that should stay, but I have seen a few companies recently start collecting stories for gifts, and I think it is just one big ploy to get business.

Majority of you know where I used to work, if you don’t e-mail me and we can discuss it on the side, I wouldn’t give them the recognition on my blog. Bitter? No, just know the behind the scenes and not legally allowed to speak about it in a public forum like this. But reason I bring that up is that there was a story submission contest and at the end of it, I didn’t see the corporate benefits of it. I can definitely see the benefits for the community, because you get to read a lot of people’s stories that you don’t normally see. Maybe they don’t have a blog, so they aren’t writing about their daily lives, or maybe they have a blog, but you just don’t know about it.

So, I will end this blog with this. I am all for sharing your story, but with the diabetes OC, not with corporate contests, because you just become an e-mail on a mailing list.

What are your thoughts? Do you think that there is too many share your story contests out there or do you think that there is not enough? I am interested to hear your opinions.