eSMArts Team First Contest Results~!!!!

WOW~! What a day Friday was for the eSMArts Etsy Team~! Twittering, blogging, cross-posting, twittering, tweeting, dm'ing, commenting..........whew..... till our little fingers were were twittering on their own. For the member who set the stage for Friday, however, it was a week or more of work and organization and educating the rest of us on the very first eSMArts Team Store contest. Lois Lindquist, A Beaded Affair, proposed the idea of a contest after her daughter's twitter group ran one to much applause. With the team's growing interest, Lois laid out the contest dates and time frame, scheduled the team for maximum twitter exposure and collected the incoming responses, messages and comments from every angle.

Using an online random generator, she "drew" the winning contestant. Our winner was Lizzie a Stay at Home Mom who's crazy about Music, Babies and Knitting. She is also a member of TwitterMoms an awesome online group for all us twittering moms. See her blog here, Lizzie.

I spoke with Lois after she recovered and she told me "Our team was incredible. Once we presented the contest to them, they pulled together with ideas, donations, offers of prizes and help. Everyone got on board to support this effort and it was truly an honor to be associated with this group. We received entries from various sources twitter, blog comments and direct emails and everyone was encouraging, supportive and enjoyed the idea. It's always fun to take a chance on winning something. There is one sale in the shop that I know of but the shop did get hits on Friday and I would think that over time there may be people that previously weren't aware of the shop that will come back to take a look again. All of the comments directly related to the shop were very positive and encouraging."

Lois also outlined the time involved in putting this event together: "Coming up with the initial idea was easy since I stole it, with permission, from my daughters at Sweet Tarragon.etsy.com. They ran a successful contest just before Christmas and had a ball with it so I thought it might translate well for us. The model for this came right from them. Initial presentation to the group took some time and was communicated through our Yahoo group. Emails were flying with questions, suggestions and support. You could feel the excitement in the group which was fun. Typical of me, I left the actual blog writing until Wednesday, procrastinator that I am. Writing is painful but I wanted to feature pictures of the items donated during the week and the shops that created these pieces. I entered the blog post in both of my blogs and 6 other online forums I belong to. Jamie of CreationsByJae.etsy.com was kind enough to copy the blog to the Team Blog. Additionally, I was on twitter from about 12:20 on Friday until midnight with a few breaks for work and food but if I had to guess, probably close to 10 hours there. This was a time consuming project."

She added, when asked what she would do the same and what she would do differently, "I think the basic premise was good but before doing the next one I would want to increase my Twitter following substantially and preferably not people in the jewelry field. One of the problems I see with it working well, and the reason my daughters did so well, is because they have access to a huge following on twitter and their blogs that are not necessarily jewelry people. So far, most of my contacts are other jewelry folks who are struggling with the same issues of over-saturation and making yourself stand out. We needed to reach more people outside of our sphere."

"So you would consider doing this again?"
"Absolutely. If nothing else, we were noticed by people who wouldn't otherwise have known that the team store existed and that it has been set up to benefit those in need. Now that I have done one, I have additional promotion ideas that I might want to incorporate into the next one."

Finally, I asked Lois if she had any special thank you's she wanted to give Without hesitation she answered: "As always, Anna Lee Husband, our team leader and owner of Gahooltree , Gahooltree Supplies and Sassy D'Lite was incredibly supportive and got right behind the idea by donating some fabulous pieces to the the shop and spending most of the day on Twitter with me as well as offering to do whatever was necessary to make this work for the team. This crew, even new members, jumped right in to help so of course a huge thanks to this wonderful team. On behalf of the team I'd like to send thanks of course to all the readers and tweeters and re-tweeters with a special thanks to our winner Lizzie. Thanks to the wonderful duo, Mer and Dani of Sweet Tarragon without whom I would not be able to function on the computer as well as the idea for the contest. And a special thanks to my husband Al. He is supportive and loving beyond reason and somehow always puts up with my craziness. He's the best.!"

Well, we think YOU are the best as well, Lois. Thank you for being a part of this team and for all of your efforts towards our benefit. You ROCK~!