FRC Blogged - Administrative manual is out

[Jessica Boucher]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

the judging panel at CMP may be left to sift through 500+(?) submissions. That will take a tremendous feat to accomplish, and unfortunately I think the tradeoff to accomplish such a task will be to have less, for lack of a better term, quality of judging per each submission.

Ah ha, yeah, it's certainly a concern. I don't know how FRC will handle that. Now, if I was writing the rules, I would steal from the best - in this case, those who built their business model around it. Influenster is a site that gamifies social influence and encourages reviews on free samples (this is squarely in the sample-size cottage industry that has popped up lately - see Birchbox)

The wider the user's audience, the more likely they are to receive free stuff. The more the users post reviews about the free samples, the more likely they are to get more free samples. It's an addictive cycle for the user, and very beneficial to advertisers who want internet buzz about a new product.

How does Influenster find the best users to send samples?
1.) You're required to list your social reach. That means listing all your sites: Facebook, twitter, youtube, etc. The more services, the higher your score.
2.) You're encouraged to share your audience size and your frequency. Most of these sites can give you stats about your reach. The more people who follow you, the bigger the reach.

Now, how does that translate to FRC? If FRC adopted a similar model as Influenster, which basically works off of a web form, the submission rate should fall somewhere in the 40% range. I'm being generous here: typically submission rates for website at a regional hovers at 50%, but awards which require more information upfront cause the rate to drop significantly. Since a web form is more intel than has been required from the award in the past, this number should fall in the middle. This brings us to 200 teams.

From there, I would weight based upon criteria. Categorize reach based upon outlet and size: high reach in FB, low in Youtube, etc. Then sort to find your top 50. I can see this being done even before the list gets to the panel.

The one grey area I can forsee is the viral anomaly: what if just one video takes off? No one saw many of the current popular memes coming. With good planning (I'm looking at you, 30 members of Daisy), the channels should see upticks in overall reach, but this may not be the case. This is where I think there should be a free-text area for the team to show off a gem to the judges which could place them in consideration.

But that's just how I would do it. How FRC will handle it is anyone's guess.