The Atlanta Social Madness Contest, the online Atlanta business social media measuring stick comparison game by the Atlanta Business Chronicle locally and Bizjournals nationally, and that has scores determined via a combination of votes, and Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin followers and activity, is being gamed.
The problem this blogger noticed is based on the idea that once a person votes for Company XYZ, the system locks out that person’s ability to vote. That is, the “vote” button is green once you vote for Company XYZ, and it remains green when you come back to the page, …. right?
Well, wrong – and that’s the problem. I’ve discovered that a person can actually vote more than once because the way votes are counted isn’t efficiently locking out each voter. I’ve re-visited the page and noticed that my “vote” button I used for my company, and for other companies, wasn’t green – so I can vote again.
Some Company XYZ’s in Atlanta seem to have picked up on this, and have raised their scores dramatically, even though they have no comparable increase in Twitter Followers, Facebook Likes, or Linkedin Followers.
Meanwhile the Zennie62 score that started at 1,766 votes somehow dropped to 1,673 votes. And Zennie62 has actually had a small increase in Facebook Likes, but our strong area is Twitter where I have over 65,000 followers – far more than any other company in Atlanta.
The way the system should be designed, I should not lose votes by any way other than gaming. Moreover, some of the companies have scores that are far larger than their true social media reach.
I personally can’t take this contest seriously if The Bizjorunals organization allows gaming to go on. The vote code must be altered – find one that can’t be gamed where someone has a way of creating artificial vote counts.
I know this claim is controversial, but that’s too bad – a person enters a contest with the assumption of fairness.
That’s not here.
Stay tuned.