Tom's Winning Strategy

Tom first tried creating a Facebook Event to invite friends to join and vote for the idea. However, his Facebook friends found this to be confusing. Tom decided to send out individual messages to each and every one of his nearly 500 Facebook friends. (He actually rallied two colleagues to do the same and it took each of them pretty much the entire day). The message to their friends basically introduced what they were doing, let their friends know how they could help, provided a link to the site and then a big thanks. This was not a mass message /spam. Tom warns, “I have great respect for my network. Don’t Spam! It comes around to hurt you in the long run.”

Some other interesting notes from Tom:

Tom informed friends that if they passed the first round, they would be asking them again to vote in the finals. He waited until the last day of each of the rounds to send out most of the messages in order to keep the competition unaware of what was coming. They found that nearly 80% of the friends on Facebook responded to tell him they voted as opposed to 30% of those they emailed. MySpace was much more difficult than Facebook to quickly and effectively message individuals.

Tom's Winning Idea, RED ROVER:
Tom Krieglstein is co-founder of Swift Kick, a Chicago-based education company whose mission is to increase student engagement through leadership, technology and community. He plans on using the $10,000 prize from ideablob.com to pay for hosting fees so his freshman orientation software, called Red Rover, may be offered to schools at no cost. Red Rover will integrate with popular online social networks (such as Facebook and MySpace) to match college students with other students, groups and courses.