For all of you Entracard holders out there, you must already know that Entrecard has partnered up with SezWho to create a better, more interactive experience for bloggers. To build momentum for this partnership, they launched a contest which they hope will get a lot of their members to start publicizing the 2 sides and also start interacting more with each other. The Contest has members blog about the partnership, twitter it and comment on other blogs about it. My first thought was “wow, it’s amazing how they can get so many people to give them free advertising, free word of mouth and a huge push for a successful partnership”.
After taking a few deep breaths and thinking about it, I realized that although everyone is helping out Entrecard, they are helping us out just as much. They are causing us to write an extra post, add a twitter and comment on other blogs. All things that we need to do anyway to build up our communities. It’s not only a push for us to do these things because we can post, comment and twitter about anything, but by participating in this contest, it opens new doors for all of us. By taking this opportunity, we are becoming better and more important members of the community which raises our rank and profile.
Thinking about this contest I recognized that the only reason that anyone would join in is because it is providing value to them as well.
Unlucky people will look at the contest for a second and forget about it. It is the lucky people who see the advantages to joining in and running with new opportunities. It’s also a little funny that they call it a contest even though everyone can be a winner by following all of the steps. It’s like kindergarten all over again.
Lessons to take from this:
I am a typical person more or less that has always tried to get away with doing the absolute minimum to get by. In school, I did my assignments last minute, I barely passes some of my tests, I crammed for everything and didn't care about retaining any information. I always wanted to be successful and get lucky but my problem was that I thought that luck and chance were synonymous. One day, all that changed when i found out that there was more to "Luck". I learned that it was possible to make your own luck and that people that were "lucky", all had very similar characteristics. I made a conscious decision to become one of those lucky people and the world started to open up. It didn't happen overnight and I'm still not there yet but at least I know what to look for and what to do. Recognizing the opportunities to get lucky is only the beginning of the battle. Now I have to train myself to jump on every opportunity and one day be truly "lucky".