Crowdsourcing ideas and sharing yours on Horse of the Year

I love crowdsourcing (stealing?) marketing ideas, and one of the cooler things I’ve seen on Twitter lately is the poll-style tweet where the user votes by either retweeting or favoriting.

As a Browns fan, I’ve seen more than a few of these the past few weeks with the Hoyer-Manziel debate, and it was also good for the College Football Playoff question of awarding the fourth seed to a Big 12 or B1G team. Thanksfully, my feverish tweeting paid off, and the selection committee went with The Ohio State Buckeyes.

Anyway, so why not do this for Horse of the Year and give people who took the time to tweet a chance to win something as well, so @TwinSpires asked people to RT for California Chrome and favorite for other, and everyone participating is entereted into a drawing to win an iPad.

Who is your Horse of the Year? RT for CA Chrome, favorite for other. All participants entered to win an iPad #tsHOTY pic.twitter.com/Xd24eDDU02

— TwinSpires.com (@TwinSpires) December 10, 2014

The initial plan was to “favorite for Main Sequence” but response to a tweet teasing the contest made me realize that leaving Bayern and Untapable out would probably hurt participation. The all-inclusive approach has worked well with lots of impressions and engagements in the first 24 hours and California Chrome holding a 60-52 edge over the field, though “others” actually outpaced the Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands winner in early voting.

The tweet will be around forever, of course, but we’ll close the contest at noon ET on Monday and draw for the iPad among the eligible RTs and favorites (I say “eligible” because even though I favorited for Main Sequence I’m not eligible to win).