1000's Can't be wrong!

from the Editors Desk...

Last month was definitely 'March Madness'! $56,646.00 to 565 winners! Yep, that is the final tally and Congratulations to you all who were winners (you know who you are!). That is an awful lot of goods & services freely given to an awful lot of locals. It was a real buzz! After a while the 1000's of entries each morning seemed to become personal. I know that sounds silly, but it did, you would have the hat pop up someone for say a Jet ski Ride, but see that the guy was in the 65 - 74 years range and then wonder if he would take it? Some mornings it seemed like every second person who popped up as a winner seemed to be from Bli Bli or Yandina, then the next morning they were all Maroochydore, the next day it was all Sue & John, I swear they must be the most popular names on the Coast LOL! Some of the comments that came back were really cool too! It was so nice to see a true "Win-Win" Situation, heaps of local businesses got extra promotion and exposure, AND, heaps of Sunshine Coast locals got an awful lot of free stuff that will really help them, as the words "I could not have afforded..." came up a few times, so that was really awesome!

We had a number of 'special' End of Month Draws, and they have all been announced now and if you click on the above link, you can actually view all the winners, for privacy reasons, only the first name & suburb have been listed, and as one lovely lady said, she was glad that the grandkids would not see it (her horse-riding prize she won) before she could surprise them when they come to visit at Easter... People always tend to think of computers and the internet as 'impersonal', but this promotion, even with the massive site traffic numbers still showed that it all still boils down to 'people', not just numbers and stats, and that was really nice to see.

We normally work long hours, but none of us knew what was going to hit us with our 'STOP Turn Off Your TV' advertising campaign. Leone and I tend to give Stephen our programmer a hard time, teasing him about his 'techy stuff', but, gee, how happy were we that he could programme as well as he can? We knew that due to all the 'Economic Doom & Gloom' we are constantly hearing, that our advertisers on site 'might' be interested in participating in an extra advertising initiative, but not as many as we had come through with great offers? For anyone who missed the ad, Stephen has written an article about how they worked, little videos of the process etc, so have a look if you are interested "15 Minutes of Cross Media Madness".

I know we have a lot of people on 'Coast News' who don't actually live on the Sunshine Coast, so sorry that you could not also join in the fun. Hopefully next time we will come up with a promotion that includes you too. Though we are sure you would like to keep visiting a vibrant local economy and community when you do holiday with us, and can therefore understand why it was important for us to do 'our bit' to help local business & local people in our own backyard.

We would just like to take this opportunity to thank all our wonderfully generous 'Premium Advertisers' who gave us such great goods & services to giveaway, (yes we will be buying you a drink to say thank you, keep an eye on your email for an invite). Thanks also to Mike from On Camera who came up with some great ideas, and pushed us into going outside our comfort zone advertising-wise (yes the yellow was correct Mike, your right & I'm wrong LOL!), and gave us such a wonderfully innovative campaign. Last but not least, thanks to all of you who entered, we know there were a few nights there that the server groaned a bit and the site was a bit slower, but we appreciate your patience. Congratulations to all the winners, enjoy your free 'stuff'! Who knows, we might make this annual, you never know???

Cheers
Noely
Community Site Operations

Permanent Link: 1000's Can't be wrong!
Publish Date: 06 Apr 09

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