We learned about Chase’s Community Giving contest on Facebook a while back, and were impressed with the effort. However, when a friend of ours from Seattle tech startup Mixpo told us that his sister’s charity, the East Harlem Tutorial Program, had made it to the final 100, well we had to do our part to help. By making it to the finals, they’ve already qualified for $25,000. Now they’re shooting to win the whole thing and take home a prize of $1 Million. That’s some serious money.

Cleverly, the contest allows you to vote for 5 charities, which maximizes the impressions voters are providing for Chase across Facebook. Thus, if you follow our lead and support our friends from Mixpo, you still have 4 more votes in which to help the 3 Washington charities. Regardless of who you vote for (did we mention we are voting for EHTP), it’s a good case study for Cause Marketing. Kudos to Chase on this one (though if they all gave their tax-payer paid bonues to the charities as well, they’d get way more positive press…I’m just saying…)

I am always excited when given the opportunity to contribute to various industry publications. Most recently, I wrote an article which ran on Mashable about how to conduct a social media contest to help drive engagement and deliver value to your brand.  In 5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest, I touched on the most pertinent strategies and best practices social media marketers should know and consider when developing online contests for their company and/or clients. Like with any topic of this kind, there is a large quantity of information to be covered. However, due to time and word count limitations, we cannot always include as much information and advice as we’d like.

Thankfully, diligent readers have contributed extremely valid comments and questions that bring up excellent points and raise additional issues about running a social contest; particularly around Rules & Regulations and channel guidelines.

It’s always in your best interest, prior to launching a social contest, to establish clearly communicated and readily available Rules & Regulations on behalf of the company that are in accordance with any relevant state and federal laws governing sweepstakes and contests, and to provide clear guidance regarding protection of PII/Personal Information. If you have a micro-site or sub-domain set up where the contest is going to be managed, then dedicate a specific page on-site for this document. If not, and the contest is designed to live entirely within the social media realm, then providing the Rules & Regulations via a dedicated blog post on a managed blog or via an owned and managed third-party domain is preferred over solely posting them to the social media site.

 In addition to formulating your own guidelines, be familiar and within the parameters of the specific channel guidelines where you plan to promote the contest. For example, Facebook has developed and continuously revises its Terms of Service and Promotions Guidelines regarding third party sponsored promotions. This is a useful resource that I encourage anyone who is considering using Facebook as a platform for an online contest to read over: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php.

If interested in a more in-depth response to these issues, read my answers on the comment thread at Mashable. If there are any other issues or aspects of social media contests you’d like addressed, please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

For those of you planning to run a social contest, I hope the tips provide some useful guidance. Best of luck!