As an important part of the launch of Nokia’s newest flagship smartphone N97, there was an interesting contest named ‘Search for N’ that has got two shiny pieces of N97 for the lucky winners. This wasn’t a contest methodology we’re very used to. I mean, the procedure is simple and straight, but the contest as a whole, could be regarded as one of the smartest pre-launch campaigns ever. Here’s why.

What the contest was: The contest ran for five days with one different question for each day. Anyone who answered all 5 questions correct, stood a chance to win, chosen by the random-ness.

Most of the competitions/contests on web are limited to particular websites. You go there, enter your name in comments or blog/tweet about it, and a randomly chosen winner gets the prize. Even though ‘Search for N’ have got the random-factor too, the way the contest was conducted is interesting. They (Nokia), came out and struck up agreements with popular and widely read tech bloggers/forums and hosted the contest at these places. Now, this is very smart. Doing so, Nokia got to present their new flagship product (which is really awesome, by the way) to a very targeted yet huge audience. And the most interesting part is that, they probably didn’t have to shell out much for this campaign (if at all they did).

This was a real example of a sensible win-win situation. Nokia won. The hosts won. And the participants won too. If they had decided to host this contest on their own, instead of inviting web authors as hosts, they would’ve spent thousands of money on online AD campaigns and email marketing, none of them returning anything near to what they’ve got by the cool and innovative campaign they did.

Which one would be better ? A newspaper being made to promote a new product, or full-page ads in the most read newspapers?

Nokia ported the same to web – the new social medium.
You see, the basics are the same. It’s just that the medium evolves.