Shycast.com launched in early 2007 as a social network offering contests and competitions to its community with support from several major consumer products and entertainment companies. You can read about that in the annals of TechCrunch. But we quickly realized that most brands prefer to engage customers "on their own turf" - their web site or branded micro-site. We also realized that unless we quickly scaled to massive size, brands would be tapping into the same user community for every campaign, a common problem with "contest sites" that have emerged since our launch.

So with help from our sponsors we developed the platform that puts contests and competitions right on our clients' web sites, and still gives us the opportunity to track brand preferences and create new products that engage. We closed the social network and re-launched the site in January of this year.

Activating Communities at the Hyper-local Level

We've seen a pattern evolve in our work: when we structured competitions in a certain way they caught fire - not just online, but "on the street", in real world communities, at the "hyper-local" level. We heard from mayors who said, "This contest was the first thing in a long time that really brought our community together", and we knew we were onto something special. We started calling this phenomenon "community activation", and we've developed a framework for creating and managing competitions that activate entire communities.

The first "community activation" competition we were involved with was IKEA's Small Business, Big Dreams contest. In some of the cities involved, IKEA saw nearly as many votes as residents (and yes, we track IP addresses!). People hung banners across main street, shop owners set up voting booths, and residents handed out fliers at local events. The competition oozed passion.

Since then we've run community activating competitions for a number of brands, large and small, in the US and abroad, with similarly inspiring results. The most important thing we've learned to remember is that success is not about the size of the brand, but the structure of the competition. If you have an idea and want to activate cities around your brand, Let's Talk.

Management

Drew Peloso

Drew Peloso is an Internet advertising and social media pioneer and serial entrepreneur with over twelve years experience creating innovative companies, campaigns, and media solutions. He sets strategic direction for Shycast and manages day-to-day operations.

In 2006 Drew and the "Princeton Posse" - four amazing students and budding entrepreneurs from Princeton's engineering school - launched Shycast to help advertisers engage their most influential customers through contests and competitions. Shycast partnered with global public relations leader Weber Shandwick, along with Unilever, IKEA North America, and Warner Music, and launched the first social network for brands and people in January 2007. Since then, Shycast has emerged as a leader in the social media landscape and specialist in activating real communities to engage with the company's brand clients.

Previously, Drew co-founded Onclave with social technology futurist and cycling phenom Steve Hatch along with UI master and guitar hero David Reid and coding maven Per Kreipke. Onclave was among the pioneers of the "read-write-web" and developer of one of the first hosted blog and syndication applications for public and enterprise use. The Onclave ASP blogging service was adopted by several leading public relations firms and Onclave was at the time among the loudest advocates ushering the PR industry into the blogosphere. Onclave's strategic relationship with the Council of PR Firms helped that organization produce one of the first and longest-running "C-level" industry blogs at www.prfirms.org. (while the Council remains an incredibly innovative industry group of creative professionals defining the future of business communications through practice, unfortunately the blog is no longer.)

Drew was a member of the founding team of NBC Interactive. He worked on the design of the first www.nbc.com, and helped manage NBC's nascent relationship with Microsoft and MSN. He was also Vice President of MarketSource Corporation's MSI division, a Top-50 web agency that was among the first to create social campaigns for hundreds of Fortune 1000 brands like Chevy, Microsoft, and 7Up. Drew developed partnerships with many of the emerging Internet companies including Yahoo!, Excite, Ebay, and Cnet, and operated MarketSource's venerable t@p Network, the leading web destination for college students.

Drew has an MBA from Cornell University and a B.S. in Finance from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife and three kids, in the shadow of the E-quad where he can hear the chants of "safety school" emanating from the stadium twice yearly.

Go Big Red, and Go Buffs!