Businesses lately have really been getting involved in the social media landscape. There's a ridiculous amount of benefits that come with using new age marketing and engagement with your business. For one, you're reaching a highly targeted audience, but at the same time, you're opening your brand to newcomers that the contest might attract. People are going to be curious, and even though they said curiosity killed the cat, I think in today's age it should be said that curiosity is what helped the cat land on its feet when falling.

I wanted to put together a few interesting contests that I've seen lately, which show an amazing and interesting use of social media:

Coach

Not sure if you've heard of the "Poppy Project", but Coach put this together recently and I've decided to experiment with it a little bit. You can get code to put in the header of your website, which springs to life a little "poppy trail" type object in your sidebar. This connects all the users who use it, and you can have other people tweet out a hashtag of your choosing (mine was #esvienne) to make it grow. As it grows, you might find a purse in it- which leads to an amazing prize.

This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2010.