Back in the early days of the Web, organizations constantly were attempting to find ways to make people want to come back to their Web sites.  One original concept was that a site should have a really good Links page–a page people would bookmark and then come back to frequently to get to your links.  (Law firms, for example, liked to have links to all the local courts, libraries, and law resources, with the idea being that people view their site as some kind of portal into the legal world.)  This didn’t really work.  First, everyone was doing it.  Second, it turns out that Links pages simply give site visitors a vast array of juicy-looking exit points.  Finally, the advent of search engines like Google (or “the Google,” as our president says), made these Links pages fairly irrelevant.

More recently, some companies have put games on their site, thinking that games will drive people back to the site and, of course, cause them to buy more of their products or services.  The success of this approach will depend on your audience.  The Keebler Elf games on Kellogs’ Web site appeals to kids, applying the same marketing logic as was done with Joe Camel:  if you can get them to like the character, you can get them to like the product.  Although this may work well when your goal is Brand awareness, I have yet to see games on a corporate Web site–a site targeting an adult audience–that I thought were effective.

What I do find effective, however, are clever and imaginative contests that anyone can enter and the results of which the target audience will want to come back to see.  An excellent example of this is The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest, which is held monthly.  They show you a cartoon, and anyone can submit a caption for it.  Then they let their on-line audience vote for what they think is the best caption (collecting your name and email address as you vote).  I try to go back every month to see what people have submitted, and usually the winning entries are extremely clever.

Another good example of using contests to attract your target audience is the Wine Limerick contest for Wine Enthusiast magazine.  What serious wine drinker does not want to demonstrate how witty he or she is?  They just recently posted the results, and I’m happy to say that my own father was one of four 1st place winners, having entered this little ditty:

I have an untamed predilection

for building a vast wine collection.

But my wife is incensed

o’er the vinous expense.

‘Tis a shame; I shall miss her affection.

Way to go, Dad.  For his efforts, he apparently gets two years of the magazine for free!  The cost to the magazine, therefore, is virtually nothing.  But they received hundreds of entries and probably thousands of additional eyeballs on their Web site.  Clever.