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| Yes, you can move large iron post hole tools in a LEAF |
This is my last post in the Nissan Big Turn On competition. Yes, you can all breathe a sigh of relief now! From the breathless two weeks of driving the LEAF around, and taking 30 odd people out for mini test drives, to the latter two weeks of writing blog posts and canvassing support, it’s kept me busy. I think I’ve spent around three or four hours a day at it, which on top of a full time job and a family has been hard work I couldn’t have done it without the incredible support from my lovely wife, or my wonderful friends I’ve made through twitter.
It’s been an interesting month. My competition URL on Nissan’s site changed 3 times, without redirects from the old address being put in. One of these happened at 5pm on the day 45,000 newspapers with the suddenly defunct address hit doormats. A redirect wasn’t put in for 16 hours.
Things like this were a minor distraction though. What started off as a competition to promote, and hopefully win a car, for me turned into a challenge of not letting the incredible support I’ve had down, as well as promoting and trying to win a car. It is in many ways humbling.
In the last week I’ve had over twice the number of people engage on the #nissanLEAFcar21 hashtag as my nearest competitor. In the last 24 hours I’ve had 200 tweets in my hashtag, almost 3 times that of my nearest rival, and I’ve reached 100,000 people, twice that of my nearest competitor.
I feel genuinely blessed, whether my (and your) efforts have been enough to win the competition or not. I’ve had Turn Ons from some of the biggest names in parent blogging, and even from other competitors. Electric car and eco-nut Robert Llewellyn has voted for me and wished me good luck. I feel popular in a way that I certainly never did at school :)
I’ve also had a few people comment about spamming their twitter timeline. They are of course absolutely right, and I did apologise to each and every one of them. It’s a fine line between popping a few tweets for promotional purposes into my timeline and over-egging it and on occasion I over-egged it.
I don’t think I could have done anything more, overseeing the publication of more than 30 blog posts on 15 different sites, appearing on local radio and featuring in the local newspaper. I feel genuinely satisfied at my attempts in the competition.
I think it’s sad that IP limiting and catchpas had to be introduced to the competition- I understand outside of the blogger competition, in the general one individual got 14,000 votes overnight, which necessitated this- but I do hope when the independent adjudicator that Nissan have appointed review my attempts, they are happy that everything stacks up and that my votes are supported by my activity.
Win or lose, and I sincerely hope that it’s “win”, I’d like to thank everyone who has been behind me in this competition. I intend to trawl my hashtag over the rest of the week and thank you all individually. If you didn’t tweet, then you’ll have to take this “thank you” as your reward.
VOTING CLOSES AT MIDNIGHT YOU CAN STILL VOTE HERE