I love entering contests. I always have and more than likely always will.
With the age of social networking, it is much easier to enter contests, particularly through the current most popular social networking application, Twitter. With a 140 characters or less tweet (message), a public relations representative, publicist or agent for a celebrity can ask a simple question for their followers to reply with the answers. Within a matter of minutes, followers know if they’ve won the current contest promotion.
I will admit, I have participated in a few of these contests, particularly ones pertaining to Kasey Kahne. I will also admit that on at least two occasions I have I been one of the lucky ones to win the particular contest. The most recent one was just the other day, Tuesday to be exact.
Kahne’s public relations representative has a Twitter account and tweets Kahne’s appearances throughout the season with an occasional contest here and there. This one happened to be for this weekend’s “Sprint’s Sound and Speed” in Nashville, Tenn.
The annual event combines country music and NASCAR in an effort to raise money for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and Victory Junction Gang Camp.
Many fans look forward to the opportunity to experience great country music with a chance to meet one of their favorite NASCAR drivers, and I am not an exception.
One of my best friends and I have always attempted to plan a trip to go and every year we just can’t seem to get it together. This year we forgot to attempt to plan it all together, in fact, before I walked out the door to head to class, I sent her a text saying basically the same thing. Needless did I know that “Sound and Speed” would be a topic of my conversation later in the day.
Kahne’s public relations representative sent out a tweet early this morning saying she had tickets for this weekend’s event and she’d tweet a question later in the day. All the Kahne fans and followers of Kahne’s public relations’ Twitter waited patiently for the tweet with the question to answer. Again, I was no exception.
When the tweet appeared on my phone from @kk9team, I was ecstatic because I knew the answer. I loaded UberTwitter, a twitter application for Blackberry devices, and replied to her with the answers of Dierks Bentley and Eric Church to her question, “…what two country artist headlined Bud events with Kasey in ‘09.”
Sending my tweet, I was confidant, not because I thought I’d be one of the lucky winners, but because I knew the answer.
I wasn’t excited until @kk9team added me on Twitter. I did a silent “yes” because you I knew I was one of the lucky winners. She had previously said she’d direct message (DM) the winners and you cannot DM someone you don’t follow.
Sure enough, I was one of the lucky six to get a pair of general admission tickets for Saturday.
However, the excitement soon went away when I realized that no one would be able to go with me. It doesn’t help that your two best friends both have jobs and that the contest was last minute. It also didn’t help that one of them lives Arkansas while I live in Georgia. Other than my two best friends, my other friends and some family members don’t have the extra money to make the trip to Tennessee for the weekend.
Basically I’ll end up with two free tickets for Saturday and what will I do with then? I will tell you. I will put them in an envelope with the tickets I won for the Indianapolis Sprint Cup race last July. The same tickets that I also won from a Twitter contest, this time from Allstate, a sponsor of Kahne. And the same tickets I wasn’t able to use because again I live in Georgia, and I only seem to know poor people who have jobs and can’t get off at the last minute.
Once again, I will feel defeated, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll learn to not enter these NASCAR/Kasey Kahne Twitter contests without actually knowing if I’ll be able to go.
Who am I kidding? I’ll continue to enter them because one of these days it will be something I can use and/or I’ll be able to use the free tickets.
What fun would I have, if I don’t try?
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It’s so cool that you won! I never win anything like that.
It’s really too bad you aren’t going to be able to go. Eventually, you & I will make it to Nashville for Sound & Speed (when both Kasey & Junior are there again). It just wasn’t meant to be this year.