How Blogging Saved The Beauty Pageant: Why Miss Teen Canada- World Competition Is An Amazing Social Media Case Study
Post by Robert Campbell on May 26, 2010
Once again, all participants in the 2010 Search for Miss Teen Canada – World beauty pageant must start and maintain a personal blog.
That one single innovation has completely changed the landscape. Now the pageant pretty much advertises itself, teaches valuable skills, and lets the public share the excitment in real time. The model also shares links from contestant blogs with sponsors.
Yes indeed, things have changed backstage at the beauty pageant, there’s a new category now; to win this pageant girls not only have to be seven shades of beautiful, but also, the successful finalist will have to be an exceptional blogger as measured in style, technical skill and original prose.
So far the 2010 MTCW Blog Army (that link is to the index page) has recruited over 52 contestant blogs from all across Canada, and the writing is fantastic. Each finalist has plugged in live Twitter feeds and Flickr feeds into a specially prepared custom 2010 Miss Teen Canada- World template made by Sugar Inc.
Starting in June, the bloggers will be issued three unique writing challenges and their responses to these assignments will be graded (by myself and possibly Casie Stewart if I can talk her into helping me) for 10% of each girl’s final score.
With less than two months before the big event, most of these ambitious teens have already filled their OnSugar domains full of original pictures, videos, and links to sponsors and charity websites. This is user driven social media and its a great community building case study. I’ve said it before on here, and I’ll say it again, because of these blogs, the Miss teen Canada – World pageant is a social capital bank.
Right now fifty girls are blogging about their lives, their platforms and of course their preparations for the July event in brand new domains that they have each just registered in their names.onsugar dot com. So you see they are each making deposits in their own richmedia information bank accounts. When the pageant ends they will all no doubt stop blogging, only to discover months or years later that their blogs are the first things to index on Google when they search their names. That’s how social capital works and eventually they’ll all use it to get jobs and advance their careers. They make deposits today, and their work pays dividends in the future, especially if they actually have something to say.
Last year the MTCW pageant raised over thirty thousand dollars for Free The Children and Siera Bearchell flew to Africa to personally deliver the funds and help build a school in Kenya. This year the organization hopes to raise fifty thousand dollars, and the Blog Army will certainly help that quest.