American Girl is not merely launching their own charitable project. They are actively recruiting the widespread community of young girls to join them in their pursuit of good deeds. It is not about helping American Girl achieve a glorious goal, but a beautiful and innovative method of involving, inspiring, and encouraging these youngsters to spread the light.

To begin with, today American Girl is debuting Shine On Now, an interactive site that requires young girls to spread the word to as many of their friends as they can. Through their efforts, American Girl will donate up to $1 million in clothes, books, dolls, and money to four charitable organizations. The site offers those involved a downloadable kit to guide the young do-gooders in fundraising and volunteering for those charities, or charities of their choice.

Simultaneously, in honor of their shining stars, American Girl is launching a new virtual campus – Innerstar University – where young girls participate in fun and enriching activities to boost their confidence and strength. Since their inception, American Girl has focused on maximizing the potential of their customers, 3-12 year old girls.

Finally, American Girl is giving away a MyAmericanGirl to a most deserving girl! We are asking our readers to nominate a girl in their lives or in the community who embodies the bespoke charitable characteristics. In a paragraph, and without referencing the girls identity, please describe what it is that makes this girl stand out. We encourage you to include her outstanding activities and how she helps others in general. Based on your description, we will choose one girl to be awarded the doll, and will feature her right here on Social Media Mom!

The program ends July 31st. Please help us spread the word!

American Girl sent me free product samples as a part of my partnership in the Shine On Now^™ program. The opinions and content posted here is my own.

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We all fall on our faces sometimes.  Sometimes it hurts real bad. But it’s those failed experiences that teach us the lessons we need to learn to become better.

Recently I had one of those major FAILs.  I helped run a social media contest for a new site called The Trendy Purse where the winner would get a $500 handbag of her choosing.  Sounds enticing, right?

Well, the contest totally flopped.  I think we got a grand total of 6 submissions.  Certainly not the 100 submissions we were aiming for.  The good news is that we learned some important lessons for the next go-round.  And that’s where this post emerges from…

Here are 5 tips for how NOT to run a social media contest:

1. Make it really time consuming

On the contrary.  If you’re going for maximum participation, make it quick.  Ideally, participation in the contest should be as simple and easy as you can make it.

2. Make it a brain cruncher

To get maximum participation in a social media contest, don’t require a Master’s thesis or make it too challenging.  People know that their odds of winning contests are not great, but are willing to participate if it doesn’t require too much time or energy.

3. Rely on the little guy

Almost all successful social media contests get their oomph from someone with big influence / readership.  If you hire someone to help with PR, go big or go home.  It’s worth spending the big dollars for someone with massive reach.

4. Put all your eggs in one basket

You think your strategy is perfect? Think again.  The best way to ensure a successful social media contest is to have a marketing plan A, plan B and plan C and to execute them all in parallel.

5. Avoid the fine print

When running a contest, it’s best to give yourself an out in case the contest flops.  Otherwise you get stuck with a big bill and few results. A little small print can allow you to restructure the contest in case it doesn’t work out the first go-around.

Thankfully we adopted this last point at The Trendy Purse.  We provided ourselves with room to extend the contest if we did not get at least 50 submissions.  In the process of extending the contest, we also tried to salvage it a bit by changing the rules to take points 1 and 2 into account.

At the end of the day, social media marketing is all about maximizing your chances of success with the full knowledge that some of your attempts, while valiant, will completely flop. It’s ok to fail.  But if you learn from your mistakes, you’ll fail less often and pretty soon find that you’re winning the race far more often than not.

Andy Beal is giving away an 8 GB iPod Touch to one lucky reader. DO NOT SIGN UP because I want to win and if you Twitter about the contest or if you blog about it, you get an even better chance of being upgraded to a 16GB or 32GB version.

Evidently, entry into the contest is quite simple; all you have to do is sign up for RSS updates or e-mail subscription. I already had Marketing Pilgrim on my RSS so I registered for the e-mail updates. That is a double does of fantastic Internet Marketing advice for me each and every day.

Dear, sweet, Fat Kid is turning 18 on March 5th and to celebrate his coming of age, he has unleashed a birthday contest and is giving away a boatload of cool prizes, one of which I am hoping to win………

• Six 1st Prize Winners will receive a free 125×125 ad on Fat Kid Unleashed for the entire month of March!
• Two 2nd Prize Winners will receive $20 in cash (via paypal)
• Two 3rd Prize Winners will receive 1000 entrecard credits

Honestly, cash would be cool but I would really like the free advertising or the Entrecard credits. I have been using Entrecard quite a bit lately and believe it or not, have seen some real traffic from it. In the past 10 days, I have received 146 visits through the Entrecard program.

There are 18 ways you can enter in honor of his 18 years of life, writing a post like this one gets you 5 entries, as well as dropping your Entrecard on his site daily. The best part about it, every time I go to his site to drop my card, I always find a great post on either blogging, social media, SEO or marketing so in my quest to win something I am actually finding great content at the same time.

Head on over to Fat Kid Unleashed, leave a comment (that will give you one entry), or at least sign up for his RSS feed via e-mail and get yourself two entries, who knows, you may just learn something.