Its been another wonderful year in 2011 and I promised to launched another valentines day couple voting contest for 2012 if my fans had reached a number above 30,000. And surprisingly it did, and we did another round of contest this year in 2012. Thanks for all 36 couples that had participated for this years voting contest. Congratz to Jared and Zengie (couple number 2) for winning this prize. As promised, the couple that gets the highest vote will win a free couple portrait worth Rm1,800. The contest goes on for 10 days and we had just announced the winner couple of hours ago.
People may wonder why I would run a contest like this, its really simple, as a photographer that shoot mainly weddings I have witness numerous love stories, for couples that have not decided or have already went through the process of marriage, I hope I am able to extend their love, or to those that have not participated in this contest, I hope they are able to feel the true stories from each and every couple that have shared their stories. By doing this I hope I am able to use this hopeful day on valentines to promote positive thinking on relationships. There are people that enjoyed most in relationships but there are people that are also suffering from relationship, or lost in some way, I hope this campaign can build their confidence to look forward in their relationship, or to those that do not have a partner, might gather those love stories and have a positive mind in their future relationships. Its just mainly something I would feel like doing every year to help or to heal the souls of humanity.
In this contest I asked couple to send in their stories, write a short story about them, and also state why they love my pictures. And I am surprised and learned a lot how each individual perceive my pictures, below are the statement they have sent in.
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because his photo full of feeling, every photos have different feel for me. For the wedding photo, I can feel the bless and happiness between the bridegroom and the bride. I like Dennis Yap Photography's photos! ♥"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because you are the best amongst the best."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because....your technique of shooting is very nice and modern!"
"Why i love dennis yep's photography because i have an excellent taste ;)."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because his photo full of imagination and meaning, bringing out feeling in every photo, and the best Photographer!"
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because the photo that he take give me diffrent feeling and got his own style."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because, i saw your photography as a way of feeling, of touching & loving.
What you have caught on your film is captured forever... it remember little things, long after you have forgotten everything. i love your pieces of art & passion” ♥
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because he is "THE Great". ( Photos better than words)"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because your photography is meaningful to me and it just like story-telling. I love to sense on photography as I love photography too and I find the feeling of natural on your most photography. Your photography is amazing all the way and I just love it."
"I love Dennis Yap photography because we able to find ourselves in the picture :D"
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because he shoot an extremely lovely couple pictures, heart melt!"
"I love dennis yap photography because...He manage to capture the true feelings of the moment...the moment may have passed, but the picture brings the feelings back...^^ i'm luvin' it."
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because his photography full of feeling when i review the photos taken by him. Besides, his photography create the sense of natural beauty, that why i like his photography."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because he manages to capture real moments in pictures that make you feel as if you were there when it happened."
"I love dennis yap photography because the photos being taken by him is an art and able to tell a story."
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because all the pictures was taken not only for fun,,but Dennis Yap can give someone feels very extraordinary and the pictures taken not only meant to get happy but it is meant on realizing some moral ethics or attitude for people to get self motivate..(^_^)v"
"I LOVE DENNIS YAP PHOTOGRAPHY BECAUSE HE CAN CAPTURE THE GREAT PHOTO WHICH FULL OF FEELING AND NATURE OF ♥ LOVE ♥!"
"We like Dennis Yap Photograph because his pictures are so true and lively, can explain a story without adding words."
"And I love DennisYap Photography for his photos - shine as the true events. Truly Inspiring!"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography is because every single picture taken, every single detail concentrated on, leaves a footprint of memories forever "
"Because we are married and you are the chosen photographer for the BIGGEST day of our lives and we love your work! What else can be better than these reasons!"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because I wish to use his service in our wedding album.His photos are so lively and the photos explain everything without our explanation!! Amazing!!"
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because he can captured all the right moments with the right feelings."
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because every picture taken looks natural, full of live and romance."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because of how it captured that very moment. ♥"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because your photography is meaningful and beautiful. Anyway, i just love it."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because the pictures captured by him do paint a thousand words."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because your pictures so creative, very special, also very interesting."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography is definitely because his pictures speaks louder than words and it shows every single detail of happiness and love in it. Thumbs Up !"
"I love you from the sincere of my heart...I love Dennis Yap Photography because his photo full happiness and meaning.I love it..."
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because his photos make me cried ~~~"
Thanks for all your comments; it really had melt my heart. For the reason I am doing photography is simply to tell the world that pictures can be more than just beauty. It can speak, made someone realize something, and can also heal or extend their love.
There are also an obstacle that I have faced for this year's voting contest, I have also learned that facebook voting contest has emerged to a different scenario, which is the question of fairness. You know what I want in this contest, is simply to be fair with everyone and I felt that I have great responsibility to make it as fair as possible because I am dealing with 36 lovely couples here, simply do not want to disappoint anyone.
To define the true winner, the winner has to be able to generate enough true vote from their friends or from friend's friend, this should be the true meaning of the contest, which is to get the highest support from their friends. However, dealing with heteroscedasticity in facebook is never easy. If you do not know the meaning of heteroscedasticity, it is simply the most extraordinary numbers in a statistic group. Everyday I have been monitoring the fans that have 'liked' the pictures. The software I have been using to monitor like statistic is called "Flirt". Flirt is a software created for only mac machines to monitor facebook events and it serve viral focus to gather specific likes for marketing purpose in both macro and micro monitoring. Out from Flirt I noticed these specific events as shown in my pictures below.
I was a little nervous when it comes to this because these are irregulars and I also found numerous likes were generated from duplicate facebook page which has only 1 member in the page. When I reasearch more indept on knowing where does all these duplicates were coming from, I have learned that there has been many competitions that was organized by large organizations which is considered unfair. Such as this page over here that I found to be unfairly organized, in this page the winner had gathered 36,000 likes and with total of 90,000 likes but the page has gathered only 11,000 fans, strange right? Which means that there are a great number of ghost voters. For my case I have had 17,000 likes in total, with 4,800 increased on members.
I have been pretty unpleased with facebook and it had somewhat discouraged me on whether to launch another couple portrait contest next year. But since I have launched this contest, I am set to develop a way that will be fair for everyone. So below is my approach.
In order to create numbers from viral reach behavior, you gotta know the 'like' performance of this competition. For example, the biggest fact from getting likes is how much effort the individual or the group of individual contributes to get likes, and versus the likes they have gathered. It is a known fact that if the main contestant that have shared the like invites to their own group of friends will more likely to get more likes, and their friends that have shared their pictures will more likely to get less likes. This is a known fact from Facebook experience. Therefore, the more days the competition had run, it is more likely that their effort versus like is less. And therefore the contestants have to use more effort to gather likes. In this scenario I called it 'like integrity'. Like integrity is a way to measure what you will expect from their effort and their actual 'likes' must be lower than the expected due to like deterioration from viral reach. In a competition like this, it is abnormal to see contestant that have spared less effort and able to generate great amount of likes, this is due to the viral reach performance. Of course, it also depend on how many friends each friends has in their account and therefore I have monitored and calculated the 'like expectation' from this competition; which also means the average number of likes gathered from each invite off from this contest. The contest is all about who you ask for likes, if individual had asked for likes from an unknown 'power like' group, then the viral reach will then failed and many ghost likes will be contributing and looses its like integrity, means that irregular activities occurred. Like integrity is a way to measure how likely people will be interested to like your page and support your contest.
The individual from 'power like' group that have liked the contestant will expect the contestant to like back, so I spent time to delete those invites in order to discourage them from doing so.
If you able to know what is the inclusion method, you will know how to gather 'like integrity'. For this I used a weibull method from statistic to measure how many ghost likes as a start. And this is my formula, the number of 1 to 10 are critical numbers used from risk analysis measured from mean of number of likes per invite. To gather a weibull number one has to capture the like contributed on each day and also percentage of ghost likes from Flirt because it will be tough to monitor them after next day.
Like Integrity = [Weibull = (1)/(1+irregulars) from life data analysis, thanks to Flirt and Reliasoft.]x[Invite performance = 0.1 to 1]x[Number of actual like]
So thats my effort for one single contest, and the winner gets a free portrait session from me. :D So much effort had been put in place, in order to voice out one VISION.
Congratulate Jared & Zengie, you guys have proved to have the biggest support from your friends and family, I will not disappoint both of you. ^_^