By: Brian J. Meli
You’re looking to build some hype around a new product rollout, establish a social presence for your company, or provide some pop to your third quarter sales. Whatever your reason, you need to get consumers quickly engaged with your brand, and you’ve decided a promotional game is the best way to accomplish that. Not a bad decision given how effective contests, sweepstakes and games of chance can be at generating consumer interest. And with social media providing the perfect platform for rolling out these tactics, they’ve never been easier to administer. The unfortunate corollary to that fact, however, is that it’s also never been easier to get your company into a world of trouble (and by trouble, I’m talking about the criminal kind) for what may seem like a perfectly innocuous sweepstake. The hard truth is that due to gambling laws that vary considerably from state to state, the difference between a well-executed promotional effort that sparks consumer interest, and an illegal lottery that puts the Attorney General’s office on notice, can be very small indeed. How small? Read on.
