Good Job!! While this is great, dont forget that you are the ones to be entirely balmed for this (TGDC). When you encouraged this behavior to gain popularity in beginnig, you should have thought about it.

There is something called Peer pressure…I can guarantee that none of the applicants would have 100% real votes.

So advice, that you either:

1. Find a way to differentiate good votes from bad or,

2. Change dates, start fresh and let there be a healthy competition this time.

No point, shortlisting a guy, gain mileage on his expanse and at the time of price distribution pull logs and save cool cash and walk away.

Think again Experience Commerce, even you are not being fair alng with HM.

I am really happy to see that TGDC is working towards the Quality of votes.

Thanks Team GDC… Looking forward for July 17th now!!!

Respect the privacy of rediff’s corporate resources / personnel. Posting it here, for the reason you have received from a erring applicant isn’t professional. hope you see the sanity here than verifying the identity and be reasonable to carry the brand name of Mitshubushi…

I would like to clarify that while we still encourage people to get votes, peer pressure is not a good enough reason to get false votes. Team GDC has clarified from the day this blog was launched and over countless support emails , that while count of votes is one very important factor - it is not the only factor that will help determine who makes it to the shortlist.

False votes do not give GDC any popularity, because of the simple reason they don’t belong to anyone. 

Many people have complained that people are getting votes en-masse from their colleagues and all their family members. We don’t see anything illegal with that - at least real people are voting. It is ok (with us) if you call your parents and all your cousins back home to vote for you. Heck if someone is patiently laboring to create false gmail IDs and voting him(her)self - not much we can do either except make sure that votes are just one of the selection criteria. 

We respect privacy and the only reason we published the second list is because we are reasonable certain that a majority of these accounts do not exist. We may be wrong. Prior to publishing we checked and found out that most corporate email accounts in Rediff corporation end with rediff.co.in, or people use the secure web-mail service rediffmail.com. Also he timing sequence and nature of these email IDs makes them very suspect. We will dig deeper.

Several people have been urging us to be vocal in condemning the behavior observed with certain applicants, and thus this post.

Votes were the Main Criteria and the Creativity took a back seat ! was the Initial Impression TGDC created in everyone’s mind.
Facts -
1. No Applicant will have 100% genuine votes !
2. The Applicant can No way Control or Regulate the Voting
  Pattern of any Foe of Friend !
3. The Applicant can only Edit the Testimonials !
4. Any one can put Fake Votes intentionally for Anyone
  whom they want to get disqualified !

This Contest has taken a wrong route.
Let TGDC change the rules of the Game and avoid the Wrong
Turn.

Just for benefit of all, following the comments trail on this post, would like to repeat that no one has been disqualified yet - and will not be, just because their voting pattern is suspect. It may certainly impact their overall scores, if we have hard evidence.

If a 3rd party puts ‘fake votes’ intentionally on someone’s application page, all the candidate has to do is send an email to TGDC support - and these votes shall be deleted. The onus is on the applicant to monitor his voting list and testimonials list.

Ref the comment that creativity has taken a backseat, my response to Dr. Anand is that it is certainly not evident when we view the Flickr stream on your application here > http://tinyurl.com/msjsjt

All the best Dr. Anand. Thank you for expressing your concerns and thank you for your support.

Hey Sandip,
kudos to your team for your constant efforts to keep this contest fair… We are hopeful that the right candidates get the necessary weightage to go forward in the challenge.

however, it is not right to say ‘’ no applicant has 100%genuine votes’’ like some members are claiming here. We are happy to confidently say that we know (almost)  everyone who has voted for us and thanked them personally in respective orkut communities.

Anyway we trust you completely to take this contest to the next level and choose the right winner.

Truth Triumphs…

Hai Sandeep.
I strongly agree with Dr KS Anand. There was so much confusion created by ur Team initially. Now i see now an then many changes.
Not we, everyone did their homework well.
Just think are u guys are playing fair?

Hi TDGC team,

Firslty, let me say - great work in making the system transparent to all of us and it is great to know that you are making efforts to make sure that this remains a fair competition.

I see many replies saying that “the competition has taken the wrong route”. To be honest, this is what my initial reaction was when I first saw a few profiles climbing 600 odd votes in no time. My immediate reaction was “its time to end our vote campaign”. However, I have been proved wrong ever since. Every post that I have seen from TGDC team thereafter seems to suggest that it will eventually be a fair contest and absolute number of votes wouldn’t be the only criteria used.

BTW, this contest has been a marketing gem! Great idea.

Hai,
    (refer to prevoius one) I am not blaming u or complaining! But not able to understand all of sudden how u people are getting new top profiles?
And one more think on Home page u have given option by date( acc to date whn we register) but trust me the day when we saw add in papaer, very next moment we register.I want to know wht that date option means an how it works. would like to advise you along with the date do put timings That will solve all problem.
No heart feeling.
  with regards Geeta.

Geeta,

We have added a ‘new tab’ that you are seeing now. which lists latest applications, first. So as new applications enter the system this week, and get featured, they are available for all to see. Hopefully this adds some freshness.

The “view by popularity” tab is unchanged but moved to the adjacent tab. Hope this helps.

Thanks for your assurance. Looked at your site you have going there - wonderful effort.

Hi Sandip.
Thank you so much for ur prompt and fair reasponce.I am really relieved to know the best effort from your side to make whole process transparent .

The list by date was little confusing. As per our perception we were 8th to register for the contest. Kinldy clarify,

as we r little anxious to see all new faces appearing in the contest. Infact, our computer has not been shut down from 22nd June, as it is set c the latest score of votes n ur blog.

With Regards,
Geeta

Hello everyone,

I have been in the area of Social Media for past three years now, as an Online Branding Strategist, and have seen such cases. Apart from figuring emails and time, I am sure you would also be tracking IP addresses.

I was surprised to see people with almost no online activity gaining more than a thousand votes, in matter of days. In any case, for certain, one cannot have that big a offline social circle, this contactable.

I hope QUALITY will be taken in to account more than QUANTITY, keeping in mind there are people who are still joining the Great Driving Challenge.

HI TGDC

The Travel route given by each applicant has a different starting and ending point. i read in the terms and condition that 9 couples would be called to mumbai for the final round and out of which 3 couples would be selected for the final round. Now pls clarify that the 3 couples will again travel to the destination they have initially planned and then start the 10 days adventurous trip and come back to mumbai ??? or every body should start and end at Mumbai..????

Hi

Would also appreciate if you could add some kind of counter tab, where we could know as to how many participants have enrolled, with whom we would be competing against

Nine couples will be called to Mumbai for a selection procedure (we will write about that later). From this 2-day event, 3 finalists will emerge. They will all start and end their trip in Mumbai. They are free to present their own travel plans, as per the T&C spelt out, though the jury may suggest changes, in consultation with the participants.

There is only ONE drive-off.

Its not really impossible to gather votes in a matter of a few days. Roohshad and me decided to register on the 11th of July. We put up our page minutes before 12th midnight and took it up as a challenge to gather as many votes as we can.

Yes! we definitely do have a HUGE social network to our advantage! And we are happy and proud to say that between us, our family, friends… their friends and family, between our joint 2800 friends on facebook, and the friends of these 2800, hundreds of SMS’  and emails…we have already clocked in 700 votes in 68 hours!

We are aware that this is not the only criteria. But then again, this is exactly what gives Mitsubishi the publicity it needs, our friends.. the excitement of this challenge, and us..the “edge” we need to get one step ahead of the others

Sandip,

Now that you are clarifying question on voting and on the next few stages… i have some for you…

Why is voting important?

Should not testimonials and the content of testimonials be more important (than voting)?

There seems to be a lower limit of 3000kms for the 10 day trip… is there an upper limit of the number of Kms?

Is the “travel plan” that we commit now final… or can we evolve from it?

Why is it that some of us have URLs like application/12345657788 and others have application/name?

In spite of all these clarifications…. U still maintain that popularity is ‘just’ one of the criteria.
Lets consider an example… lets say there are 5 criteria with 20% points for each. If two couples get full points in the other4 criteria, they still stand to b judged by the remaining one criteria - popularity. So if one of them get more votes in this by hook or by crook, they win right?
So how does all this talk of ‘popularity is only one of the criteria for winning’ matter?? It still remains THE criteria for winning, and that too, by hook or by crook it looks like… as u haven’t clearly mentioned about throwing out the ‘crook’ ones!!

I am happy to see a lot of discussion on this topic but there are certain fundamental assumptions that are being made that are flawed, for example let us sat that there is a guy working for a big corporate and let us say that he had a huge team of of 200 - 300 folks and he send out a request to the team to vote for himself, and lets say that 10- 20 of his team members vote immediately the log created will have the following trail a block of 10 - 20 different e mail id’s that are valid (as they would be confirming the votes too) and all the e mails tracable to the same I P as the ip layer visible will be that of the corporate,,,

And lets say the contestant send these kind of request to different units / departments within his organization then he will be branded as a “BAD APPLE” as per the TGDC team’s analysis.

This poor participant will further get victimized in case the second part of the logic that he has no activity on his social networking site so he will not have access to such a mass group of contacts outside :( .

Poor Participant guy - Hope TGDC team is a bit more rational and level headed and comes with a fair an just process to evaluate and shortlist the top 100 folks instead of taking a shortsighted view of things.

I would suggest a certain amount of marks for each criteria like

Number of Votes -30 %
Pitch - 20 %
Drving Experience 20%
Partner’s Driving Experience 20%
etc,etc…..

What say folks??

Best Regards

Raju and Shilpa

Of course there is some food for thought

1. Discussion is good. To be honest, people getting more votes by hook or crook are the ones “gaining” on at least one criteria as far as we have understood the comments from EC/TGDC.

2. The entire idea is about gaining popularity and get known. Contestants creating the biggest discussion wave causes more attention and thus further popularity of Mitsubishi/TGDC. Is TGDC yet an equal opportunity player? :o)

3. All criteria look subjective. After all this is all about getting popular. At the end jury has to see how significant are the 99% participants who trusted TGDC team, or, the 1% who created controversies or sparked discussions and brought more attention to TGDC.

An objective list of actions or criteria can resolve the war of the “good” and the “bad” would be much appreciated from TGDC.

Of course, it might not be the focus of TGDC at all.
Awareness, popularity, marketing are!

It is up to TGDC to understand that every participant has played a role in the popularity and awareness, not just “highly voted” ones.

I hope participating in forum discussions is not one of the hidden criteria

I just wanted to mention that the contest talked about getting votes without laying any ground-rules. Assuming EVERYONE would play fair is probably too much to ask, no insinuation intended.

Hi
  Dont understand how we can decide if it is a fair game? Its just coz one is getting num of votes an other not?
A good vote bank contain many factor.
When applicant register?
Its depend on their network !
How much time they spend to get vote!
  For example all new applicants wont be having so much votes but that doesn’t mean that others are not fair.People who registered first certainly they will have more votes.
  And Sandip had already told that criteria is
Votes An Testimonials
Pitch
Photography
Driving
Blog
I am srry if i forgot something but these i remeber.
so why to get worry? Let jury to decide ! I hope it clear all confusion regarding votes importence!
and last but not the least all were workingg under the guidelines set by TGDC.
  with regards
  Geeta.

First of all i would like to thank you TGDC for appreciating our application on the blog titled forever young. I went through the popularity list today and it was unbelievable. I would not like to comment on ethics issue, but i hope that the jury will take a rational call on this and put weightage on parameters such as, creativity in presentation, the genuineness and passion and of course what will be the socially significant contribution as participants in this mega event…as brand ambassadors
chandrani