Today, digitalbeat had a pretty interesting article on Spigit,  a white label service provider which allows companies to run social-contests on their sites. There’s lots of competition out there, but what I found interesting about the article was the fact that they broke down the different kinds of contests that are out there, which I hadn’t seen before. I pulled an excerpt below.

* The “You Vote, We Decide” model invites participants to vote on an idea and provide feedback, but the ultimate decision rests with the company.

* The “Crowd Decision” gives all authority to the crowd. The highest vote getter wins. This model is not likely to be used for strategic decisions, Carpenter said, “but this concept is great for engaging your audience … and for letting them communicate to you what they think is the meaning of your brand.”

* The “Expert Decision” model is reserved for highly specialized or technical decisions made by a smaller crowd of experts. Netflix, not a Spigit customer, used this model to conduct a contest that awarded $1 million to the first person to improve the accuracy of its movie recommendations for subscribers by at least 10 percent.

* The fourth model is the “We Vote, You Decide” model, which Carpenter also affectionately calls the “American Idol” model. In this case, the company solicits all sorts of suggestions, but narrows down the choices over time, just as Simon, Randy, Ellen and Kara do on the reality TV show, then turn the process over to the fans to pick the winner via phone call or text message. “The experts make a selection and kind of filter out the worst of the crop … guiding the process toward a certain area,” said Carpenter

Worth a read.