Blingo Buzz: May 2005

We get a lot of emails from people wondering when they're going to get their prize (even though we have this information in the Rules, the winning email, and the Contact Us page). Here's the way it works:

1. Officially, we have to send you your prize within 6 weeks after the end of the month you won the prize in. That means, for example, that if you win on May 1st, we have until the second week of July to mail you your prize.
2. In practice we send prizes much faster. For example, we've already mailed Movie Tickets to people who won in the 1st two weeks of May and we just mailed most of this month's premium prizes (e.g., Gift Certificates).
3. There is an exception. We have to make sure each win complies with our Rules, so if our system flags your win for review it takes longer to get your prize.

We are working on sending prizes even faster. I'd like to see everybody get their prize in 1 to 2 weeks, if not sooner. That would easily beat any other giveaway I know of (most are at least a couple months) and would be almost as fast as the free shipping option on Amazon! I think that's pretty darn good for free stuff. I hope you do too.

Well, not really, but I love this description of Blingo. I couldn't have said it better myself. Thanks Mai.

If you'd like to put a link to your Blingo Friends group on your blog or website we now have some nice little Blingo Buttons for you. Here are a couple samples:

Running an Internet company is sort of strange because you never see your customers and they never see you. Sometimes I wonder "Who are all these Blingo users?" And I assume many of you, the Blingo users, wonder things like "Who are these Blingo guys? Are they real?" Well, if you've ever pondered these questions you might enjoy seeing me talk about Blingo on TV (and you'll just have to trust me that Rob, the other Blingo founder, is in fact a real person).

Click here to watch the piece.

We're starting to notice a lot of people blogging about Blingo (thanks bloggers!). Check out this blog post from one of our winners - it has a picture of an actual Blingo Movie Ticket. Or, do a Blingo search on Technorati, a blog search engine.

For awhile now I've been wondering what our winners (almost 4,000 of them) would look like on a map. So I decided to make one and I think it's pretty cool. It never ceases to amaze me how word spreads through the Internet -- Blingo winners are truly everywhere (a winner in every state).

Here it is - just click on it for a larger version. (A quick note to you detail-oriented folks who will try and count the pins: the pins represent zip codes vs. individual winners, so pins often have more than one winner.)

In the course of sending out thousands of prizes (we've sent out over 4,000 so far) you're bound to get a few returned. So far though we've only had three letters returned (seems pretty good). I have these three prize letters sitting on my desk, so if you're one of the following people please contact us and I'll send you your prize.

P Smithwick of Mesa, AZ
J Bosco of Pittsburgh
L Rayra of Shelby, MI