For more information about Veeam Reporter Free Edition, click here

What: Shameless promotion to drive downloads for the new FREE product for VMware: Veeam Reporter Free Edition and also do some good at the same time via charitable donations

How: Bloggers who participate each get a special download link that tracks how many unique downloads each blogger sends.

Details:

We will be registering bloggers for the contest starting today. Once registered, we will send each blogger a link to download the release candidate of Veeam Reporter Free Edition. The obvious intention here is that bloggers blog about it and talk about the new free tool.

The contest officially begins on the day we release Veeam Reporter Free Edition. At that time we send each blogger their unique link for them to promote. This link will go to Veeam’s site and allow people to register (if not already registered) and download Veeam Reporter Free Edition. Bloggers are allowed to use any means (within reason, see note below) they want to distribute the link including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. We also encourage bloggers to mention to their readers that there’s a charitable donation involved if they should win.

NOTE: bloggers are NOT allowed to employ an army of teenagers to drive downloads, we will be checking the authenticity of downloads and if anything appears abnormal we will disqualify the blogger. This includes but is not limited to: hiring an outside firm to drive downloads, hacking social networking sites or any method that would be considered “not normal” by the officials at Veeam. Veeam does not allow the use of “public” email domains for registrations and downloads.

The blogger who drives the most unique downloads for Veeam Reporter Free Edition between the start date and Monday, August 30^th 11:59 PM EDT will receive the grand prize. We will be announcing the winner at Veeam’s VMworld US party. While this is a party you won’t want to miss if you’re at VMworld, you do NOT need to be present to win.

Veeam will promote all participating blogs on our official landing page for Veeam Reporter Free Edition as well as in an official corporate blog post at http://www.Veeam.com/blog.

Prizes:

This has been the most difficult part to determine. We thought about giving cash or technology but in the end we decided that it would be best to give the prize money to charity. We even conducted an informal poll of the bloggers who expressed early interest in participating and I think one respondent summed it up best:

My vote is for something donated to charity.  It’s in the spirit of the contest – we’re helping Veeam out, Veeam is helping us out (promoting our blogs), so we should help out others who are in need.  I don’t think we all need MacBooks or cash when there are others in the world who need those things a lot more than we do.

We were also inspired by one of the Seattle Tech Field day participants, Kevin Houston, and his Plea to VMworld attendees.

After some careful consideration we determined that if Veeam picked the charity it wouldn’t mean as much to the bloggers, that is why we have decided to go with Charity Choice, this allows each blogger to choose the charity of their choice from a list of over 100 charities. Here’s the breakdown (in the interest of full disclosure and transparency):

• The first 15 bloggers to register and participate will each receive a $25 charity gift card
• The Grand prize will go to the blogger who generates the most downloads: $1,000 charity gift card
• The honorable mention prize (to be determined by Veeam): $250 charity gift card

Of course we encourage each blogger to mention their charity of choice in their posts.

Are you an interested blogger? Click HERE TO REGISTER