My job: Freebie finder spreads the word

Matthew Harman, community manager of a giveaway website, trawls the internet for fresh promotions. Photo / Supplied

Name: Matthew Harman
Occupation: Community manager for Gimme.co.nz
Employer: Digital Advance Ltd
Age: 33
Working hours: 9am to 5pm
Pay scale: "I'm on revenue share, but this sort of role would typically be in the $45-70k range."
Qualifications: B Bus

Describe your job.

I am community manager for Gimme.co.nz. That involves moderating competition and giveaway listings, tirelessly pursuing new sources of free stuff to post to the website and managing the workload of our content administrators.

And what is Gimme?

It is New Zealand's ultimate guide to free stuff. Competitions and giveaways are a fantastic way for companies to increase product awareness and sampling. Gimme makes it easy to run promotions and generate tonnes of interest.

It is part of the Digital Advance group, which runs a portfolio of niche content and community websites. Head Office is in Wellington, which is supported by a team of contributing writers and content administrators spread around the country. Promotions posted on Gimme reach a monthly audience of more than 150,000 people (this includes syndication).

What is your work background?

My background is in product development, marketing and sales. I've been involved in building and growing websites since 1999.

Why a website for competitions? And is Gimme paid by companies to list competitions?

Running promotions to attract customers and generate brand excitement is definitely a growing trend. Just in the 12 months Gimme has been operating, we have seen the average number of promotions listed weekly increase by more than 25 per cent.

We make our money from selling featured competition listings, running promotions on behalf of brands, promotion analytics and from display advertising on the website.

Why is the job important?

Everyone loves free stuff and when we get to tell someone they've won a prize it makes their day/week/year. That doesn't necessarily make it important, but it does make it fun and worthwhile.

For companies, Gimme provides a neat way to reach out to new customers and that's hugely important and valuable for them.

What are the job's main challenges?

So much free stuff, so little time (to get it on to the website).

We publish probably about 300 new promotions every week. There's a lot of content that comes in from a lot of different sources and there is a substantial job in sorting the content.

The same competition might be notified by multiple members of the community and by our content administrators and email alerts. It takes a lot of time to work out what we have already got and what is new; the technology takes you only so far, so it's a bit of a manual process.

What is your daily routine?

We work with some content administrators that are outside New Zealand as well to give more 24-hour coverage.

First thing of the day is reviewing what has come into the site overnight, looking for issues with that content and seeing what has happened with the community, for example, reviewing comments made, making sure they are in keeping with the community guidelines on the site and also answering questions that come out of the comments.

And then we have a bit of a scout around to see what else we can find, what is fresh. That involves looking through websites and going through RSS (really simple syndication) feeds of new contents.

And we load those up and it's just a matter of "rinse and repeat" from there!

What is the most unusual thing you have been asked to do for this job?

Occasionally we find that an organisation running a promotion doesn't actually want to tell anyone about it, so we get the odd request to remove listings. It can take a bit of explaining that things posted on the internet are there for all to see.

Are you allowed to enter the competitions?

If Gimme is managing the promotion, then no. If the listing on the website is an ad for a promotion being run by a third party then yes, absolutely.

How much time is spent at computer each day?

Around five hours a day, with the site being updated throughout the day as new listings become available.

The best part of your job?

Telling people they've won a prize. The more popular prizes tend to be cars or money. And anything that is a giveaway, rather than a prize, is always popular.

Last year, Mainland ran a promotion for its new Buttersoft product, a giveaway of 10,000 tubs. It went very fast. Freebies are incredibly popular, it's amazing how many people jump on that sort of thing.

And the worst part?

Hard to say. It's all good fun.

What are your strengths?

Doing 10 things at once and wearing a dozen different hats.

What do you want to be doing in five years?

Managing my own internet business from a yacht in the Seychelles.

Advice to those interested in a similar role?

The great thing about the internet is that it's still fairly new and developing. You don't have to have done a particularly degree or have a certain number of years of experience - just jump in and make it up as you go along.