I’ve been gone for a few weeks working on a great, big content project. It’s going to be pretty exciting and I’ll tell you all about it in the coming weeks.

Today, I wanted to tell you about a contest sponsored by IZEA and AT&T. You might be saying, “Steve, that’s a lot of sponsors,” and you know what, I would agree.

AT&T is really pushing the Social Media angle on this campaign, I’ve received not one but two emails about it in the last week from people I respect and have professional relationships with. Fortunately enough, both emails involved asking me to tell you how you can win interesting stuff for your businesses.

What is this all about?

AT&T is giving away a “tech makeover” to one small business.

Before you ask, a “tech makeover” means you get a metric ton of AT&T enterprise-grade services, a couple of Samsung Epix smartphones, Windows Small Business Server 2008 and one-on-one small business consultation from this guy.

To enter, you need to create a 2 minute video on why your business deserves a makeover.

Let’s look at that point for a second, I have a love-hate relationship with contests will this, while I love the idea that AT&T is opening up its coffers and giving away a bunch of useful equipment, the “tell us why your business is wunderbar” angle always falls a little flat for me. I’m a story guy at my core and there are really only a tiny handful of interesting stories that a question like this can generate. Most will orbit around one of three concepts:

My business does cool things.
My business doesn’t have any money.
My business does cool things and doesn’t have any money.

That being the case, maybe you guys can do a little bit better. Honestly, if you can stray away from falling into those three traps you increase your chances of winning by orders of magnitude. I’ve left an example in this post.

What does AT&T get out of this deal? To learn that, we turn our attention to their new AT&T Small Business InSite, which is — as you may have guessed — an information portal for small businesses that also serves as a microsite to encourage you to buy lots and lots of AT&T products and services. If you cut through the usual, “we are trying to sell you things” framing, you will find that they have quite a few excellent posts on small business, especially as it relates to mobility, telephony and VOIP. They have a lot of other widgets and dodads that are somewhat confusing, like their “Helping People Help Others,” section which I think is about charitable outreach but currently only has one video making it difficult to get a feeling for the context.

There it is. I wish you all luck. If you happen to win, be sure to leave something about it in the comments.

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