How to get publicity for a product naming contest

We're giving away a $100 Amazon Gift Card to whomever gives our product a name. We've tried Twitter (though with a new company we have few followers) and an individual with 700 followers, Facebook both personal and business and some banner advertising. I would have thought dangling the Amazon carrot we would have had a higher rate of response but so far its mostly been friends and family.

We've completely avoided public forums that we use so as not to engage in shameless self promotion but I'm a little perplexed on how to get the word out.

Is the word is out and nobody cares to participate in that kind of interaction?

Maybe these types of contests generate little response?

There are various ways you might want to go about doing this. I have marketed in the past and have found that 700 twitter followers on an account is nothing. I have well over a thousand following me and few of my followers would be likely to respond to a contest or anything like that.

If you have a budget, you may want to consider advertising your contest on a site such as Facebook. You could also give away something more personal feeling than a giftcard. If you can have second and third place winners, why not have a t-shirt with your company's name on it for a prize for them --- so people feel like they have a higher chance of winning.

Additionally, you could run to concurrent contests, one is a random drawing of people who help promote your contest and one is the actual naming contest. As it stands, the fewer entrants there are, the higher chance that any one of those entrants would win, so they've no reason to promote the contest. Give your contest participants a reason to help promote the contest.

There could be a few things happening here:

1. People don't understand what your product is.
2. The prize is not tempting enough
3. You are not getting the word out to enough people
4. You are not getting the word out to people who care.

I'll elaborate!

1. Looking at your website, your product is not that obscure, a bit more description on what the product is and what it does would help people understand the product. You also want to encourage them to be excited about it and connect with it (or else they won't come up with a good name) so a bit of sales copy would not be out of place here (a bit of shameless self-promotion can be a good thing!) The other advantage of this is that is starts to educate your potential users.
2. I think your prize is a little underwhelming. Let's face it. Whatever you name your product is an important business and marketing decision. So if you are asking people to help, you want to reward them appropriately. One of my relatives won an iPad last month for naming a conference, so you may want to change your prize. Another option is to offer a free subscription to your product (if you are going to charge for it). This would mean you would need to target potential users to participate in your competition - but this is what you should be doing - using it as a marketing exercise as well.
3. Only a certain percentage of people will respond to an offer (of any kind) so you need to make sure you are reaching enough people to get the amount of responses you want.
4. Your friends and family are going to participate because they love you and want to support you. Anyone else will be unlikely to participate unless they have a reason to. If you target your competition towards amateur sporting clubs and others in your target market, you are more likely to find a greater care factor for your product and are more likely to participate. Again, you could structure this to be a marketing exercise. If the prize was $1000 worth of sporting equipment for the club, club managers would be likely to promote the competition to their members getting you more entries and more buzz around your product.

If all else fails - don't sweat it, name it yourself. You are sure to come up with a workable name.

1. Do something really creative, crazy (but not stupid), out of the norm
2. get media attention.

Easier said than done.

old post on running a twitter contest - some good info here. What hashtags have you used?