You just won an iPad2! An iPhone4! Only It's a Dream.

You know the feeling of talking to yourself and saying, "Why not?"

It's like a jolt of fresh lightning electricity that hit your irrational mind out to blurt out and imagine things differently. You convince yourself to pull the plug and try it too. In that alter universe, you picture yourself entering this and that room and scenario and you are the happiest human being.

Friends are pouring out: "How come?," "What was it that you just did?," and "How lucky of you to get that!"  Instantly you are the star, now the lights are showering you the beam.

Only, you are excited not because of something like you and your friends will embark on a Bohol adventure or you will write your next novel to beat Haruki Murakami for that coveted Nobel Prize.

Because your excitement is for winning a contest! An iPhone4s! An iPad2! A Samsung Galaxy! The Universe! Ha! So it brought your hands busy searching and searching for contest and promos to join.

This actually happened to me after learning that my friend just won a brand new iPhone4 from an online contest and promo. So I was like, let's find more contests out there and wait for destiny to unfold! (There must be a psychological explanation for this, I just thought.)

But another part of me was saying that just because out of the hundreds or thousands of entries that my friend was picked the winner of that highly-coveted gizmo, the same luck will transfer to me. So I thought.

But it was still motivating, at most encouraging, to try.  And I was already even imagining that my prize will be shipped in front of our house's door soon. Crazy!

After one, two, three hours of searching and looking for contests on Facebook, Twitter or friends' walls, it finally dawned on me that this experience is worth pondering.

And more lessons rained on me that I realized it may be best to blog about them here.

• Think of online promos and contests as marketing and advertising campaigns. This can either be positive or negative. Contests and promos are there for a reason, and the most basic is spelled B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S. The more that emails are collected or gathered from interested participants to raffles, contests and promos, the more that promoting companies earn from website traffic and other publicity benefits. Emails are expensive, especially if they are legitimate or if emails are owned by a human being.  So if one or two participants will find a "You won a new iPad2!" in his or her email, the rest of us will be in a sorry, try again next time mode. But don't blame yourself for giving away your email, just make sure that you join legitimate contests and not spamming sites' fake contests.

• Second, while it is fun and enjoyable clicking likes and sharing through Twitter and Facebook the pages of the promoting companies' contest pages, one should be ready to face the consequences. One is your friends' reactions for flooding their Facebook walls with your likes of pages and contests shared. Don't be surprised if you find your friends sneer or laugh at you for thinking that you are desperately seeking an iPad or iPhone. But if you know your reasons fully well on why you are joining (e.g., you want to save the world by developing the next app through an iPad2 that you are looking at winning), just don't mind or ignore the naysayers. But again, be ready to face the consequences, but be sure to keep your promise (of saving the world when you win!).

But of course, there are still more to realize from all this. That contest of whatever kind has the tendency to bring the very best and worst of human behavior. So it is  really important to bring along the most handy moral - being contented. This being happy also means that, even if the winning person is not you but your close friends, you are glad it is them who won.

Again, just enjoy and don't expect too much.

P.S.

I just entered in this contest, while there is still time, you might want to join CNN Go's Win an Iphone4s contest

May the best answer wins!