BizJournals Social Madness is Madness
Social Madness is a Throwback to 2007
On June 1st, BizJournal in cooperation with Spark Business from Capital One launched a national competition called Social Madness. The name is perfect because it is madness. The competition is held in 43 local metro markets. The idea is for local businesses to promote their social media accounts to get the most votes, fans and followers during June 1st and June 18th, eventually with the competition culminating in three national winners on September 11th.
5 Reasons Social Madness is MADNESS
To be clear, I think this is madness. There is nothing I like about this contest. The essence of the competition is to score the popularity of local businesses according to votes as well as growth in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn followers. In other words, the local businesses that do the best at asking their customers to vote for them and plug their social media channels to grow their following stand the best chance to win.
Relevancy Doesn’t Matter
If a local plumber you’ve never used asks you to follow them on their social media accounts, will you do it to help them win? There is no relevance if you’ve never used that plumber. If a local CPA firm asks you to follow them, and your company doesn’t use this firm, will you follow them to help them win? If any local business promotes their social media accounts to me, I would not follow them to help them win if they are not relevant to me and my interests. In fact, I will have a negative impression of a business that asks me to vote for them just to help them win votes in the Social Madness Challenge.
Engagement Doesn’t Matter
As far I can determine from their explanation of the rules, their proprietary algorithm doesn’t factor engagement. If it does, it’s not obvious. Here’s the explanation of how they will count votes and determine finalists.
Social Madness Promotes short term thinking
Reports such as the 2012 Social Media Marketing Report from Social Media Examiner illustrate that one third of businesses using social media devote 11 or more hours per week and have been using social media for 3 years or more. Social Madness is a competition that promotes a very short term window to grow your social media presence just to win the contest. This short term mindset sets a bad example. As a consumer, if I follow a business whose primary interest in me on social media is getting my vote to win a competition, how loyal do you think I’ll be toward that business in social media or as a consumer?
2012 Social Media Marketing Report via Social Media Examiner
Social Madness Winners Prove Nothing
Even though BizJournals is segmenting the competition according to size of business in attempt to level the competitive playing field, what will it prove to win the competition? Social media marketing is about building a loyal community and engaging with them about the things that matter to your community. The Social Madness challenge feels like a weight-loss contest with no regard for long term sustained benefits or promotion of strategic planning that can help a business over the long run.
Social Madness Promotes Worse Practices
Social Madness is spread across 43 metro markets. Each local BizJournal publication has been writing about the competition to spread the word. One such article by Roger Hughlett from the Washington Business Journal wrote a story titled 6 Reasons to Enter Social Madness. His list includes:
1) Formalize your social media outreach
Really? Where’s the strategy? This contest is all about winning a popularity contest. That’s not a social media marketing strategy!
2) Impress our readers
If that’s important to a local business, that’s a legitimate reason to enter. But, it sounds more like self promotion to the local Business Journal than a benefit to local businesses.
3) Represent your local city
If your business is local only to your metro area, being one of the finalists in this contest in your local market can be a nice promotional perk.
4) Gain national exposure
If you win the local round between June 1st and June 18th you’ll be written up with national exposure as the challenge progresses to the next round. That’s cool. But, if your business doesn’t have a long term social media marketing strategy, this is a short term win. And, if the winners don’t continue to build and engage a loyal social media following they’ll do more damage to their brand reputation than help it.
5) Reach new audiences
Maybe, but if you get votes from irrelevant audience just for the contest, there is no long term value in that.
6) Bragging rights
Give me a break…Business is not a sport. Consumers are smart. They care little if any about your bragging rights if you win this contest. When I pick up my shirts at the local dry cleaners, the fact they won this contest means nothing if they don’t do the little things to deliver a quality service to win my loyalty offline and online.
We Can Do Better Than This
The reason I state at the top of this post that Social Madness is a throwback to 2007 is because back in the early days of social media marketing, the early adopters in the business community had a “grow your fans and followers” mindset. At the time, it was understandable. It was the early days of social marketing. Those brave businesses just starting to use social media didn’t know any better. It was a “figure it out as we go” time. Over the next couple of years, the brands that enjoyed the most success with social media marketing figured out that building a loyal community with engaging and relevant content, minimal selling and maximum authentic engagement with your community about issues they care about is the secret sauce to successful social media marketing. Frankly, a contest that promotes a 5 year old mindset is very disappointing. At best it’s outdated thinking. At worst, it’s an insult to the intelligence of the consumer.
BizJournals should know better than this. And, the folks at Capital One should also know better. This contest is indeed social madness in every sense. There is however, one thing I like about this competition. The $7,500 prize to the three final winners will be awarded as a donation to the winner’s charity of choice. So, there is a silver lining in this social madness competition. Share your thoughts below…
9 Comments to BizJournals Social Madness is Madness
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Great article Bernie, we are in the contest (reluctantly, honestly never thought we would get picked to be in it), and there is no clear definition as to how the "score" is being measured. Our goal is to have fun checking it out, without bastardizing our accounts. On a funny note, I tweeted TBBJ to get some clarification, and no response, 2 days later :/ if nothing else, this serves to prove to all of us in Social Media that we have job security
I'm thinking we need a few of our companies to ban together and design a contest for businesses outside of social media, and tie it to a charity. I always tell people, "want to see what your influence is? ask all your followers for $1" I think the results would be quite humbling for many.
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Hey Tony, thanks for your commentary. I like your idea. Let's explore it…On a related note, I would've been supportive of the BizJournal's Social Madness event if they had used a different scoring methodology. That's my gripe with it. It's VERY old school. They should've partnered with one of the social media monitoring software companies like Buddy Media or Radian6 and used their software to measure influence, engagement and reach, not growth in fans/followers. If they had taken that approach, I would have been supportive.
Thanks again for your comment.
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Bernie, great post. Of course I was enthused about participating in the contest but found the contest rules extremely confusing. I'm shocked that they are using this contest only to measure followers when even Klout measures engagement. Anyone who knows anything about social media, knows that there are tools to circumvent the process to auto-follow people. In addition, I've spent a lot of effort organically growing followers for my company on all the SM platforms; got my company engaged, spread the word, etc only to find out that it looks like some companies suddenly have thousands and thousands of points overnight. This cannot possibly be a fair contest and I will be extremely disappointed if these companies aren't scrutinized for somehow cheating the process. For now, I will continue what I am doing and see how this all washes out.
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Hi Charise, I certainly won't pass judgement on how companies participate in the contest. That's for BizJournals to manage. My main point as you know is that successful social media is not about how many fans/followers you have, but rather how well you engage and influence your audience for positive brand results. Their approach is very outdated to say the least. That's what disappoints me the most. I thought we were well past that mindset.
Thanks for your comment.
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It's all about quality and not quantity anyhow so I agree with your point made in your post. Thanks Bernie
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I agree, that would have been good, but even that can be gamed. It would have been good if they hired someone who knew better to police the competition. I would go for charity over "measuring" after all I've seen people score high on influence, but when they ask people to act, nothing. The could have raised money for so many worthy charities.
defiantly due for a lunch:)
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The article makes some good points. The goal of increasing reach for the sole purpose of increasing reach is not sound strategy. Of course engagement should be measured, but that is more difficult for varying industries. My company is also in the competition in the Albany market, and we have tied it to another campaign we're running to support a local charity. Noble Gas Solutions is donating $1 to the Ronald McDonald House Charity of the Capital Region for every new Facebook "like" and Twitter "follower" . In this way we can play the game and help the community at the same time. The goal is to raise $2 million for a new house, so the challenge will play a small part in actual capital donation, but can effectively raise awareness of this cause.
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Hey Ryan, I LOVE what you guys are doing by tying it to a local charitable cause. That is absolutely awesome! I hope you help them raise awareness through your participation in Social Madness. I tip my cap to you.
Thanks for sharing your story.
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This is the perfect blog for anybody who really wants to find out about this topic. You realize a whole lot its almost hard to argue with you (not that I really will need to…HaHa). You certainly put a new spin on a topic which has been discussed for many years. Great stuff, just wonderful!
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