Some of you may have heard about the Business Journal‘s Social Madness contest happening nationwide right now. The concept is actually really compelling – create a contest that begins at the local level and then carries to a national stage as time progresses centering around the social savvy of a company. It’s of course a great way to raise the visibility of the participants, and also a way for the publications to build deeper relationships with the contestants.
Here’s the challenge: the participants that are “winning” at this juncture are for the most part, quite ANTI-social or UN-social as we would call it.
In this immature world of social media there are continuous conversations about the ways to rank social zealots and experts. There’s Klout and other tools out there that have various algorithms that attempt to give a score that indicates just how influential a person is in social media. As with any technology in a crazy fast moving world, they are flawed and confusing, and working with data that historically (in the traditional world of “influence” scoring) has been a good indicator of just how important someone is in the space. What we have found in the last 10 years of research and working hands on with brands and real data is that the current algorithms really focus on numbers of followers, not actual influence or social prowess.
The Business Journal doesn’t reveal it’s complete algorithm for judging; only sharing that it’s partially a combination of votes, the number of new followers on Twitter, and the number of new fans on Facebook at each phase of the contest. While this is definitely a good baseline for any contest, it doesn’t tell the complete story – and continues the ongoing challenge of creating a true methodology for judging social influence.
During our long careers of managing social media for brands big and small well before the moniker “social media” even existed, we have been tasked with tracking impact and influence of brands, people, and products. What we have found to be a better judge of influence (especially when tracking sales data from online and tracked offline purchases from inception point) is their social interactions; not their numbers of followers (totally.)
Why is this? Let’s go back to the same adage we use to talk about social media engagement over and over: the party scenario.
- You can have a million followers, but if you aren’t following a decent number of them back – you are NOT social. It’s like being the most popular person at the party, but only allowing a small number of people to truly interact with you. Eventually, they all tune out because you are preaching to them rather than speaking with them.
- You can have a million followers, but if you aren’t saying anything interesting then no one is truly listening – therefore you are not influential. At the party, you can have a sea of people around the hottest girl in the room, but if she’s spewing “buy now” messages over and over, even the most desperate guy is going to walk away (but keep her on his wish list.)
- You can have a million followers – especially if you buy them. A great party, with good food and high profile entertainment always attracts a big crowd, but do they remember who the party was for?
- You can have a million followers, but if you never engage in two-way conversation then you are, by the very definition, NOT social. You can’t be the host of the party that refuses to speak to anyone.
We’ve seen the challenges of ranking social influence, and creating an algorithm that speaks to tracking the above concepts is well beyond our expertise (and clearly everyone else’s at this point.) But given the limited number of contestants (when comparing it to the whole social media population) we would have thought that some of the “social” part of social media would be part of this contest. Clearly it is not. Let’s take some examples in the Phoenix market thus far to prove our point.
- The number one ranked contestant winning by a landslide, AZ Commerce, has 3,399 people following them on Twitter, and they are only following back 268. So they are following 1 person for every 13 that follow them. They post on average one time a day, and have yet to interact with anyone. They do have a ton of Facebook fans (over 14,000) which we hope were gained organically (and not through the easy $99 purchase most brands make.) So maybe FB has a higher rank in the algorithm than other items in social media. (There’s also that question of the rules – and whether or not this player is a government agency or partner which is prohibited.)
- Fox Sports, currently ranked number 8, doesn’t seem to have a LinkedIN page at all. They have a 1:24 ratio of followers to follow back. I guess they are REALLY picky about who they let listen to them on Twitter.
- The number 10 slot is ranked with someone who has 56 followers on Twitter.
- In the top 10 slots during the first week of the contest, 7 of the contestants hadn’t posted anything that wasn’t a self-serving sales message on their Facebook page.
- If you look at just the interaction of Phoenix Raceway and DailyOffertunity with their followers, they are the most social in the top 10 by far, and should in our opinion be ranked higher than they are currently. (Though we’d like to see their ratio increase a bit.)
- Kleinman Law Firm has long been one of the most social brands we have ever seen. Brent posts a wonderful mix of informative career related fodder and social fodder. They answer people immediately, and they talk about things real people talk about. We would argue that they are the MOST social in the contest, but are sadly ranked quite low.
At any rate, this isn’t really about the contest. And though it may sound like we are sore losers, it really brought to question the ongoing challenge of ranking social media engagement. Our clients constantly want to reach the “influencers” and have ad agencies that use the old audience standby as the way to rank them. What we have seen though is that someone with fewer followers, but a higher interaction, can actually influence a purchase ten times more than the reverse. This has been proven in case studies we’ve generated for our highest profile retail client as well as our start-up small niche baby product client. So, how do we measure that? How do we give a “point” to actual social interaction? How do we assign a ranking to that person that everyone argues they hate because they post what they had for lunch, but in all reality, truly drives a captive audience that purchases, not just fans a brand? What are your suggestions?
And if you want to stroke our egos, you can vote for us in the social madness competition here: Social Madness Contest.