Latest Blog Articles

Social Media Is Nothing More Than Social Competition, Right?

Date Published: 23rd February 2010 | Written by: Cory Savage

I guess it is safe to say that Social Media is something that everyone is familiar with since my dad, the man who types with two thumbs, still uses dial up and picks up the phone and calls me (rather than emails me) is on Facebook everyday. 

For those of you who want to see what I consider to be the best analogy of how social media was created, click here for this YouTube clip.

To preface this SLOG entry, I need to tell a brief story about how it came about.  I was on a pitch last week down in Chicago and afterwards met up with my good friend and business partner Jim.  We decided to get together for our usual beer and wings and “everything about the internet” conversation that we usually embark on when we have a chance to sit down and converse.  For those of you who know who I am talking about, skip to the next paragraph.  For those of you who don’t know Jim, he is one of the most versed, creative, educated people I know on everything that has to do with online strategy and execution.  Not to stop short of calling him a genius, he has been playing around with social media before any of us knew what it was.  His analogies of what social media is and how it works are, in my opinion, dead on.  Check out his personal blog at:  http://www.jameshigginsinteractive.com/

As we sat there discussing the most important topics first - BEER, (Jim swears by Chimay - the wiki definition can be found here and I have recently gotten back on the bandwagon of Fat Tire Amber), Jim asks me if I had seen some recent posts of one of our mutual friends on Facebook.  Of course I had and it led to the statement that led to this SLOG entry:  “Social Media is nothing more than social competition”.  As he continued on with statements like “You never see people posting pictures of their obese kids who failed out of kindergarten or pictures of the ‘77 Nova rust bucket they were forced to buy because they just lost their job”, I started thinking about how much sense he was making. 

I started to think about the posts that I saw that day or the tweets I was getting on my Iphone and I quickly realized - he is right.  People that post a lot on Facebook tend to post about a cause they want people to believe they support, photos of their super cute kids, photos of themselves in bathing suits after losing 25 - 200 lbs, but you rarely, if not ever see “bad” photos.  Don’t we all tend to brag about how good we are doing rather than the fact that life can be miserable, tough and stressful?  GUILTY!  We all have friends who have gone through or are going through divorces and we don’t see posts about how that is going, do we?  I would love to see “Well, she got 70% and the kids, guess I should have kept it in my pants.“

How does this relate to your business?  Isn’t there a lot of competition amongst businesses?  One of the first things we do in a brand strategy report is define the landscape and research the competition.  What do consumers want?  They want the “best”, don’t they?  It’s the preface for yet another start-up we are working on called Good Local Eating.  Don’t we all want to eat at “the place” or state that “we have been there”...?  Creating competition amongst local restaurants can be a great community, economic development technique to draw consumers to an area, rather than just a restaurant.  It really doesn’t matter what industry your in, consumers want to feel like they are “buying” the “best”...  It’s about what businesses are using your products in the B2B world and how many consumers are purchasing “your products and services”...in the B2C world. 

What’s your strategy?  How does your organization plan to use social media / social competition to market to new consumers?  Just having a fan page on facebook or the ability to tweet all day long isn’t enough, is it? 

As always, if you want to hear our ideas on how to utilize strategy to get results, contact us.