Tonight at 11:59 PM, the first leg of nationals for The Business Journal’s Social Madness Competition will come to a close. So too will The Social Firm’s run in the tournament. Last week, we shared our Social Madness experiences and thoughts as we headed into the national rounds. We were aiming for the gold and hoping to come out as the small business winners and taking home 10K for a charity of our choice. Unfortunately, we were surprised by some of the HUGE numbers our competitors (other local winners from cities all around the US) started off with in nationals. Though we refused to throw in the towel, we were unable to overtake the 10,000 vote lead of 100% Pure, the California Company with whom we were matched head-to-head. As we’re drawing near to the end of our Social Madness road, we are left with some suggestions for future years and many positive takeaways.
This was the first social media contest in which The Social Firm has ever competed and we are so glad to have participated! Overall, the experience was invaluable and highly enjoyable. Our peak in the whole process occurred when we were crowned the local small business champions for Columbus, Ohio. We love our city and are very proud to be your winners!
We also experienced a roadblock in the competition, which occurred 2 days into this final round. We began having some difficulty checking the Social Madness website to monitor the competition and share the link with our fans and followers. For some reason, the site was registering as malware and being blocked by antivirus software. This glitch was a bit of an inconvenience as our supporters reported experiencing the same issue and could not get through to share their votes with us. However, after alerting The Business Journals of the problem, they took the site down and had the issue fixed up rather quickly! There were also a couple stretches during the local rounds when there seemed to be an issue with keep tracking of the numbers, which made each firm’s standing in the competition unclear. We weren’t sure if we were still the #1 seed towards the end of the local rounds due to chaos with the vote tallying. All in all, The Business Journals took care of these issues promptly, for which we are grateful. Hopefully these kinks will be worked out before the start of next year’s competition!
Lastly, we’d like to suggest that The Business Journals review certain specifics of the Social Madness competition, such as the way in which they determine a company’s “small”, “medium”, or ‘large” standing. In an internet competition, we think the size of a company’s network should be taken into consideration and given some bearing alongside the number of employees they may physically have in a certain location. Additionally, in future years, we’d love to see results zeroed out for all companies as they head into the national rounds. As competitors in nationals are determined by the winner of each local city’s rounds, we feel it makes sense to clear out previous results (such as likes, shares, and other points) and start anew, as local markets have much room for variation. What may be an incredibly impressive figure for the winner of a smaller city may not even be a drop in the bucket in the local rounds of a larger city. Thus, carrying over each winner’s results at the outset of national rounds is, in a sense, pairing apples up against oranges.
Our few minor complaints being aired, we’d like to thank The Business Journals and Capital One for putting on the Social Madness competition and inviting us to participate. We had a lot of fun and our only regret is that we were unable to bring home the 10K prize for a local charity. Other than that, we certainly consider ourselves winners! Social media and marketing are ever-changing fields and one can never stop learning and experimenting. Thus, through our social madness efforts and following the efforts of our competitors, we gained tons of valuable insight and inspiration for our future social media and marketing undertakings. As we mentioned in our last Social Madness post, far and away our best takeaway from the competition is the connections. Throughout the course of Social Madness, we gained 1,000s of fans and followers. It’s great to be able to share our thoughts and information with a large network, but what really matters is each and every individual. Without your thoughts, comments, suggestions, insights, and support, we would have nothing. Thank goodness we just so happen to have the best bunch of supporters in the whole damn land! This year’s competition may be ending for us, but as long as we continue sharing, supporting, socializing, and finding ways to work together, we’ll all have won at least a little something. Thanks again, everyone- we’re already looking forward to next year’s #SocialMadness!
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