The Maddening Lessons of Social Madness

[Aaron Deacon]

OneLouder Apps has a score of 125,675 and Cerner has a score of 1,450. The goal is to get the bigger numbers. The competition is called Social Madness. I’m not really sure what it’s about.

I started this post intending to write about the disparity in vote volume between the large and small businesses and what that says about social media and business size. As I poked around, confused about the contest, its content, its methodology, and it supporting brand, I found someone who already expressed my growing frustration. (I've intentionally left out the links so you can share my pain. Hint: For me, Bing was much more successful than Google.)

Social Madness Is a Throwback to 2007

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.

Bernie Borges goes on to list five and describe five key problems with this contest.

• Relevancy doesn't matter
• Engagement doesn't matter
• Social Madness promotes short-term thinking
• Social Madness winners prove nothing
• Social Madness promotes worst practices

But most of this criticism is about how it encourages the contestants to use social.

What struck me the most was how poorly the sponsor uses social. Even after spending a small chunk of my morning trying to figure it out, I still have little idea what the Spark Business brand is about, which I assume Capital One intends to be something more than another business credit card.

What is Spark Business? What is their overall brand? As a small business owner, what can they do for me? How do I find "Spark Business" online? The SEO strategy, the digital strategy, the partner strategy, and the brand strategy all are wanting.

For the sponsor, that is. For local participating businesses, more power to them. Here's where you can vote.

I'd love to hear from our members who are participating in the contest--has it had an impact?

One Louder--what did you do to get your score so high, and how do you think it will help?