The Three Ships Media team has written extensively as to the incredible benefits a small business can reap through social media engagement, as well as the caveats they face in obstaining from jumping onboard, online.
What we’ve only scratched the surface of, however, is the level and intensity of activity required to take full advantage of that engagement. More is required than hanging up your shingle on Facebook or opening up the lawn chair on Twitter. The eyeballs will not naturally flow to you. Nor will they continue to flow if you scale back engagement over time. If you’ve grown your sporting goods store’s following on Facebook because you share the greatest inside-the-locker room stories and hustle to get athlete interviews and share highlights, and then suddenly stop that activity, you won’t keep your fans for long. You will have pulled the rug out form under the reputation you developed, the inroads you had made, and the knowledge about your customers you had gained. Lesson: Complacency across social networking platforms is a nail in the coffin of any benefit a small business owner may hope to achieve.
The Brown-Coakley Massachusetts Senate race has made this particularly top of mind. Bear with me.
As Pete Wylie and the Emerging Media Research Council revealed in recent research (cited in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday and the Huffington Post on Wednesday), the Brown campaign (GOP) outpaced and out-hustled the Coakley campaign by a significant margin across social networks. Followings were more robust, and engagement was more active and genuine. The GOP and Brown got social media right. The Democrats and Coakley got it wrong. (NOTE: this is not to say the election hinged on who had more Facebook fans. I’ll be the first to admit – having worked on the Presidential campaign in 2008 – that results are impacted by incredibley nuanced demographics, well beyond the realm of online interaction).
Combined with the impressive online feats of the Bob McDonnell gubernatorial campaign in VA, it appears the GOP has passed the Democratic party in social media prowess. Yet it was the Democrats in the 2008 Presidential campaign who blew th GOP out of the water online, in terms of fundraising, network growth, network engagement, and voter mobilization.
What happened? Democrats became complacent. Social media “wins” became a given, an expectation. Republicans became hungry. They explored. They invested. They beat a complacent Democratic online presence with a vigorous Republican one.
This translates directly to small business. First, get online, and get networking – that’s a given. Second, success is iterative and cumulative. Keep engagement high – across the long-term it will enhance your reputation, and it will grow your business. Third, don’t get complacent. If you do, that rival sporting goods across town may steal your seat at the table.
