And the winner of the Social Media Super Bowl “#Superbowl” is . . . Volkswagon or Doritos, depending on when you ask, who you ask, and when you consider the game being “officially” over. In the social media world, the game is never over.
I think the real winner is Social Media in general, and Twitter specifically. (Facebook is a close second). A thought to consider. Doing a simple search of “#Superbowl” on Google, shows about 320 million results in the last 24 hours (as of 2/7/2011, 2:00pm EST). But first, just what does it mean when you add the “#” mark in front of a word. In short, it is a way to track conversation on Twitter. Tech for Luddites did a great article on that here, so I won’t go into details now. But to put it into perspective, that means it was mentioned 320 million times either directly on Twitter or referenced about Twitter. That does NOT count the number of other posts about the Super Bowl on any of the other social media platforms.
There is also a nice site that has a running measurement of “#Brandbowl”. Brandbowl2011.com is measuring online activity of the various brands as you read this. A unique aspect of this measuring system is that they “use a narrow five-hour sliding window during which time we measure the Twitter stream.” So now, we are looking at the staying power of the various brands as people discuss the various commercials the day after the Super Bowl.
So what does all this mean to small businesses? Plenty. If the big businesses are willing to spend a LOT of money to get on the social media band wagon (The NFL, Visa and Twitter ran a huge partnership promotion during the Super Bowl) then you need to spend a little money and time finding the right way to get your business involved in the social media world. The nice thing, is that it does NOT take a lot of money to get started. That being said, you need to approach social media with a plan. It is basically another avenue of advertising for you business so you need to treat it with the same respect you would of a radio/TV/Newspaper advertisement.
Now is the time to start planning. So . . . What is going to be your next step?
(First published 2/7/2011)