The MTV / Bournemouth Uni Hashtag Tells Us Social Is About Competing With Everyone
If we think that social media is the main platform for others to engage with us, we’re wrong.
One thing is true when we use the world of social to distribute our message, we are competing for attention against everyone and everything.
This is none more apparent than the current MTV competition with the hashtag #YESPimpMySummerBall. To anyone that is connected to anyone involved with Bournemouth University, it’s going to be a pretty tough March with the reward of a summer ball given to the university with the most hashtags tweeted. As of Friday 7th March, Bournemouth are nearly 50,000 tweets ahead of second place Kent for that elusive MTV summer ball. To those in my local area that means a lot of people are looking at their timelines that is awash with reference to the mentioned hashtag. It’s a bit like the scenes you see on the Boxing Day news, when Selfridges opens it’s doors to the winter sale and the hoards of people panic stricken to run to the nearest clothes rail.
However, I’m not saying this is a bad thing, it just makes me realise that social media represents the head on impact of professional and personal relationships. If we want a safe channel to stick to for the B2B market, then we’d all be on LinkedIn, but while we’re slowly making it work better and the strides it is making with Pulse, Influencers and making SlideShare work smoothly, the majority are still using it as the recruitment and self promotion platform.
To be heard on the social channels we can either feed it with rubbish content that is not the slightest bit of relevance or we can embrace it and become more useful to others.
Our competition isn’t solely the companies in our respective business sectors we are fully aware of and keep one eye on, but our friends, our family and every other company. This is the bigger world we are competing with for our attention and engagement. We may have a link to encourage people to come to our site but if someone else has beaten us to it with a picture of a man trying to hold the sun between his fingers and failing miserably, then my attention has been diverted to another place.
The only way to keep attention focused on what you say within your 140 characters or timeline, is if the information provided is relevant to your audience and has value to what they do, plus if you can relate to that person as a human being (and not a logo), then the chances of building a dialogue (and creating trust) becomes far more realistic and the opportunity to eventually bring to your platform and subscribe to what you provide (such as newsletter campaigns and information guides).
Authenticity wins and whilst I’m getting used to my Twitter feed filled with winning a summer ball for the next few weeks, it makes me realise that the only way we can rise our heads above the noise is to promote how useful we actually are first, before we state how good our company can be. If we can connect with others, it puts us in a greater place.
Solving problems, finding pain points and helping others is the helicopter rescue rope out of an ocean that is continuously yelling.
