Social Madness is a corporate social media challenge launched by The Business Review and its parent company American City Business Journals. Social madness measures the growth of each participant’s presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. The contest will be based social engagement. The local challenge starts on June 3, 2013. The contest will conclude with a national bracket challenge that will have three winners in three categories.
Reasons to Participate
Participating in this challenge will improve your social media profile and engagement. It will showcase your social media program to a national audience. Your company will gain media exposure through syndication and public relations efforts. You will get insight into social media best practices for businesses. Ten thousand dollars will be donated to a charity on behalf of the three national winners.
The following changes were made for 2013:
- Categories are not going to be determined by the number of full time employees: instead they will be determined by the size of the combined social following at the beginning of the competition.
- A scoring algorithm that measures social engagement instead of growth.
- To ensure companies are playing fair, new systems and safeguards are in place.
- The competition was reduced from 16 weeks to 11 weeks.
- Google+ was added as a platform.
- An “At Large” category was added to allow any eligible US company to enter, regardless of where they are located.
Eligibility
- Companies that are headquartered in the US.
- US headquarters of foreign companies.
The scoring algorithm that measures social engagement will rank the participating companies. The algorithm will check votes on bizjournals.com and audience in engagement on the four social platforms during the challenge. Contestants have to submit their completed forms before May 15, 2013. Companies that are accepted will receive additional information before the June 3rd start. Entrants need to submit URLs for the company pages on each of the four social media platforms.
For more information about the official rules, visit www.socialmadness.com/rules.
Last year’s winners were: Onelouder Apps in the small business category, Hard Rock Café in the medium business category, and Target in the large business category. Although, there was a lot of controversy surrounding how the contest was scored. Writers and bloggers alike criticized the competition because it did not measuring engagement. It appears the changes that were made are more in line with today’s social media marketing strategies.
What do you think the topics for optimal social engagement will be? Will you be one of this year’s winners?
Source: www.bizjournals.com
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