How Social Media Won George Wacker a Car

The Champion

Earlier this year, a few of us who know each other from the Lehigh Valley Tweetups started seeing advertisements for auditions for this “2 Days in the Cube” contest to take place Memorial Day weekend at the Mayfair Festival in Allentown, PA in which 5 contestants would live inside a 2010 Nissan Cube for 2 days, compete in some silly competitions, and be allowed periodic bathroom breaks in hopes of winning a 2 year lease on the car in the end.   We came to the conclusion that we had to put our heads together and pick one person we could all get behind, support, and make sure they won that car.  That person was George Wacker.

After several days of online harassing, peer pressure, and other coercive measures, he agreed to do it.  He went to the auditions with his now-infamous taped up guitar and wooed the judges.  The strategy was sheer volume.  Heavy hitters if you will.  Get a little more than a handful of people to just pound away at the texting on their phones for 2 weeks.  But it was more than that.  We harnessed the power of social media.  We started a Vote for Wacker in 2 Days in The Cube! Facebook fan page with many administrators to add content, we created crazy momentum on Twitter, and got a catch phrase to keep it in the front of the masses – “Wack the Vote”.  Every time people saw it, it made them vote.  We would text each other and just say “Vote”, and it happened.  We even launched a Facebook Ad campaign for 20 miles around.  It got nearly 340,000 impressions for the cost of one tank of gas.  We didn’t care about click-thrus (linked to the Facebook fan page if they did), we just wanted visibility.  We kept the campaign light, funny, but visible and in front of the audience.

We posted pictures from Mayfair, we made sure people knew the number to text and send WACKER to, we pointed them to the live feed on UStream.  We made silly but clever motivational posters to vote.  We leveraged social media to stay in front of the people throughout the 2 weeks to keep momentum, raise awareness, have some fun, and oh yea – win a car!

Congrats again to George.  So – who’s next?

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Why Facebook Fan pages are better for business

When small businesses first started to market on Facebook, many business owners used their own personal account to broadcast their message to the masses. This was fine. You connected with a person who shared not only personal thoughts and stories, but something about their business. A little later, people started to get creative and create accounts for their business. This meant you became “friends” with a hotel, a bar, or a local plumbing service. This was so-so, but not really the best way to do it. Along came the growth of Facebook fan pages. This is where it is at for businesses to really execute and build awareness to a Facebook community. Simply put here are five strong reasons that accounts need to be actual people with real stories, and administrate and reference business ideas and information on their fan pages:

1. Like we said, Fan pages can be managed by one or more accounts. It means you log in with one account and can go manage several fan pages while logged in as that person. Too much? You can add other administrators as well to help, without having to worry about sharing accounts, or passwords.

2. Fan pages are a one-way relationship. The entity exists whether you have 5 fans, 500, or 5,000. Do you really want to be in the business of having to accept all those requests as a friend request one by one?

3. Fan pages have metrics. It shows you demographics of your fan base, trends of adds, drops, interactions, and article effectiveness. None of this is available on personal account pages.

4. You can always suggest the page to fellow Facebook friends, or post links on Twitter, Linked In, or in your email marketing. Potential fans can visit the page and instantly decide if they want to subscribe or not without waiting for a friend request to be accepted.

5. Separation of business and personal information. Fans of your business might not want every nook and cranny detail of your life, just your business or information on your industry. Or maybe your friends just like you as a friend and not about your business. It allows your friends to be social, your fans to connect with your business, and those that want both, to hear both sides of the story.

Hope you find this helpful. We’d love to hear your comments and thoughts on how you use Facebook to manage content for a business, or how you use that information as a consumer perhaps.