Social Voting? It's Madness (All Year Round).

Earlier this week, an ad rep for a media brand came to us with a sponsorship package that revolves around social voting. Social Madness riffs off college basketball's bracket-style competition, its calendar-inspired moniker and it marries them with a social voting program.

We've documented our issue with social voting in the past. Even Geoff Livingston weighed in on the topic for us. The only voting competition we put up with is from SXSW. And that's because you have no choice if you want to speak at the Austin-based interactive festival.

Misguided, Traffic-Driving Scheme

According to the Social Madness sales materials, the program "measures the growth of a company's social presence" at a local and national level. It claims it's designed to spotlight the best corporate social media programs in the cities the media brand serves.


Participating companies earn “points” in the competition based on individual rankings which are determined completely by quantitative metrics. Companies are ranked “based on a scoring algorithm that measures social influence." It tracks votes for each company made on the media brand’s web site, along with each company’s LinkedIn connections, their Facebook Likes and their Twitter followers.

Buying Influence

Advertisers are encouraged to sponsor the program to improve their social profile, increase their follower base, showcase their social media program, gain exposure to media through syndication and, if their company wins nationally, they’ll receive a "valuable prize package."

Are they asking companies to participate, sponsor or both? Based on the verbiage it’s not very clear. Regardless, influence is related more to relevance than quantitative numbers. A metric of social influence like Klout that doesn't consider audience relevance can be directional. But even this goes out the window in a social voting contest. Social voting competitions aren't even about popularity, they're about who can bug the most people and get the most votes.

The Secret & Lie of Social Voting

Consider the fun in store for participants in this competition. They get to harrass their employees, vendors, customers, family and friends to vote for them...multiple times over the course of a 12 week competition. It's not even benefiting a charity. And don’t even get me into the issue of sponsoring vs. participating.

Inflating each company's social metrics may increase the media brand’s traffic, but it will have little sustainable impact for each company’s audience acquisition, engagement or influence.

Kids, Get Off My Lawn!

Call me a cranky old blogger, but my hand to Ed Bernays, it's less my age or my professional temperament and it’s more a professional standard that drives my ire. It's bad enough a media brand put this competition together, consider how many companies will enter and in turn burn out their hard-earned communication channels trying to get votes. Oh the humanity!

:: By Kevin Dugan, @prblog