Find out the social media marketing strategy I used to earn Microgrid Energy the regional semifinalist position for the Business Journal's Social Madness Competition.

1. Social Madness
Competition
Semifinalists
June 2013

2. OVERVIEW
As a St. Louis-based company with a wide-reaching social
media presence, I was excited to be nominated to represent
Microgrid Energy and participate in the Social Madness
competition hosted by the St. Louis Business Journal. The
contest lasted several months, generating thousands of
impressions for us and created such a buzz that the organic
reach spike continued long after the contest was over.

3. Social Madness COMPETITION
Judges preplaced companies based on the size of their collective
social following at the start of the local competition.
The first two weeks of both the local and national competitions
consisted of an open format, where the top companies with the
highest score at the end of the round advance.
A proprietary Social Madness algorithm gauged votes on
bizjournals.com as well as social engagement on LinkedIn,
Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ during the challenge. (Facebook
page likes, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, and Google
followers did not count in the algorithm.)
The winner advanced to national competition and earned a $1,000
donation to the charity of their choice.

4. PROCESS
Rules of the competition restricted several tactics, such
as advertising.
Instead, the following actions were taken:
Changed all social media branding to reflect the
competition with big, graphic, easy-to-understand
images instructing how to vote
Posted about the contest regularly, but keeping
the focus on the content that aligns with our
mission and brand to not disengage audience

5. PROCESS
Added rich media to every post including links,
photos, and video to appeal to Facebook's natural
algorithm for organic reach
Conducted personal, one-on-one social media
lessons with employees and showed them how to
best participate in this contest with their personal
accounts (not required, but everyone participated)
Engaged friends, family, coworkers, partners,
vendors, and anyone who could help us win.
Understanding we could only do so much asking
online, offline rallying played a large part

6. Secret Tactic
We gained the most reach by appealing to human
biology: people enjoy seeing images of what they
recognize, so we used many photos of people,
especially employees.
This not only provided an inside look at the workplace,
but it also allowed each person in the photo ("Get
together, you guys!") to be tagged, which gave us more
organic reach because Facebook valued personal profiles
over business pages.

7. ANNOUNCEMENTS

8. PRESS
It was great coverage
for Microgrid when our
rapid growth in the
competition was
highlighted by an
excerpt in the printed
and online St. Louis
Business Journal.

9. CHARITY
This non-profit has a mission to inspire fresh thinking that
creates economic opportunity, social equality, and
environmental well-being. For example, they created
FoodHub, which is an online marketplace designed to
connect wholesale buyers and sellers of regionally grown
food. Donating to this cause is worth your money as 84% of
its funds go towards program costs.
Learn more at www.ecotrust.org.

10. RESULTS
We eventually took 4th place out of the original 65 companies entered
and enjoyed the coverage the competition brought us.
From what we learned, our engagement rate was already healthy, so
this contest was just a matter of nurturing our current fanbase instead
of trying to gain more followers.
Aside from the social media action and press coverage, Microgrid
benefitted greatly by networking with companies in our city,
extended reach to new potential markets, and raised awareness about
Ecotrust.
Gained:
203 Facebook Fans
191 Twitter Followers
35 LinkedIn Page Follows
15 Google+ Followers