What can NCAA’s Final Four, The Superbowl, the World Series and the Stanley Cup teach us about social media?

1. There is no such thing as an instant win – wins always come as a result of long term effort
While last minute comebacks and nail biters always generate buzz and press, in truth, that success didn’t come through a short-term. It took months of working as a team and years of individual skill training to play in the big leagues and the big games.

Likewise, asking for instant, earthshaking results from any social media campaign is simply impractical. Luck does happen, but it’s rare to make it to the tourney on your first campaign. It simply takes time and work to generate the results you need.

2. Momentum is real
Just as teams want to hit the tournament time on the basis of a series of key, fan-energizing wins, social media does the same.

After observing results and clickthrough numbers on a series of successful and unsuccessful social media campaigns, things just work better if you’ve got something that’s driving buzz and activity with your audience. Also, be careful not to waste your best campaign in a time when momentum has turned against you. Get the momentum going again, then put your best campaign into play.

3. Even in the worldwide spotlight, fundamentals are what wins, and loses
We watch the stars and see them do amazing things at tourney time, but when it comes right down to it, the game wasn’t won on the last-second shot. It was won by protecting the ball, boxing out, clean passes, defending the lane, and getting your hand in the face of the shooter on every single shot.

Fundamentals are also key in social media: identifying and delivering the needs of your target audience, conversation, transparency, appropriate frequency, proper usage of tools, careful nuturing of your followers, choosing the right sites, etc. Without the fundamentals, you will lose.

4. Great performances require great coaches
Great coaches regularly turn also-rans into stars and a group of stars without a great coach may shine for a short time, but will eventually fall out of star status. That’s because there’s a difference between coaching and doing. It’s literally a different skill set. Coaches watch the bigger picture, test to figure out what works and doesn’t (usually in a less-critical circumstance than in the championship game), drill their players to refine muscle and mental memory to automatically perform perfectly at the right moments.

The same applies with social media. There are a few great social media coaches, who are spending time and energy watching the big picture, devising and testing strategies and tactics to discover what works and doesn’t, and providing information to people on how to raise their performance to significantly higher levels. I recommend that you find and follow at least one social media coach, so that you too can kick your performance to a higher level.

By the way – I’m cheering for Duke!

Can you see things I’ve missed? Disagree with any of my statements? Let me know by posting a comment below!

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