CHAPTER 11
MONEYBALL: WINNING BIG BY GOING SMALL
For baseball nuts, perhaps the seminal book of the past decade was Michael Lewis’s 2003 study, Moneyball (the film adaptation, starring Brad Pitt, was released in 2011). Lewis documented how the small-market, small-budget Oakland A’s were able to be competitive in an American League environment that favored big-market, big-budget teams like the New York Yankees. In 2002, the A’s payroll was $41 million; the Yankees’ payroll was more than $125 million.1 Yet each team won 103 games while losing only 59. In a sport in which most fans and analysts assumed that spending money and boosting payroll was the key to playing winning baseball, the A’s managed to be the exception to the rule, seemingly disproving the conventional wisdom. Obviously, the A’s were doing something right. But what was it?
Lewis’s core revelation was that the A’s general manager, Billy Beane, believed that baseball’s conventional wisdom was wrong. He thought clubs overpaid for players who could deliver big numbers in the traditional categories and statistics: RBI, batting average, home runs, and stolen bases for offensive players and ERA, strikeouts, and wins/losses for pitchers. Beane believed that lesser-known statistics like on-base percentage and slugging percentage were far better indications of effectiveness and success. By focusing on undervalued players who excelled in these emerging statistical categories rather than the traditional big-money, high-attention categories, Beane built a team that was more than capable of running with its high-payroll counterparts in New York, Boston, or Los Angeles/Anaheim.
There’s a similar dynamic at work in social media, especially as practiced by most big organizations—and if you heed the lessons of Moneyball and Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s, you can make your company’s social media program far more effective, delivering greater return for less investment. Traditional ways of measuring effectiveness in both “traditional” media and social media reflect just as outdated a view about marketing and PR as does measuring home runs, stolen bases, and wins by a pitcher in baseball. It’s not that the old methods and measures don’t work (let’s not forget that the Yankees also won 103 games in 2002). It’s that you can find other ways to win without spending big or focusing on those traditional measures.
In social media, the big events, massive campaigns, and heavy influencers get the same attention as batting average and RBIs do in baseball; we even call a huge success a “home run.” Big brands aggressively court big-name bloggers and Twitter personalities with big followings, hoping that winning their favor or impressing them with forward-thinking social media efforts will lead to greater credibility in the space. We covet not just their influence but also their reach, and we seek the “home run” campaigns that will be favorably mentioned by speakers at social media conferences around the world.
Some of these things work. I’m not here to say that you shouldn’t court the big names, nor that a presence for your brand at a big event is a waste of your money, nor that you should ignore monthly unique visitor counts and Alexa ratings or SEOmoz scores. I’m not discounting the effectiveness of a big visibility campaign, like what GM did for Chevrolet at South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2010, the Pepsi Refresh campaign, or the Ford Fiesta Movement. Big campaigns or all-out presences at the big social media events do work. They often carry with them the added benefit of drawing traditional media attention, which not only promotes your product and brand but also establishes you in the minds of the casual observer as a leading brand in the social media space.
But not every organization has the ability to do something that size. Your company might be too small to devote hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of dollars to a social media campaign. Your company might not have embraced social media enough that you can convince leadership that such a swing-for-the-fences approach is worth funding. Maybe your organization has the will and the budget, but your product doesn’t quite fit at a big event. Perhaps you’re a B2B company, and big consumer-facing programs don’t really address your target market. Whatever the reason, an eye-catching, attention-drawing, big-money social media campaign is not realistic for many companies.
If you happen to be running social media for such a company, however, this is not the hindrance it may seem. There are ways to play moneyball in social media—to focus on the smaller, more local, less expensive programs and initiatives that are highly effective without breaking the bank or needing the digital equivalent of a $200 million payroll.
When It Comes to Conferences and Events, Size Doesn’t Matter
When you’re considering which events to get your brand involved with, it’s tempting to look longingly at the monster social media events like SXSW, BlogWorld Expo, or BlogHer and think that you have to have a major presence there. But it just isn’t so. It’s true that a well-executed program at one of these events can establish your brand as a leader in almost one fell swoop or can go a long way toward reinforcing the “smart” behind your organization’s social media thinking. But you’re not just looking for quantity of people you reach; you’re also looking for quality in the relationships you’re able to build for your brand with online influencers. And in many cases, this is done as easily—if not more easily—in smaller events.
An event with thousands of attendees will be an exercise in five-minute conversations and quick-hit introductions. With that many people to connect with in just a few days, even if you’re really good and your brand team spends most of the conference networking, the best you can hope for is to have short conversations with several hundred people and to follow up with them later. (SXSW usually has anywhere between 13,000 and 15,000 registered attendees for the interactive portion. GM’s program there in 2010 was considered a runaway success, and yet we probably interacted with only about 20 percent of the attendees.)
At smaller events, however, you’re usually competing with fewer brands for attention; there’s less clutter, and it’s easier for a strong, well-executed program to stand out. Not that competition for attention should daunt you or that cutting through clutter is something only experienced social brands can do—but if you can rack up some good wins and get people talking about your brand as a social media leader or innovator, why not do it?
More important, however, smaller events offer you a better opportunity to actually interact with all the attendees at the event—and more deeply and meaningfully than at many big events. An event with 50 or 80 or 200 attendees may seem “too small” by traditional marketing standards to merit much time or resources—but at an event with 500 or 800 attendees, you might likely only interact with about 200 of the attendees anyway. At the smaller event, you may actually have the opportunity to have a longer, more meaningful interaction with many more of the attendees. Additionally, audiences at smaller events often appreciate sponsors and partners a bit more, not only because of the more direct or intimate nature of their interactions with your brand but also because they recognize that the event may not have taken place without your participation.
There are dozens of smaller social media events, in almost every region or city at this point, that bring together the influencers in the local social media community, the business community that hasn’t yet taken the plunge, and occasionally a nationally recognized speaker. If you’re a small, regional business or organization, look to attend and possibly sponsor some of these events in your area. If you’re a national-level organization or brand that hasn’t yet established itself in social media, these regional and local events provide an excellent opportunity to build relationships with community influencers, get noticed by members of these communities as a brand or organization that “gets” social media, and have your message heard and your products experienced by a good number of an area’s social media community.
Better yet, these events can provide you a launching pad for more direct interaction specifically with your brand after the event ends. People who’ve met your people or your team or been impressed with your program at an outside event are more likely to agree to interact with you at an event that you put on that’s specifically focused on your brand. So make a point of finding smaller, more local social media conferences or events, and pay them as much attention as you would a big-name event. You don’t always need the grand-slam home run of an SXSW or BlogHer. If you get four runs via bunts and singles at smaller events, you’ve got the same score on the board at the end of the inning—probably without spending as much money or expending as much time as a big program at a big event might take. Either approach works, but if you’re budget- or resource-constrained as the Oakland A’s of the 2000s were, smaller events are a way to even the playing field and win just as big.
Think Globally, Act Locally
Thinking globally while acting locally is not just a mantra for environmental or social good; it’s sound social media advice. Outside events and conferences aren’t the only cases in which smaller can be equal or better. You should also start thinking about microtargeting or going hyperlocal in your own programs as well.
In his stump speech, my friend Jason Falls of the Social Media Explorer blog and author of No Bullshit Social Media explains how the connections with brands made via social media can bring people back to a “small town” kind of mentality. He points out how business is done in small towns where everyone knows each other. For example, you don’t bank at Chase or Citibank; you bank with Bill, whose son plays Little League with your son. You don’t buy a car or truck from Chevrolet or Honda; you buy from Dave, who goes to your church. You don’t buy a house from Century 21 or Coldwell Banker; you buy from Diana, whose daughter is in your child’s class and who volunteers on PTO programs with you. And so on. Individuals earn business in a small town by being known, friendly, and trustworthy—and if an individual you trust leaves one employer to go work for another, you may well follow the individual. Brand loyalty does matter, but it is those local, individual connections that in many cases generate brand loyalty to begin with—and can be as important to the ongoing relationship with the brand as product quality. National commercials and ad campaigns may grab attention, but those local connections just as often have more to do with what purchases are made.
This phenomenon also takes place in social media. National campaigns like the Old Spice Guy do a great job of raising awareness of the brand behind them, but how many people who saw it actually had their tweet answered via video by the guy in the towel? That campaign was remarkably successful in the sense that it drew the desired attention to Old Spice—but it only rarely drove actual interaction with the product or even with any of the people behind the brand. (In the campaign’s defense, sales did go up 107 percent in the month after the videos and commercials aired.2 I’m not arguing that the campaign wasn’t successful, only that there was very little that was “social” about it. The Old Spice Guy was a traditional advertising campaign carried out on digital channels, not a social media campaign.)
While consumer knowledge of a product or brand is important, that can be accomplished through traditional advertising, marketing, or PR. To take full advantage of social media, brands need to focus on building relationships, showing a level of engagement in social media that is missing in traditional channels. Local activations provide the opportunities to build those relationships, to encourage that small-town feel that Jason talks about. In the well-executed online programs I just mentioned, that local or community flavor was missing, or at least wasn’t fully exploited.
Chevrolet’s program at SXSW in 2010, for example, helped GM announce to the world that the brand was back—not only as a social media player to be reckoned with but also as a healthy option in the marketplace for people looking to buy a new car—after having to go into reactive mode during the business crisis of 2008 and 2009. But the biggest benefit we got from that campaign came long after all the SXSW attendees had left Austin. We met literally hundreds of people with whom we started relationships that we pursued during the rest of 2010. (I’ll describe in just a moment a few of the follow-up events we were able to do with some of these new friends.) While by traditional measures we had every reason to be happy—61 million online impressions, more than 13,000 mentions of Chevrolet on Twitter in nine days, more than 250 traditional media stories generating more than 80 million more media impressions—the big win for us at SXSW was not the visibility or the impressions. The big win was meeting people we were able to go back to in their own home locales later on, building on those relationships to do more meaningful engagement in more conducive environments. Of the 15,000 people who attended SXSW Interactive in 2010, we were only able to get a few hundred actually into a Chevrolet vehicle to experience our product. But at our follow-up local events, the percentages of people who actually experienced our products and not just our branding were far greater—and that’s where the real benefit happened for Chevrolet, getting us the chance to see not just a good marketing campaign but also how we were helping change people’s impressions of American cars and specifically what Chevrolet is all about.
Among the local programs we carried out in 2010 alone that I consider to have been at least equally successful as what we did in Austin for SXSW are the following:
• “Pizza Crawls” in the Miami area. Our southeastern regional social media lead, Jennie Ecclestone, invited Miami-area food and lifestyle bloggers on a rolling tour of south Florida’s most well-reputed pizzerias. Transportation was provided by Chevrolet cars supplied by local dealers, but the focus of the event was the pizza. Dozens of bloggers who might never have given Chevrolet a serious thought were able to experience the vehicles while doing something they loved doing—and Jennie was right along with them, not pushing Chevy but simply joining in on the fun. Not only did we have the chance to change some minds about our vehicles, but we gave our guests a face and friend inside Chevrolet as well.
• Tweet to Drive. Tasked with reintroducing Buick to a younger generation that had likely never considered the brand (and probably hadn’t been inside one unless at their grandparents’), our north-central regional social media lead, Connie Burke, worked with her agency partners to develop a unique twist on the test drive: instead of trying to persuade people to come to us, we went to them. We set up a Twitter account, @DriveBuickChi, and told the Chicago Twitter community that whenever they had anything they needed to do—grocery shopping, a trip to the airport, whatever they wanted—they should send us a tweet, and we’d come to them with a Buick vehicle along with someone familiar with the vehicle, and they had the car for as long as they needed to use it. In just three months, the program gave out more than 1,000 rides in various Buick vehicles—and many of those riders did blog posts or shared video of their experience.
• The Traveling Baby Shower. Partnering with Winn-Dixie, Safe Kids USA, the USO, and central Florida Chevrolet dealerships, we conducted a series of baby showers for military families—women whose husbands or partners were deployed overseas and who found themselves facing impending motherhood and family separation at the same time. Many military families are stationed in areas where they have no other family nearby to help them—so together our organizations worked to provide these moms a little bit of fun time and gifts that they’d normally have gotten from friends at showers near their home. Chevrolet provided the moms and their kids transportation, while Safe Kids provided car seats for the new babies, Winn-Dixie provided other baby products the moms would need, and the USO facilitated the entire program. Chevrolet team members and dealership representatives also took part in the showers, being part of the new extended family trying to make things just a little bit easier on military families.
With the exception of the Tweet to Drive, none of these programs had a cost that entered five figures. (That may sound like a significant number, but when you consider what major brands usually spend on advertising and marketing, you get a sense of how very low the cost truly was, relatively speaking.) Each of them achieved its goal of providing a more direct engagement with GM not just online but also with our products—and our people—in a more intimate, personal, and real-world setting. More important, each of these programs allowed us to be relevant to the target audience by fitting our products and people into their interests. We didn’t force them into interacting with GM or Chevrolet or Buick; instead, we found something that they would be interested in or that they’d need and found a way to fit our vehicles and our people into their lives.
GM isn’t the only big national brand that’s found success through playing this kind of “small ball.” Consider:
• Hogs with hearts. A national radio network in the middle of trying to penetrate three new markets ran targeted local Facebook ads promoting upcoming local events. In one market, it ran an ad about an upcoming motorcycle event, “Ride for a Cure,” targeting people living within 50 miles of that city and interested in cancer causes, Harley-Davidsons, or motorcycles in general. The ad reached more than 17,500 people for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising, and the network knew exactly how many times the ad was clicked. After the event, the local marketing team reported the participation of a large group of motorcyclists who showed up despite never having heard of either the local affiliate or the national network before. These bikers were not brought in by friends, radio ads, or billboards; they heard about the event from the Facebook ads and began relationships with this radio network due to its Facebook activity.3
• A walk on the wild side. SeaWorld in San Antonio, in an effort to raise its Texas profile as a family destination, decided to specifically target “mom bloggers” in major Texas cities. It reached out to small groups from Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin and suggested that if they would be in the San Antonio area on a given date, they could drop by for a “meet-up” inside the SeaWorld park, a chance for the women to get together in a fun setting and to “camp out” overnight near the penguin exhibit at the park, bonding with each other and beginning to form a community. These women weren’t transported to San Antonio or given anything other than free admission to the park and a behind-the-scenes tour of the facility. Anyone who was interested and signed up was part of this new group. A little more than two years later, that community has grown into the “Texas Wild Side Bloggers”—a group of 16 bloggers highly influential in the Texas “moms” community. A Google search for “Wild Side SeaWorld” reveals more than 3,000 returns—more than 3,000 blog posts and Twitter updates from 16 women in just two years. Not only that, but this group has bonded into a tight-knit community whose members interact with each other nearly year-round, reinforcing their connection to the brand and promoting the community and the park within the Texas mom-blogging community. Three thousand opportunities for SeaWorld San Antonio to have its brand repeatedly promoted as a Texas vacation destination among Texas moms, for the cost of a few free admissions, letting some people “sleep over,” and investing the time to have some of SeaWorld’s people get to know these women in an off-line, real-life setting. Talk about a return on that investment!
That’s one of the most critical lessons about social media success: it is as much about your off-line effort as it is about your online efforts. Online is a great place for you to begin relationships, but to cement them takes an off-line, real-world interaction—even if it’s a short conversation during a conference, a drink at a reception or Social Media Club chapter meeting, or inviting them to share an experience with you and your people. You need to consider real-world, off-line tactics that will reinforce your online ones if you want your programs to really win.
By thinking first of the audience’s interests and needs and then finding a small, direct, local way to integrate with those interests, brands can build much stronger and more effective relationships with online influencers. Not only is it easier to track the posts and commentary people put up after the interactions, but also it’s a lot easier to send personalized follow-ups to 10 to 20 people than mass e-mails to hundreds or thousands of names and addresses on business cards. Companies can also more readily track more tangible business results, such as whether anyone offered to organize another event with his or her audience for the brand or whether anyone actually purchased the company’s product in the days, weeks, or months after the event.
The relationships developed in these smaller, more local interactions much more closely resemble Jason Falls’s small-town model. In the GM examples, our people weren’t “the GM people”; they became “Jennie, who works for GM” and “Connie, who happens to be at GM.” People in social media began wanting to work with us not just because we represented GM but also because they knew and trusted our people as acquaintances and then even friends. (Actually, during the bankruptcy and its aftermath, some people worked with us almost in spite of our representing GM rather than because of it; the personal relationships we’d built and the personal approach we took in developing new ones were a saving grace that helped us weather the worst of the enmity and negative feelings that the business situation could often engender.)
Additionally, these events in fact drove more tangible business results for GM in comparison with big programs like SXSW or a national vehicle launch. While the big activations paid off handsomely in awareness, online “buzz,” and contributing to the recognition of GM and its brands as significant innovators within the realm of social media, they could not—for reasons of size and volume alone—provide the in-vehicle, individualized, tailored-to-the-audience’s-direct-needs experience that the local events could.
The other side of this coin is the kind of people you should invite to the local events. There’s still a mind-set in social that you’re aiming most for the “big fish,” or the people with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers or readers—that an activation or program is only a “success” if people with significant followings took part or were “influenced.” The big guns certainly help with a large-scale program like a SXSW, to be sure. If your goal is awareness and buzz, the bigger players help you get it. But with smaller, more local events, you’re aiming not just for buzz or impressions but also to provide real-world interaction with your products. If you’re successful, some of your guests will buy your products at some point, whether immediately or in the long term. This is where you have to redefine your concept of “influence.”
Let’s use Oprah Winfrey’s book club as an example to demonstrate this point. Think of the effect that Oprah has on her audience; when she held up a book on her show and said, “This is the book I’m recommending that you read,” more often than not, the book ended up at or near the top of the New York Times bestseller list within a matter of weeks or even days.4 Oprah has, for her audience, earned enough trust to have that kind of influence. When she says something is good, her audience believes her, and her opinion is disproportionate in that community; winning her over is the key to gaining her audience’s favorable opinion. Oprah isn’t just influential because she has a huge audience; she’s influential because her viewers inherently trust her.
There’s someone like that in every online community, no matter the size. These people have earned enough trust to have disproportionate influence over the opinions of the other members of the community—and whether the community is large or small, if you win over the “Oprah” of the community, you win the community. The money spent on your product is the same whether it comes from someone with 50,000 followers or 50, whether they’re following a social media superstar or a mom in Indiana with a hundred readers. A customer is a customer, right? You wouldn’t stand for it if you walked into a retail store and were told you weren’t influential enough to be waited on or valued as a customer, would you? Why treat online communities—your potential customers—that way? Readers or followers of a smaller community of 200 are just as valuable to your business as those of a community of 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000.
And while it’s not impossible for trusting relationships to be built with mass audiences, it’s common sense that it’s easier to build closer relationships with a smaller number of people. In fact, there’s a construct within psychology—Dunbar’s number—that suggests there is a finite limit, dictated by the human brain and how it’s wired, to the number of people a human being can maintain a stable social relationship with. There’s no precise number agreed upon for the exact value of Dunbar’s number—most agree that it’s somewhere between 100 and 230, with 150 being cited most frequently5—but if that theory holds, then it might logically follow that some smaller online communities are perhaps more tightly connected and trusting as a result of their size and the amount of more individual interaction that takes place within them.
The beauty of social media is that it allows this kind of individual interaction and individual attention, even for big brands. You don’t have to invest any more time or money in interacting with a “small” community’s Oprah than you’d spend on reaching out to a superstar—but you might be more effective, because many “smaller” bloggers aren’t as accustomed to being taken seriously by a big brand or organization as the bigger influencers are. The outreach may be more appreciated and warmly received.
So when you’re considering these smaller, more local interactions, make your target audience a broader mix of both some “name” influencers in your target area and some that traditionalists might consider “too small” to warrant an outreach. Doing so gets you the ideal mix—the online buzz and social media credibility that the bigger names and prominent influencers can get you and the tangible results on business objectives you’re aiming for in the long run. And if you string together enough of these small events that are executed well and drive lots of chatter in these small communities, people will begin to notice at larger levels. Rack up enough wins, and you start to have case studies and successes to share at conferences or webinars—and the social media world places increasing respect on actual results, so you’ll find yourself in more demand (both at conferences and by the social and traditional media) to tell your brand’s story. Score enough runs, and you’ll be winning at the end of the game—and no one’s going to ask whether you got them one each inning through bunts, walks, and singles or via a couple of three-run home runs. All that matters are the runs you put up.
Here are a few guiding principles for putting together successful, winning hyperlocal programs that can result in these bunts and singles for you.
1. Get involved in the local online or social networks and communities. Start earning the trust of the people you’re hoping to reach before you start asking them for favors. Make it a point to identify groups, both online and off-line, of the social media community in the locality you’re hoping to be active in. Engage in conversations with them online, and show up at their real-world get-togethers. Most social media groups have semi-regular meetings or tweetups you can attend. Make it a point to get to know both the leaders and the “regular” members of the communities you’re hoping to reach. And when you talk with them, make sure you’re soaking in the things that matter and are of interest to them.
2. Do what your audience is interested in, and find a way to tie yourself to it. When you ask Jennie Ecclestone, who was our stellar social media representative in the southeastern United States and ran dozens of very successful small regional programs, what’s at the heart of a winning hyperlocal social media event, she’s very direct: “You have to find what they [your target audience] want to do,” she says, “and then integrate your product into that.”6 Don’t lead with your marketing message or make the entire point of the program the interaction with your product. Frankly, very few people are going to care enough to take time out of their day just for the “privilege” of experiencing your product. Find a way to help people do what they already want to do.
3. Make sure your people are as much a part of the event as your product. Your people are your best assets; in an environment in which trust is a key currency, it is your people and their personalities that will sell an audience on your brand as much as your product. If you’re trying to humanize your organization, you have to let people meet your humans! Don’t just outsource the execution of an event to a vendor or agency and expect a report back. Have your employees, the ones who do the actual interaction online, as involved as they can be. Put your people front and center in your program, and make interacting with them a big part of the day or event. After the event, it will be more natural for them to follow up with people they actually met. Your people need to be committed and convinced that their personalities are as important to the success of the program as your products—and you need to have some faith in your people and give them space to be themselves in order to make the relationships work.
4. Ask for ideas! There’s no rule that says a good idea for a program has to come from within your organization. Members of the community often are creative and have good marketing instincts of their own—or they have events going on already and may have ideas as to how you might integrate into them. This will often involve a request for sponsorship or money of some sort. In and of itself, this is not a bad thing, but make sure that you have the opportunity to actually be part of the event, rather than just cutting a check or being acknowledged from the stage during the opening remarks. If there are people within the local or regional social media community whom you’d like to reach or find a relevant activity for, by all means ask them what they’d be interested in or if there’s a potential idea they might have for you to work together. If they come up with something of mutual benefit, do it.
5. Coordinate and integrate with traditional media when possible. I’ve mentioned that half of success in social media is executing smart initiatives and programs, while the other half is making sure that people know what you’re doing. One way to make more people aware of your social media efforts—not to mention extending the branding benefit of your program or event—is to make sure that your social media and PR or media relations teams are working together and getting the traditional media involved when appropriate.
The traveling baby shower in Florida was covered by Tampa Bay television. GM talked with local newspapers and radio about events or programs we’ve done in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities. On occasion, even national media like Fortune have covered GM’s local activities, such as a program its western regional team did with college students in Southern California. In each case, GM not only extended the message and awareness of the program to audiences outside of social networks but also increased awareness of GM as a brand active in social media and doing fun, innovative things in the social space.
Partnering with your PR team to generate traditional media coverage for your social media efforts helps make others in the social community aware of a brand’s efforts and its program, which in turn paves the way for other programs with other members of the community. Like any other marketing effort, getting the traditional media involved helps extend your effectiveness and promote your brand. Do it when you can—but pitch sparingly enough to not generate feelings among the social community that you’re using them for publicity.
6. Rinse and repeat. If one of your local or regional teams comes up with a winning idea that works as well as or even better than planned, you’ll absolutely want to share the lessons learned and best practices with your other regional teams or to replicate the effort in other parts of the country. GM has done pizza and cupcake crawls in other parts of the country after Jennie and her team pioneered the idea in Miami, for example. Ask your people or teams to present to the rest of the organization on what they did and why it worked. See if they can put together a template or playbook that allows other members of the organization to replicate the program in their own regions. There’s no such thing as a good idea that shouldn’t be reprised elsewhere if it’s executed properly.
Being Billy Beane
Resources and time are always scarce, and it’s often especially difficult to persuade leadership to devote significant resources to social media before you’ve racked up a few successes that prove its worth. But you don’t have to have a seven-figure marketing budget and a team of 20 people working on social media for you in order to win big. You don’t have to be the biggest fish in the big social media event ponds in order to develop a strong reputation in the space as a leading and innovative organization. If you apply the basic principles of social media—keeping the audience’s interests front and center and making the depth of the relationships you build a key priority—to small events, you can channel Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s and compete quite effectively with the brands spending more money in social media than you. Social media success is not always about acquiring the big free agents with the gaudy numbers and being the New York Yankees of the space; it’s just about smart execution and creative thinking. Money is less important in social media than creativity and fidelity to smart principles—the basics and fundamentals of the game. It worked in baseball, and it works in social media.