Once again the Dallas Cowboys let a game they weren’t supposed to win slip away from them in the 4th quarter. Again it was Tony “oops” Romo that had a hand (or “didn’t have hands”) in the loss. I can’t blame it all on him as I saw many problems that led up to the defeat. I, as a master football coach of 4-6 year-old flag football, could write multiple paragraphs on that subject, but because this is a social media blog, I will get back on topic.

After last night’s “4th quarter of doom” that probably led to crazy nightmares for my sleeping kids (I may have been yelling loudly and often), I decided to open Twitter to see what everyone in the world thought about the game. I have to admit I was a little shocked at how many Cowboy haters are out in the wild. Of course the game was trending, and the conversation was … diverse: You had your die-hard Cowboy fans that were saying, “Shake it off, you weren’t supposed to win anyway.” You had your fair weather fans that were saying, “Great, another season opener loss, I guess I’ll follow the Texans instead.” You had the fans of other teams that were saying, “Haha, the Cowboys lost again – Go (Insert your team here)!” And, of course you had the pure Cowboy haters who were saying, “#$%^#$%^#$ the Cowboys they #$%#$% and #$%# and then #$%#$%. Eat it!” I would say most were Cowboy haters, and most of the tweets were not even close to being rated PG-13.

Stay with me now … I’m finally onto the real topic.

Social Media
What I saw on Twitter last night was real Social Media to me. It was current, real time, opinionated, cool and sad all at the same time. It encapsulated the thoughts and reactions of the public to something that was happening or just happened. Why is social media cool? A couple of weeks ago when the earthquake struck the northeast, people were saying that they received tweet updates of the ground shaking and notifications that an earthquake hit seconds before they felt the tremors in their area. Think about that and how many possible uses that has in lots of different industries. X happens, Y needs to know about it right away, Z tweets it or posts it on Facebook (or any of the 2000 other social apps out there), and like magic you have the information almost before you are supposed to. That’s viral social media.

Social Marketing
Social Marketing isn’t nearly as sexy. It’s only and exactly what it sounds like. We do it at SoftLayer: You see tweets from us talking about press releases, new products, our new website, our new international locations and some of the other value we provide to customers because we know how easy it is to miss some of the best stuff in the noisy social sphere. It helps us build our brand and helps with awareness by getting our name in front of people who may not have seen it otherwise. It drives traffic to our website and straight to our order form. It is significant to our bottom line.

The challenge with this kind of engagement is that the volume of content can seem overwhelming to some. Some customers only want to hear the viral social media kind of stuff with up to the minute news (which is our vision for @SoftLayerNotify), but it’s tough to abandon the social marketing piece because it’s been so measurably successful for us.

With that being said, we want to hear from you about what you like and don’t like about our social engagement. What you would like to see more of? What would you like to see less of? Do you like it? Do you hate it? We’re definitely listening … Well as long as we’re not busy getting ready for the next flash mob.

-@skinman454