Social media matures, Columbia becomes a gorilla | Guest Column

In 2010, social media fully matured into mainstream society. Facebook led the charge and opened the door for social networks Twitter, foursquare, MySpace and others.
When Facebook made changes to profile layouts and how personal data is displayed, 60 Minutes did a story on it. Social networking is no longer a fad; it has proven it is here to stay.
This is great for CoMO, an endearing reference to Columbia on social networks. CoMO has a large digital presence and during the past year has demonstrated that in full force. In 2009, Columbia won $50,000 for the Central Missouri Humane Society, and in 2010 we took it to an entirely new level.
CoMO started the year with a bang. In January, Y107 competed for the prize of “North America’s Most Caring Radio Station” held by Children’s Miracle Network. For two weeks, Y107 DJ’s encouraged listeners to vote for them for a chance to win $50,000 for the local Children’s Hospital. Y107 turned out to have the most caring listeners, if not the best connected listeners.
In February, Google announced a competition in which the winner would get fiber optic communication lines installed to every home. Several people, including some who had never even met, quickly united on Facebook and Twitter to create the group known as CoMO Fiber.
CoMO Fiber’s goal was to get the community involved and online to nominate through Facebook, Twitter, Google Groups, as well as organize a large scale flash mob. Due to the scale of the competition, Google announced this month that it would be unable to meet its deadline of declaring a winner at the end of the year. However, online tech magazines Gizmodo.com, Mashable.com, PCMag.com and others consider us to be a top contender.
This year CoMO also demonstrated its support for local citizens on a national scale. Rock Bridge alums Melissa McMillin and Jeremy Gebhardt competed for Today Show’s “Modern Wedding.” The word quickly spread through CoMO on Facebook and Twitter. Friends of friends who knew the family asked people to vote and spread the word. Enough people heard, and the couple won a dream wedding.
In October came the big game: MU versus No. 1 Oklahoma. After MU’s win the previous week, students immediately began promoting the hashtag #MizzouGameDay. A hashtag is a tool used on Twitter to categorize or identify something you post. In this case it identified that the tweet was in support of ESPN’s College Gameday coming to the MU campus.
Not only did Gameday show up, but Columbia also shattered its attendance record with 18,000 fans.
Supporting local businesses, CoMO also helped Shakespeare’s win the title of “Best Bites Challenge: College Edition” on Good Morning America in November. This is a direct result of the restaurant’s 3,116 Twitter followers and a staggering 24,125 Facebook fans.
Immediately following the announcement, Shakespeare’s posted this on Facebook: “This really did go viral, and the voting was CRAZY!”
Going viral means a lot of people start talking about something and sharing it in a very short amount of time. CoMO’s large digital presence allows citizens to quickly spread the word when it is needed. When Shakespeare’s asked fans to vote, it was like telling a juicy piece of gossip to 27,000 people at once.
Although going viral is great, it is also rare. However, just because something doesn’t go viral doesn’t mean it isn’t being shared. The same lines of communication that help contests go viral are always available to local businesses. About 150,000 people call Columbia home on Facebook, 50 percent more than our physical population. As more Columbians join the online conversation, our presence grows larger.
Every new connection a person or business makes online creates more lines of communication that lead back to CoMO. This drives online customers to local businesses and gets the attention of national corporations — national corporations such as IBM, Google, Car Fax and probably others that we don’t even know are looking. Columbia is on the forefront of digital communication, and that is exactly what modern tech companies are looking for as they develop the information industry.
Scott Wendling is a social media consultant, speaker and owner of PenguinSpark.com.