Tip #3: Fully engage your audience

To win the Curbed competition, do you really need to "vote for yourself many times in consecutive 24-hour periods"? Or; would you really want to spend "an IT staff’s billable hours (and we all know the hourly rate is expensive) to write a program that automatically votes, 7542 total"? These are some of the opinions raised during the course of the competition.

I would think there are better uses for those times. This competition was best won by engaging supporters versus spending the time supporting one’s self with more than 1,000 computers in tow.

If we analyze the bracket of wins, we will see that at every round, the bar is continually raised. It exceeded the previous record of votes. Notice also the consistency of the market share of votes generated. It's consistently more than 3/4 of the total votes.

 Let's look at the graphical pie charts closely.

 

Round 1 started with 83.3% of 461 total votes.

Also in Round 1, we've already set the tone on how we would play this game.

"Also of note: architect Lira Luis, an alumna of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin school, earned the most votes overall." - Curbed

Notice the big jump in total vote-count from Round 2 and Round 3. This was the turning point. The engaged audience has gained voting momentum.

There's still a steady increase in total vote count.

By the time we hit Final Round, the audience who have stayed with me in the journey have already invited others to join in the fun. The overall result is a snowball effect of 7,542 votes.


Here’s how to develop a highly-engaged audience:

In Twitter, some people judge your “influence” by the number of “followers” you have in your account. I’m a bit wary of the “follower-counting” culture. Number of “followers” don’t mean a thing if all they do is follow you and don’t really care to listen to what you have to say. One of the ways to test if your “followers” are truly listening is to ask them for support. If they support you, then you know they have been truly following you all along and holding on to every word you tweet. By the time you ask for help, they’re more than willing to give it to you. I found this was the case, when I first assessed the Social Media tools I have to work with as mentioned in Tip #1.

In blogs, while some may have people commenting on the posts, the question to ask is, are those comments posted by the same people every time? If you’re not developing new commenters at each new blog post, do you really have a highly-engaged audience?

1. Participate in Social Media groups.
2. Chime in on discussions.
3. Contribute insight and possible solutions that add value, not simply vent criticisms in Twitter chats.
4. Keep your audience informed at every step of the way. 

Here's a recap of the 7 Tips.