The Power of Social Media in Local Markets
Well, yet another project makes the front page of local media!
Aberdeen, South Dakota, is a great city to live in. It is a great city to raise a family in. Most of all, it’s a GREAT city to do business in.
It is not a great city to live in after it snows.
The city has an abysmal reputation for not doing a quality job keeping up with snow removal, which is unfortunate given the weather here is capable of dropping over 12″ of snow at a time. The city does such a poor job plowing, sanding, and salting, that the number of car accidents after any substantial snowfall just skyrockets. Just how many of these accidents can be avoided is anyone’s guess, but you would be hard pressed to effectively dispute that poorly plowed roads play a big impact. The city will spin this in any number of ways, but it comes down to poor road conditions even days after the last snowflake falls.
The facebook fan page took approximately 45 seconds to create and 5 minutes to throw out to my contact list. I let the list grow 100% organic. Considering my town only has 22,000 people living here, the ‘conversion’ rate wasn’t great, but hey, organic is organic!
The reality is it takes a little bit of mob mentality to get any sort of results with small local governments, and my city of Aberdeen is no exception. The Facebook fan page was only 3-4 days old when it hit 250 people, the frontpage of the 1/12/2009 newspaper, and got the attention of a local councilwoman.
Join the Aberdeen, South Dakota Snow Removal SUCKS! facebook group here!
UPDATE: 1/13/2010 @ 8am: ~500 fans of this page. Page 5 days old. Entire population of city is only 21,000.
Popularity: 75% [?]