The Social Media Sausage Race

By John McGory

Baseball’s favorite promotion started in Milwaukee’s County Stadium in the 1990s when people dressed up as a bratwurst, an Italian sausage and a Polish sausage, staged a foot race during the middle of the sixth inning.

The contests became wildly popular and have spread.  Now, all sorts of entertaining competitions between salted meats or condiments take place at American ballparks. 

Another three-contestant race Americans love to watch is in social media.  The daily jockeying for attention between Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is riveting.  The three social media giants are in a daily challenge to capture the confidence of the social media consumer.

Like the battle between the sausages and brats, a new wiener, uh, winner, emerges every day. Where do social media touts see the race for consumer confidence heading?  Here are the trends, strengths and weaknesses of our three contestants.

Facebook users are the least secure in the confidence race. A survey by Barracuda Labs shows 40 percent of Facebook users admit to malicious virus and malware concerns.  Twitter users are second, with 28 percent feeling unsecure.  LinkedIn is third at 14 percent.

LinkedIn is the most trusted, but this race could tighten as cyber criminals target its accounts.  Business disruption, employee misinformation and business assets are areas where hackers could cause serious problems.

LinkedIn is also the least-blocked social network.  Only 20 percent of companies block LinkedIn on work websites.  Twitter comes in second with 25 percent, while 31 percent block Facebook.

Twitter problems indicate that 43 percent of Twitter accounts are "true users" with real followers and regular tweets, and 57 percent are "not true users," but are either spam bots or inactive accounts. 

This causes problems for users opening shortened links TinyURL or Bit.ly posted by “not true users.”  This can lead to drive-by downloads or an exploited browser.

Facebook security issues focus on trust rather than the random drive-by.  Many of the malicious viruses are unwittingly passed on by friends.

Being the largest social media competitor has its disadvantages and advantages. There will be more efforts to compromise larger platforms, a disadvantage.  Plus malware and viruses can spread quickly among large groups of friends.

So many people are on Facebook, however, that when a problem occurs, the word gets out just as quickly as it spreads.  The recent example is the “Starbucks” anniversary scam. 

The ruse got unsuspecting Facebookers to visit a website to get a free $50 gift card.  Share the link with your friends, give them some personal information and you win. Unfortunately, all you got was malware on your computer, and an avalanche of unending spam in your email. The scam ended when Starbucks used Twitter to tell its followers of the problem.  That information spread to Facebook and the problem disappeared.

So the daily race for social media consumer confidence will continue.  Who do we like?  Too early to tell, but the Polish sausage is sounding like a winner.

John McGory is a partner at Webface, a communications and marketing company helping others win the social media race.