Every once in awhile, everyone takes a look at little guy success stories to compare the effectiveness of what massive companies are doing on a global scale to illustrate how it also works for the small players in local or niche markets. I’d like to suggest that there are two distinctly different ways the social success scenario blossoms. Both come from mimicking success by others, rather than from being a leader.

1. Small Business are always the leaders in Social Media and corporate behemoths only notice once they see the effectiveness of a local business engaging dynamically with their local audiences – saying, “Hey, let’s do that on a massive scale!” The little guys got noticed on a global scale precisely because they did such effective local and niche marketing using social media.
2. Small Business B2B operators or niche sellers resist using social media, pointing to the corporate big boys success on a massive scale and say, “Why bother with that when I have only local business or work only within a very tiny and restrictive industry?” It’s an excuse to avoid being social – so they don’t engage until they see it working for other small or niche players.

The real way this works –(regardless of company size or market):

1. A social business finds unique ways to speak to their own audience
2. They become successful
3. Then everyone notices

It’s not the size of the company. The story is instructive however you see it progressing.

This week Mashable did a popular post titled “5 Surprising Social Media Success Stories” with examples of unique B2B or Niche business uses of Twitter, Facebook and blogs. The video embedded here came from the article below.

Chances are, most of the businesses you interact with as a consumer are on social media. Your local restaurant is blogging, your grocery store is on Twitter ??? even your favorite candy is on Facebook. Companies in mainstream, consumer-facing industries are all over social media. But how about other businesses? … Are they experimenting with social media? You bet. Here are five examples, all at different stages of their experiments, and all indicating the breadth of business use of social media.