Apparently the UFC was built off of Social Media...

That's the argument that Mashable.com makes in their article entitled: "How Dana White Built a UFC Empire with Social Media"

Now, some of you might be saying "I didn't know Griffin vs. Bonnar was shown on Facebook" or "amazing how people who write about social media think it's the equivalent of the movie Inception" or "this is the dumbest thing I've ever read" and you would be right but let's just deal with the big points.

Of course Mashable.com completely ignores any of the real factors that contributed to the rise of the UFC in favor of  platitudes regarding social media, so let's address those one at time. 

Social Media Boot Camp
Much of the UFC's commitment to social media outreach comes from White himself, an avid Twitter ()-er. In order to bring his organization up to speed, White hired PR firm Digital Royalty to teach the fighters how to properly use social media. He gave the fighters a simple instruction: "I want you to Twitter your asses off,"...

Yes, thank goodness the UFC has told their fighters to tweet their asses off. Without that kind of pressure we wouldn't get Jeremy Stephens calling Floyd Mayweather Jr. a f****. Or how about Marcus Davis proclaiming his desire that Dan Hardy die of AIDS on Twitter.

Of course, the unbelievable access to fighters has nothing to do with their need to create a public profile in the hopes of increasing their marketability to be able to make more money to add to their relatively meager salaries. It couldn't be that at all!

Raw Honesty
White is known for his unflinching honesty and his confidence to share even embarrassing or shameful moments with his fans. These important traits have become part of the UFC's social media brand. When one of the UFC's star fighters breezed through a prizefight with noticeably little effort, for example, White gave this apologetic interview (which has been viewed over one million times).

Honesty is a great trait and should be applauded but unflinching honesty gets you in hot water in the professional world. Like telling your fans to f*** off through Twitter.

Or how about going profane videoblog rants against journalist(s) that would have even gotten the CEO of BP fired. Yep, that's honesty that everyone can get behind.

The Power of Twitter
Before broadcast media would air the fights, the UFC was vaulted to popularity through direct interaction with fans on fighter enthusiast blogs. Now, in order to scale with the UFC's global reach, White has a new favorite sounding board: Twitter. "I love Twitter," said White. At more than one million followers, it's clear that the love is mutual. White's unusually strong commitment to @reply's and real-life meet-ups has cultivated an incredibly responsive audience.

During the run-up to big fight in Montreal, a marketing agent asked White how he quantified Twitter. White responded, "How do you quantify billboards? How do you quantify newspaper adds? You can't quantify it. But let me show you how [expletive] strong this is."

White and his dinner companion strolled over to a local gas station at 11:30 p.m. and tweeted his location. About 36 seconds later one fan had shown up, after three minutes White estimated there were about 100 fans at the gas station.

If we ignore the fact that typically these meet ups occur with prize giveaways concede the point that Twitter is a metric of power and popularity for the "UFC Empire", then guess what? Dana White is bigger than the UFC!

Oh my god. It's not the UFC it's the Dana FC!!!

Look, the UFC's rise was and still is a tremendous success story. Their application of social media is wonderful but let's not dilute ourselves into thinking that Twitter (something that didn't exist until after the MMA boom), Facebook (does anyone know how to monetize this thing yet?) and Youtube (thank you UFC for banning awesome fan highlight videos) are the reason for this success.

No, the rise of the UFC can be directly attributed to the product itself, e.g., watching two grown men beat each other to a pulp inside the cage to the delight of 18-34 year old white males.

And boy is it a great product one that I thoroughly enjoy consuming.