Page 40 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Using social influencers to mobilize

Social influencers obviously play an important role in getting people to do things.
And this extends beyond the world of marketing. What makes social influence dif-
ferent on the web is that it’s a lot easier to do now. Author Howard Rheingold was
one of the first thinkers to identify this phenomenon in a book titled Smart Mobs:
The Next Social Revolution (Basic Books). He discusses how the street protestors of
the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) conference used websites, cell-
phones, and other “swarming” tactics to organize, motivate each other, and plan
protests. The smart mobs (an intentionally contradictory term) could behave
intelligently because of their exponentially increasing links to each other. Through
those links, they influenced and motivated each other to perform tasks, form
shared opinions, and act together. They used social influence marketing tactics on
themselves to accomplish specific objectives.

In a seminal book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organiza-
tions (Penguin Press), Clay Shirky also focuses on the power of organizing and
influencing using social technologies. As he explains, every web page can be con-
sidered a latent community waiting for people to interact, influence, and mobilize
one another. People with shared interests visit the web page at various times and
often seek out their peers’ opinions — not just opinions from the web page’s
author. Shirky also discusses how Wikipedia, a user-contributed encyclopedia,
can grow exponentially, publish efficiently, and self-correct using nontraditional
corporate hierarchies.

We use the Seattle WTO protests and Wikipedia as examples to demonstrate how
much social influence extends beyond the traditional realms of marketing into
dramatically different domains. Driving the success of the Seattle WTO protests
and the Wikipedia publishing model were two factors: social technologies that
allowed people to contribute, participate, and converse easily, and technologies
that allowed people to see what others were doing. The social influencers were at
the heart of these efforts and many of the other “smart mob” initiatives over the
years.

Twitter directly enabled protesters in Iran to organize in the wake of their 2009
elections, to such an extent that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay
a scheduled maintenance so that it wouldn’t disrupt communications among
the Iranian citizens as they protested the reelection of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. And arguably, one of the key factors that drove the Arab Spring and
the fall of the Egyptian government in March of 2011, was the ability to use social
media to organize on a mass scale quickly as well as share media about the pro-
tests around the world at a time when the official government channels of com-
munication were blocking everything. In fact, many people believe that the simple
Facebook status update “Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under
your scarf for tear gas” significantly helped the protestors.

24 PART 1 Getting Started with Social Media Marketing