Page 41 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

More recently, on March 20, 2014, the Turkish government blocked Twitter fol-
lowing the circulation of leaked recordings that implicated the Turkish prime
minister and members of his inner circle in sweeping corruption allegations.
Although people hadn’t mobilized through Twitter, the Turkish government was
worried that the leaked recordings would spread through the platform like wild-
fire and enable people to mobilize against the government. Just that fear was
enough to make the prime minister order the blocking of Twitter.

In a similar fashion, social media became a battleground in Hong Kong’s protests
in late 2019. Pro-democracy protestors used social media as a way to galvanize,
document, and organize large-scale protests. It was also used by both the govern-
ment and the protestors as a tool to influence public opinion. From circulating
images of protestors being injured while protesting to actual video clips of police
brutality and campaign posters, Instagram was widely used by protestors to influ-
ence. The government used Instagram and Facebook to publish images and video
clips of protestors disrupting traffic and vandalizing shops in the streets. With the
protests being leaderless, social media’s role as a connective tissue for the protes-
tors was even more central to the protest than it had been in any other mobiliza-
tion effort in the past.

But bringing the focus back to your company, this discussion of mobilization also
demonstrates that you can harness those very same social media marketing phi-
losophies to achieve other corporate objectives as well. We discuss those market-
ing philosophies further in Chapters 3 and 22.

Social media marketing isn’t just about how people influence each other by what
they say on the social media platforms and on sites across the web. It also happens
when people observe what others are doing online and offline. As a result, if you’d
love others to mimic a certain type of customer behavior, make that behavior vis-
ible to everyone visiting the website. We don’t just listen to people we admire; we
also copy what they’re doing.

Marketers as better corporate citizens

As has been the case in the last few years, marketers are increasingly supporting
and furthering specific social causes that are in alignment with their brands. This
win-win situation results in the marketers getting more favorable attention for
their brands and the specific causes getting much needed sponsorship, too. One
area where marketers are increasingly harnessing social media marketing tactics
is in amplifying their efforts in the cause realm both to demonstrate that they
have a business purpose that goes beyond profit and to better align with the values
of their customers.

CHAPTER 1 Understanding Social Media Marketing 25