Page 63 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND SOCIAL
INFLUENCE

Consumers have always been heavily influenced by each other when they make pur-
chasing decisions. They ask each other for advice; they observe and mimic each other’s
decision making; and, frankly, they let peer pressure inform their decisions, whether
they like to admit it or not. What’s changed is that digital behavior has caught up with
offline behavior, and that’s why social media marketing matters to anyone who has a
future in marketing.

Communication technologies such as social networks, prediction markets, microblog-
ging solutions, location-based networked mobile phone applications, and even virtual
worlds make it possible for consumers to influence each other more directly and dra-
matically than ever before. According to Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman, this
influence occurs in three ways:

• Compliance: Conforming publicly while keeping one’s own private beliefs
• Identification: Conforming to someone who is liked and respected, such as a
celebrity or a favorite uncle
• Internalization: Accepting the belief or behavior and conforming both publicly
and privately

In addition to making for good copy in behavioral psychology textbooks, these concepts
do translate into tactics for social media marketing.

In this regard, three steps help you gain a marketing advantage from influential
consumers:

1. Discover the influential consumers.
As you launch a social media marketing campaign and identify your consum-
ers, pay extra attention to who is influencing your potential customers. Who
are the consumers who are influencing your customers, and where is this
influence taking place? (You can find out more about influencers in
Chapter 18.)
2. Activate the influential consumers.

After you identify the influential consumers, whether they’re bloggers, forum
leaders, or just conversationalists with lots of friends on the social networks,
develop relationships with them and find ways to activate them to do the
marketing on your behalf. In later chapters, we discuss exactly how you can
do this.

CHAPTER 2 Discovering Your SMM Competitors 47