Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

The Power of Other People

In the context of marketing, the power brokers used to be the people who controlled the traditional media. Now the people with enormous influence are everyday people, like you and me.

This power shift is due to the mass adoption of social media.

“Social media has altered the scale and velocity of word of mouth,” explained David Jones, CEO of the 12,000-employee ad agency Havas Worldwide. “For example, we did the Roller Babies ad for Evian. This was the most downloaded piece of commercial content in history, with 125 million YouTube downloads. Time named it the TV ad of the year in 2009, yet it had never been on TV.”¹

Social media has fundamentally altered the way people share. “Now we've got this big tool to take word of mouth that might have been one-to-one or one-to-two, and suddenly it's one-to-1,000 or one-to-50,000,” explained Andy Sernovitz, author, Word of Mouth Marketing (Kaplan Business, 2006).²

This meteoric shift is equivalent to the invention of the automobile. With the invention of cars, people were able to expand their known world. With the massive growth of social media, anyone anywhere can group together and have a massive impact.

With the click of a button, people can share your great content with all of their friends and fans. For your business this represents an incredible opportunity to be quickly discovered—without reliance on traditional costly marketing methods.

When you build a strong base of readers, they become a powerful force ...