Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Taking Social Influence Beyond Marketing

As we hint in the earlier sections, the benefits of social media marketing extend beyond the core domain of marketing. If you harness the power of social influence marketing to change other parts of your business, you stand to gain the most. You can use SMM to mobilize groups of people to take specific actions, make marketers better corporate citizens, and further social change — and through those efforts, enhance a brand, too.

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 it different 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 discussed how the street protestors of the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) conference used websites, cellphones, 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.

More recently, in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without ...