Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Basic Books). He discusses 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.
In a seminal book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (Penguin Press), Clay Shirky also focuses on the power of organizing and influencing using social technologies. As he explains, every web page can be considered 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 protests around the world at a time when the official government channels of communication 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.
More recently, on March 20, 2014, the Turkish government blocked Twitter following 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 wildfire 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 government 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 influence. 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 protestors was even more central to the protest than it had been in any other mobilization 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 philosophies to achieve other corporate objectives as well. We discuss those marketing philosophies further in Chapters 3 and 22.
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.
But why causes in particular? The causes have all the ingredients to make a successful social media marketing effort. They are usually time bound, have broad appeal, and are subjects that people like to discuss with each other. Marketers who tap into causes see their brands benefiting from the halo effect by being associated with important social concerns and by gaining visibility with much larger audiences than they normally would have. If you’re a marketer, it bodes well to directly support a cause, encourage its supporters to harness social media marketing tactics, or sponsor it indirectly. Even better, it makes sense to market your own cause efforts using social media marketing tactics in a measurable fashion.
Procter & Gamble (one of the largest consumer-goods companies in the world) organized a social media education session for all its marketers. But instead of having a series of presentations by employees, P&G invited social media experts to visit its headquarters. The company divided the social media experts into teams and paired them with the company’s own marketers. The teams were tasked with raising money for Tide’s Loads of Hope disaster relief campaign using social media platforms to sell T-shirts. (The Loads of Hope website is shown in Figure 1-7.) The winning team raised $50,000, and Tide matched that team’s contribution. Through this effort, P&G positioned itself as a better corporate citizen, raised money for a good cause, and was able to educate its marketers about the potential of social media by actually practicing social media marketing. Some detractors argued that this was just a one-day effort that got more attention than it deserved, but the fact that so much money was raised in so little time is admirable.
FIGURE 1-7: Tide’s Loads of Hope.
Social graphs for social change
There’s more to social causes than your ability to amplify your efforts around causes using social media marketing tactics. A larger change is afoot that demands attention, even if it doesn’t directly relate to your objectives. The web allows individuals to financially support a cause at the very moment that they’re inspired and then encourage their friends who reside
