Читать книгу Social Media Marketing For Dummies - Shiv Singh - Страница 44

Consumers have always been heavily influenced by each other when they make purchasing 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, microblogging solutions, location-based networked mobile phone applications, and even virtual worlds make it possible for consumers to influence each other more directly and dramatically 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 consumers, 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.

3 Turn customers into brand advocates.And finally, after a consumer becomes a customer, deepen your relationship with her so that the customer becomes a brand advocate. That’s not a new strategy, except that now you can ask her to take specific actions within her social networks as a brand advocate. Rather than just ask her to talk about your product, you can have her actually reach out to her peers and then reward her for her participation.