This week's
Leadership and Emerging Media’s class readings covered what, at first glance,
appeared to be a scattershot of subjects.
These topics ranged from: using social media to improve sales; a full
PhD dissertation on using network analysis to identify opinion leaders;
understanding how many friends one has in their social sphere; to word-of-mouth
marketing; with a couple of TEDTalks included for good measure and digital
relevancy. Having provided that list as
a baseline here is what I have deduced with regards to opinion leaders and
their use of interpersonal and social media communications: Word-of-Mouth (from
now on referred to as WOM), or as Okazaki describes in “Social Influence Model and Electronic Word of Mouth” (2009) the
“person-to-person information exchange” is the diffusion communication king.
Mass media is
still able to ignite a buzz and bring awareness to an innovation, service or
message through encouraging a perceptual change in people. It is, however, the opinion leaders that
encourage a behavioral change in others through interpersonal and social media
communications (Kim, 2007). WOM is the
latest and greatest communication tool for the diffusion job. This combination of interpersonal and social
media influence is exactly what Emily York mentioned in her article, “Starbucks Gets Its Business Brewing Again with
Social Media”. York provides details
about, “how the company turned around sales by finding the ‘intersection
between digital and physical’” (2010).
They didn’t find a place per se, they found an online and offline
community and diffused various messages to the opinion leaders within it and
let WOM do the rest. Starbucks is by no
means the only entity developing and employing the WOM model with a targeted opinion
leadership strategy.
One of the
readings was a piece about Ford Motors and their similar approach with the launch
of a Ford Fiesta Movement. The article, “Ford launches the Fiesta Movement, But Is
It Really Just a Campaign” (Collier, 2009) points to capitalizing on
opinion leaders as change agents using WOM.
In this scenario, Ford is using the connectedness of opinion leaders in
the social networking world to attach to their WOM campaign. But here is the intersection, these opinion
leaders in the digital world also have an interpersonal connectedness in their
social world.
So when considering this intersection and the
use of WOM as a seed, an image of a garden comes to my mind. The seeds of innovation and ideas are first
planted by the marketing entity and then tended to by the opinion leaders
within their respective social network, their community gardens. A community garden is much like the network
coproduction model mentioned by Kozinets, de Valck, Wilner, and Wojnicki (2010)
in “Networked Narratives: Understanding
Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities”. The marketer distributes the seed, the
“direct influence” to the opinion leader, who is now deemed a consumer and lead
gardener if you will. They in turn use
their credibility and communal interests to share the seed in their social
network community garden. All consumers
a.k.a. workers within that community garden, that social network, work together
by sharing these messages through both interpersonal and digital WOM. Results for the efficacy of WOM in the garden
are in and they are good, really good.
Support was found for just how good in a recent, January 2016, article
by Marcdavid Cohn aptly titled, “40+
Word-of-Mouth Marketing Statistics You Should Know.” I urge you to give this article a read because
according to the numbers WOM is indeed like a marketing “MiracleGro”. The social network community gardens are
growing like crazy.
Case in
point, I happen to be a United States Air Force veteran and a proud one at that,
so I have some vested interest, a communcal concern, in caring about and
sharing with my segment of that community.
Here is the scenario, there is a national non-profit organization named
VetTix and about a year ago the message got to me about some of the services
they provide. So when this WOM was diffused to me via a shared personal story I
learned of the VetTix existence. I felt
like I needed to know more about the organization and what they represented,
now I know that I needed to know their “why”.
See Simon Sinek describe the “why” in his wildy successful TEDTalk on
“How Great Leaders Inspire Action” (2010). During my due diligence I learned that VetTix
started when the founders realized just how many empty seats were always at
various sporting and entertainment events.
This organization serves a liaison
between event ticket donors (both corporate and private) and military active-duty
and service veterans.
Now that I
had the why I was ready to buy in to their organization. I completed the required application and have
had several of my own personal experiences with their ticket distribution
process. All of these experiences have
been favourable and all of them were shared by every social media platform I
subscribe to, as well as, interpersonal WOM within my own physical social
world.
After sharing
my personal WOM experience I’d like to mention that yes I’m fully aware of the
attribution theory and my own humanistic basic need to explain and relate my
story. That is the very beauty of WOM,
we as humans inevitably want to share and belong to something bigger and
collectively better. Kozinets et al.
(2010) summed it up with, “…successful WOM depends on the transformation…to
relevant, useful, communally desirable social information that builds
individual reputations and group relationships”. Within the WOM framework, we as individual
consumers and as members of common network gardens, are able to share our
narratives and in so doing share our “why”s.
Last but not
least, I’m going to start ending each blog with a “bonus share”. Something that I come across during the week’s
reading/research and feel is blog-share worthy.
This week it is all about Mr. Simon Sinek. First, there is a sign-up website to receive
a Sinek – “Start with why - daily dose of inspiration” email or
newsletter. Here it is: https://www.startwithwhy.com/Newsletter.aspx. Next there is a Simon Sinek “Why Discovery
Course” in which Sinek himself will serve as your “interactive video guide” to
help uncover, explore, name and frame your Why statement. I mention this because it is a) interesting
to me, and b) associated fees aren’t crazy expensive, but also c) back to my
veteran community garden. At the very
bottom of the webpage there is a “Salute to Service” discount for active duty members
and veterans. With confirmation of service
the “Why Discovery Course” is reduced to $10 vice the standard fee of
$129. If interested visit: https://www.startwithwhy.com/LearnYourWhy.aspx.
Strategically Yours,
Autumn
WORKS CITED:
Cohn, M.D.
(2016, January 21). 40+ Word of
Mouth Marketing Statistics You Should Know.
Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/40-word-of-mouth-marketing-statistics-you-should-know-marcdavid-cohn.
Collier, M .
(2009, May 29). Ford Launches
Fiesta Movement, But Is It Really Just a Campaign. Retrieved from http://mackcollier.com/ford-launches-the-fiesta-movement-but-is-it-really-just-a-campaign.
Kim, D. K. (2007).
Identifying Opinion Leaders Using Social Network Analysis: A Synthesis
of Opinion Leadership Data Collection Methods and Instruments (Doctoral
dissertation). Retrieved from https://etd.ohiolink.edu/rws_etd/document/get/ohiou1186672135/inline.
Kozinets, R.V., de Valck, K., Wilner, S.J. & Wojnicki,
A.C. (2010). Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in
Online Communities. Journal of Marketing, 74, 71-89. doi:10.1509/jmkg.74.2.71
Okazaki, S. (2009).
Social Influence Model and Electronic Word of Mouth. International Journal of
Advertising, 28, 439-472. doi:10.2501/S0265048709200692
Sinek, S. (2010,
May). How Great Leaders Inspire Action [Video File] Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en
