The Nature of Network Influence (Week 3 reading synopsis)

What is network influence? To understand network influence we first need to understand what influence is in general. Put simply, influence is the ability to drive people to action.

In the online world, influence moves much more rapidly than in the real world. Opinions and attitudes can change at the drop of a hat online. Businesses can use social networks to influence consumers to spread good word of mouth about their products. This bolsters a company’s reputation and can result in higher profits. Influence can also go the other way with companies being influenced by their consumers’ feedback about how to improve their products and services.

Popularity and influence are two different things. Popularity is exposure in the online world, Influence is the ability to make people take action. In order to influence people online, a company needs to forge trust and establish a connection with consumers over social networks. Popularity is not enough to drive people to action.

Influence, at its core, is a personal interaction between the company and the consumer. Social media is the tool to forge those personal connections with individuals.

Organizations need to remember that automation is no substitute for real human interaction on social media platforms. Automation should only be used on social platforms for tasks that require repetitive, mechanized interaction. Automation is a way to free up more time and resources to devote to human interaction with the consumer. Real people, not artificial intelligence, need to engage with the online community.

Content must be custom-tailored to each social media platform. What works on youtube, for instance, will not necessarily work on twitter. Content cannot simply be mass-distributed. It must be crafted and delivered to individual social media platforms and their respective communities.

Algorithms and artificial intelligence can never replace genuine human engagement. Social media is all about this concept: human engagement. By having a real two-way dialogue with your consumer, you build your brand’s reputation and influence.

Strategy vs Tactics in the Business World

What is strategy? What are tactics? What differentiates them? In this post we will define strategy and tactics as they relate to the business world primarily, but strategy and tactics can be used by any organized entity, including non-profits and governments.

Put very simply, tactics are the things you do to achieve your strategy, strategy is the plan that is formulated to achieve broader organizational goals (Seager par. 2). More specifically,  Let’s look at an example of strategy and tactics in action to make these two concepts more understandable. A strategy of Seneca College might be to raise awareness about its social media program to the general public. A tactic to achieve this goal could be to make students create a viral video to release on youtube. A strategy of H&M might be to increase overall sales. A tactic would be to use the social media site, Foursquare, to offer consumers incentives to shop at H&M by checking in at any location and receiving discounts on clothing.

Jeremiah Owyang states that strategy and tactics must work in tandem or else the organization will not be able to achieve its goals: “If you have strategy without tactics you have big thinkers and no action. If you have tactics without strategy, you have disorder” (par. 4). Steve Seager says that most small to medium sized businesses do not have a strategy (par. 2). Because they don’t have a focused plan to achieve their broader goals, they only have tactics, which on their own, aren’t very useful (Seager par.2). Michael Porter, in his speech at the Leaders in London Summit, stated that companies often confuse tactics with strategy, and because of this, the tactics they use often lead the company over a cliff because they have no aim and no focus (What Strategy Is). An example of this would be Blackberry, a company that ignored the market trends and had no clearly defined strategy. Their tactics remained the same while the smartphone landscape transformed around them, and they were left in the dust.

Now we understand that strategy and tactics are two very different concepts, however they must work in conjunction to achieve success for an organization. Implementing one without the other results in failure for the organization.

Works Cited

• Owyang, Jeremiah. “The Difference between Strategy and Tactics”. 14 January 2013. <http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2013/01/14/the-difference-between-strategy-and-tactics/>.
• Porter, Michael. “What Strategy Is”. Leaders in London Summit. 2-4 December 2008. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibrxIP0H84M&gt;.
• Seager, Steve. “Strategy & tactics: what’s the difference? And the relationship?” 3 April 2011 <http://www.steveseager.com/strategy-and-tactics-whats-the-difference-and-the-relationship/&gt;.
  

Week 2 Readings synopsis

The first article, “Choosing the Right Social Platform for High Quality Engagment”, addresses the need for brands to engage with their consumers in the right way on the right social media platforms. It offers advice to companies on how to engage with consumers properly online. The Social Web has given the consumer much more power over brands than they had before. To raise a brand’s reputation, companies need to communicate with their consumers online and address their concerns and queries. With the rise of sites like pinterest and instagram, image-based marketing is more important than ever. However companies need to beware the way they use imagery as it is more open to misinterpretation by consumers who might not understand the idea that the brand is trying to communicate.  Twitter is by far the most popular Social Media platform, and the one that companies must use to engage with their consumers. A humourous, informative, and helpful tone is the most effective way to engage consumers on twitter. The most important thing is that companies realize that technology comes second to the human element of communication. Communicating with consumers in a genuine, human way over the social web is crucial to success. When this is mastered, it can be applied to any social media platform.

The next article, “How Governments are Using Social Media for Better and for Worse” discusses the ways in which governments are adopting social media to connect with their communities. American politicians are using social media to converse with their constituents to varying degrees of success. Barack Obama has managed to use social media very effectively, while Anthony Weiner famously destroyed his political career using social media. In Canada it is becoming widely acknowledged that social media is a mandatory tool for politicians to engage with the public. Social media is being used in electoral campaigns as well as to affect government policy. Russia is very involved in social media. It has the most engaged social networking audience in the world. President Dmitri Medvedev even created his own twitter account to engage with the public. The government is also using social media to get the public’s input on new policy and laws. Censorship and control of social media is proving to be an issue even in robust democracies like France and the UK. In China, people are finding ways to get around social media restrictions. In the Middle East, social media is being used to organize protests against corrupt governments. The article concludes by saying that governments are still trying to figure out how best to use social media to engage with the public and achieve their goals. There are no clear answers, but social media is not going away anytime soon.

 

The third and final article, “Nonprofits: Drive behaviour with social media”, talks about the ways that nonprofits use social media to advance their causes. At their core, nonprofits seek to alter people’s behaviour in altruistic ways, whether that’s getting people to volunteer, donate money, or change their lifestlye in support of a cause. Social media provides a new platform to get people to support nonprofits. By highlighting a person’s altruistic behaviour on social media, you encourage them and their friends to support the cause. For example, Facebook honoured organ donors, by giving them the ability to mention their organ donor status in their profile. By giving people the incentive to raise their status on social networks, nonprofits can encourage people to donate, volunteer, fundraise, and so on. And when people mention the nonprofit on their social networks, they raise the profile of the nonprofit itself, thereby giving the organization more exposure.