Opinion Leaders and Social Media

In my previous post, I discussed Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations (2010), and I mentioned the importance of opinion leaders and their roles in the social system. In this week’s discussion board in my Leadership and Media Strategies course, our professor asked us to answer the following questions:

• Does the existence of social media make it easier or more difficult to for someone to be an opinion leader?
• Opinion leaders know that their words and actions are under a higher level of scrutiny today because of the wide spread adoption of mobile cameras. A growing percentage of people always have a video camera on their smartphones and they are quick to post interesting (and embarrassing) items to YouTube. Should opinion leaders craft their messages for the social media with the thought of how it will play on YouTube?
• How can opinion leaders use the media, both traditional and social, to convey their message to the public?

Thinking about these questions got me thinking about the about the advantages and disadvantages of social media. Social media has come to play an important role in our lives, whether we want it to or not. All around us are advertisements and publications featuring the logos of the major social media websites, enticing us to “Like” a certain brand or product on Facebook, share a website through Google+, or view a video clip on YouTube. To the chagrin of some, social media is here to stay, and it’s up to society to take it and use it to its fullest potential. This is where opinion leaders come into play. I think opinion leaders have the greatest advantage with using social media because the other members of the social system look to them when deciding whether to adopt or reject an innovation.

To answer the first question, I believe the existence of social media makes it both easier and more difficult for someone to be an opinion leader. According to Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory, opinion leadership is “the degree to which an individual is able to influence other individuals’ attitudes or overt behavior informally in a desired way with relative frequency” (2010, p. 27). Opinion leaders, in turn, are those who “exemplify and express the social system’s structure,” because they are better qualified, they are better aware of our changing society, and they are more innovative (Rogers, 2010, p. 27). With these facts in mind, we can see how social media can be both beneficial and detrimental to opinion leaders.  

On one hand, social media provides opinion leaders outlets to reach larger audiences from different demographics. When we look at the power of blogs, we can see how bloggers develop a loyal readership through their abilities to relate to their readers’ lives. I’ve seen how people will read blogs and, because it relates to something in their own lives, make an effort to change a part or all of their lives to line up with what the bloggers write. I follow several natural hair, health, marriage, religious, and fitness bloggers and personalities, and many of the topics I’ve read about or viewed I’ve tried to incorporate into my own life. One of these blogs, Marriage Works! (http://www.marriageworks.us/blog.html), appeals to my desire for a healthy, Christ-based marriage. The writers, Kevin and Cetelia Bullard, write posts that are Bible-based and feature current issues that plight marriages along with advice to spouses on how to tackle these issues together as one. After reading the articles for this week, I better understand why I gravitated to blogs like this one and others: it was because they were trustworthy and credible, and they appealed to my interests. If it weren’t for social media, I wouldn’t have been as aware as I am about many of the issues I care to know and learn about. Social media allows opinion leaders to disseminate information to readers and consumers in a personal, relatable way versus in a didactic tone.

On the other hand, social media exposes opinion leaders to much criticism from members of the social system who don’t want the norms to be challenged or changed. In the article “Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities,” Kozinets, de Valck, Wojnicki, and Wilner explore how word-of-mouth marketing works in blogs. In their study, they found that when bloggers deviate from the established narrative of their blogs (i.e. the norm), many people feel alienated and betrayed, and they become critical. Unless the blogger can employ the appropriate narrative strategy, they risk losing their readers. They must “exhibit a consistent character narrative and conform to forum standards and communal norms” (Kozinets et al., 2010, p. 83). This article showed the importance of opinion leaders’ positions within the social system. It also showed how easy it is for opinion leaders to lose their positions if they don’t accommodate their readers’ own positions within the system. This leads me to answer the second question.

Because opinion leaders are at the center of the public eye, they must watch how they present themselves to the social system lest they jeopardize their credibility and trustworthiness and alienate their followers. With this in mind, I don’t believe opinion leaders should craft their messages for the social media. I know that I would readily spot a scripted message from one of my favorite bloggers or social media personalities, and this would cause me to look at them in a different light. I’ll use the article I mentioned in the previous paragraph. In their study, the researchers determined that when the bloggers deviated from their character narrative when marketing the product in question without any justification, their readers react negatively. They found that bloggers “need to balance inherent commercial-communal tensions while being consistent with the character elements of their ongoing narrative” (Kozinets et al., 2010, p. 86). In other words, the bloggers need to remain consistent with their blog’s style, namely when introducing new information to their readers.

When I think about the third question, the TED Talks video “How great leaders inspire action,” which was filmed in May 2010, comes to mind. (http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html). In the video, Simon Sinek explains how great leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Wright Brothers were able to persuade their followers to believe in their innovative ideas. He discusses the “golden circle,” which explains how our society communicates “from the outside in” (2010). He asserts, “People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe” (2010). I thought this video was very effective and relevant to the plight of traditional media outlets in remaining relevant. I say this because Sinek laid out the diffusion of innovation theory in such a way that explained how opinion leaders could work to convey their messages to the public concerning the problem of connecting traditional media and social media in an innovative way. As a society, we tend to focus on selling the “whats” and “hows” instead of the main product—“the whys” (2010).

Starbucks is a prime example of how opinion leaders can bridge the gap between traditional and social media to convey messages to the public. In the article “Starbucks Gets Its Business Brewing Again with Social Media,” Emily Bryson York (2010) shows how Starbucks rebranded itself in a sense by creating “a consumer relationship-building environment” by offering customers outlets of expression on its social media sites that would then lead these customers to its brick and mortar stores. Starbucks was able to influence its customers’ innovation-decision processes by becoming relatable to its customer base. Opinion leaders must be able to act as a mediator between the consumers and the businesses, understanding the needs of both sides and being able to cater to each one in way that is profitable to both sides. They must also be able to present the “whys” of traditional and social media and show how they can work together to communicate information to the masses.

References

Kozinets, R., de Valck, K., Wojnicki, A., & Wilner, S. (2010, March). “Networked narratives: Understanding word-of-mouth marketing in online communities.” Journal of Marketing, 74(2), 71-89. DOI: 10.1509/jmkg.74.2.71

Rogers, Everett. (2010). Diffusion of innovations. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=v1ii4QsB7jIC&source=gbs_slider_cls_metadata_2_mylibrary

Sinek, Simon. (2010, May). “How great leaders inspire action.” TED Conferences, LLC. Podcast retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html

York, Emily Bryson. (2010, February 22). “Starbucks gets its business brewing again with social media.” Retrieved from http://adage.com/article/special-report-digital-alist-2010/digital-a-list-2010-starbucks-brewing-social-media/142202/