viral social media
In latest social media a new phenomenon gives rise to a huge paradigm shift. It is about viral spread of news. Like in the ancient world of small villages and small indigenous cultures, where people were listening to the voices of other people and reacted to the news, we are now experiencing the same phenomenon on the global scale.Usually in the past the word of mouth caused an action to be undertaken to punish the villain, to fix the problem, to abide to the laws of the community. Sometimes this news was true, sometimes it was a lie, and depending on what it was, the action was just or totally wrong. Then we could call the word of mouth a micro effect. What we experience now in social media around the world is having a tremendous impact or macro effect because the village now is 7 billion people around the world or maybe less because not everybody has a computer access, but anyways - the world becomes indeed a small village. The ancient word of mouth is now at work again. People finally found a way to connect. Before the age of social media nobody would even know about the struggle of John and his dog Shoep.
But now all of the sudden millions of people could see and reacted to one photo that changed one lucky man and his dog's life. Amazing photo put online causing a huge reaction from people around the world.
A touching story behind this picture, prompts many people to take action and help the owner of a sick, old dog to get the laser treatment he needs to prolong his dog's life. The money starts pouring in and a foundation is created for the dog owners who can't afford expensive treatments to save the pets. This is just one of the examples of power of social media. Here is this piece of news
There are of course many other examples of the news spreading across the media like fire. Take the latest story about a harassed bus driver. Some make a lot of good impact. So what if the bus driver who was miserable all her life becomes a millionaire. Good for her:))
Some stories are fake, produced to accomplish the desired effect. Those are primarily the attempts to capture general public attention for gain. The bottom line here is that it is now up to people to decide and sieve the truth from lies. People are picking up the right vibes, and general public is not easy to be fooled. One of the good things happening is that no violent act of the governments or organizations can go unnoticed. Corporations can no longer harm local communities without the world being spread about it. All that goes wrong around the world is now recorded by somebody in blogs, forums, or on Facebook or you tube, and the little ripple changes into a huge wave.
Knowledge is indeed power. You can try to google the keyword "police brutality forums" for example and you will find thousand of entries with stories about it. But what makes a huge impact is one story that goes viral. Oftentimes a story that is shocking to people can go viral. The psychological implications of this is used by companies in advertizement like the video about a blender that chopped an I-Pod to pieces. This phenomenon gave the companies a new power to influence people, and we can argue if this is a positive or negative impact of the news go viral. From the business point of view if you can use this power of media you are definitely a winner. The whole new "science" of social media marketing is based on this new phenomenon.
I think you are right about how the power of the Groundswell's voice through social media is more powerful than one company's, political candidate's, etc. voice is. Your discussion highlights even more how important it is for organizations to listen to and talk with the Groundswell if they want to be successful. People are more likely to respond to the reactions of their peers. If you can tap into those relationships (by creating moving videos like the one in your post) then you are tapping into the power of the Groundswell.
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