Aliens, hobbies, and strikes: social media manifestation as social influence

This post will be about media, new media, social media. Of course we know or believe these have immense persuasive (and pervasive) effects on people. There is a vast amount of advertising linked to these media, for instance. Remember: the services are free and if something is for free, than you are actually the product and not the genuine consumer. Viewed from another, social psychological, perspective, I will describe in this blogpost how these media are also persuasive katalysts that do not have an offline equivalent. The core of the argument will be that social media nowadays (such as facebook and twitter) actually give some insight about the prevalence of previously covert behaviors or opinions and this insight will lead to higher proliferation of these behaviors and opinions.

How "frictionless" is killing its darlings

One of the next hypes in social media will be frictionless sharing (see, e.g., Polle de Maagt). Whereas traditional sharing is fun and social, but cumbersome or time-consuming, frictionless sharing implies automatic sharing activities. In fact, lots of social network users are already sharing frictionless. For instance, with an automated link between LinkedIn or Facebook and Twitter, or with an automated Spotify sharing on one's Facebook account. Marketers now seem to massively dig into the frictionless idea, presumably because the less cumbersome sharing could increase eWOM (electronic Word-Of-Mouth). Or maybe they are just creating future job opportunities, because frictionless sharing might, in the longer term, kill a lot of the appeal of social networks to marketers.