Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

The Social Media is not a magical destination; rather, it’s a landscape in which human beings are doing what they’ve always done; being sociable, having conversations.

If there is a code to be cracked, then it’s quite simply how we, as marketers, disrupt these conversations, and manipulate the social agendas in a manner that benefits us, our clients and their products or services.

The Agenda Setting function of the media is not new – Shaw and McCombs introduced us to the theory as far back as the early 1970s, when they wrote that “Considerable evidence has accumulated that editors and broadcasters play an important part in shaping our social reality … this impact of the mass media – the ability to affect cognitive change among individuals, to structure their thinking – has been labelled the agenda setting function of the mass media. …the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about.” [Emphasis my own.]Quoted in Littlejohn, S.W, Theories of Human Communication, (USA, Wadsworth, 1983).

In essence the theory suggests that there is a direct correlation between the rate at which a message appears in the media and the importance that we ascribe to it. Say it often enough, loud enough and with enough conviction, and people begin to talk about it at the office water-cooler, at lunch, and, dare we say it, in Facebook, Twitter and the rest.

Put another way, the bigger the headline on the front page of the newspaper, the more likely we are to talk about it.

The goal of any advertiser, therefore, must be to get their message in front of as many people, as many times, as possible.

In old-school thinking this equated to multiple messages in multiple channels (TV, print, billboards, etc). 

The advantage of Social Media is that once we’ve seeded our message (assuming it’s interesting enough to garner attention), it (our message and by extension our agenda) is repeated over and over by our peers, thereby gaining salience. 

There’s another very important aspect to this, and that’s the issue of authority and believability. Messages in conventional media channels are given more or less credence based on our own perception of those channels (we’re more likely to take seriously a New Straits Times article than we are a tabloid expose). 

In the Social Media channels, the messaging is coming from the most trustworthy source we know – us, our friends, and those whose opinions we value.

The good news is that this approach ostensibly frees up resources to be spent on the creation of impactful assets, rather than being spent on expensive media placements.

And that’s good for everyone.