Page 143 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

The Impact of Word of Mouth and the Facilitative Effects of Social Media 135

company to consumer, or consumer to consumer. Underpinning this
transactional perspective is the need to understand how information is
exchanged between individuals in a network. The key to how information
diffuses through a given population was revealed by two seminal papers
appearing in the literature within nine months of each other and with vir-
tually the same title: “The Strength of Weak Ties” (Granovetter, 1973) and
“The Strength in Weak Ties” (Liu & Duff, 1972). These papers provide a
theoretical foundation to explain how micro-level interactions affect mac-
rolevel phenomena by examining interpersonal “tie” strength defined as
“the potency of the bond between members of a network” (Mittal,
Huppertz, & Khare, 2008). Granovetter (1973) argued that the “strength”
of an interpersonal tie is a function of the amount of time, the emotional
intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services that
characterize the relationship. “Weak ties” are characterized by relation-
ships that are tenuous or even random; such individuals, if known, are
known only in passing. Conversely, “strong ties” represent the individual’s
personal networks, including family, friends, and co-workers. The premise
of these papers was that while one might expect that communication
would flow more easily between individuals who share similar attitudes
and beliefs, such communication may be largely redundant because it pre-
sumably does not introduce any new information into the system (Liu &
Duff, 1972). Both authors hypothesized that for the diffusion of new infor-
mation to take place, some “heterophilous” relationships must exist; that
is, the tie between communicators had to be weak. In other words, for an
idea to flow completely through a given population, it must challenge the
tendency for it to be contained within a specific subnetwork or group.
This can only happen if it encounters an entity that has ties with distant
networks or weak ties with the group. As Liu and Duff (1972) explained:

Homophilous communication has structural limitations to diffusion, so that
information tends to re-circulate among those who already possess the same
information. Heterophilous communication, seemingly facilitated by the
weak ties of neighborliness between some members of different socio-
economic classes, allows new ideas to enter the network of homophilous
relationships, where such ideas and information were hitherto unavailable.
(p. 366)

Today’s social media, including Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
YouTube, and the like, facilitate the prevalence of weak ties between indi-
viduals because people in all walks of life can interact with each other in
these venues, sharing stories, experiences, information, and beliefs.