Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web

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We live in a world of exponentially increasing information which we can't consume anymore. Consequently, we gradually increase our reliance on our social networks to make decisions. In other words, people spend less time interacting with content, and more time communicating with other people.

What role do the social networks, and especially Facebook and LinkedIn play in this transformation? How can we leverage them to grow our business?

Paul combines product design experience at Google and Facebook with an outstanding skill to lay out complex topics in a simple and easily understandable language. That unique combination of experience and skill ideally positions him to write a book about social networks and about the best ways to use them for business growth.

He makes three key points that have profound implications:

The Web is being rebuilt around people and moving away from being built around content.We can now measure social interaction.Independent small groups of friends determine how people are influenced (not the influencers).

The application of Paul's points to marketing and advertising are straightforward: Permission-based marketing trumps traditional advertising or interruption-driven marketing. Precise peer-to-peer based advertising is the most effective and efficient advertising. Marketing campaigns need to support conversations instead of merely sharing content. Advertising content must rely on people remembering relationships and not - details. For example, using experts in marketing campaigns can lead to over-promising and under-delivering.

On the other hand, effective permission marketing seeds multiple groups with ideas and avoids targeting a few trendsetters. It focuses on emotional arousal and gaining trust through word-of-mouth endorsement. Marketers need to focus on preparing content that is "shareworthy," customizing data around people's social connections, reinforcing their message by having multiple people within the same group repeat it, and then showing others' behaviour to influence people.

A separate chapter focuses on helping people change their behaviour:

Change people environment: trying new things in a new environment is easierMinimize cost of change - break it into small manageable tasks making the new behaviour easier to perform, and so more likely to be repeated and therefore forming a new habit.Ensure that people observe others doing the desired behaviour and then see the rewards

Other ideas focus around choice reduction and helping people to feel that they are getting something for free and now.

All-in-all, a great and concise book for marketing professionals and business owners looking for modern ways to grow their business.

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