Social Media Marketing Campaigns — learnings from war

Effective use of coercive persuasion in social media brand campaigns.

Lots of useful things come out of wars and military technology…the internet is a good example. There are also things to learn about how to persuade from the compliance techniques used in war camps.

American Prisoners of War (POW), held by the Chinese during the Korean War, were subjected to an extremely effective form of communist brainwashing, termed coercive persuasion.

POW essays

The American POWs were encouraged to enter essay competitions organized by their Chinese captors. Although the winning essays were sometimes pro-American, bias towards Communism and anti-American sentiment was usually rewarded. Rewards were usually fairly small, but still valuable (such as a pack of cigarettes) and the essay competitions were voluntary. The written proof of these pro-communist/anti-American concepts had the following mind-bending effects:

• It was material that could be used to convince other American POWs to change their ideals
• It was material that could be used to convince the writer them-self at a later stage of a change to their ideals
• As the essays were voluntary with a fairly small potential reward, there was no evidence down the line that the writer had been coerced to write their statements

Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Marketers can apply the same coercive techniques to their social media campaigns by getting consumers to write short positive pieces of sentiment about their brand for the potential of a small prize. By doing this, the consumer convinces them-self of the brand’s benefits and convinces others too.

The Memory Machine

Before making this link between coercive persuasion and social media marketing, our agency created the Memory Machine. Users had to tweet a memorable experience connected to the brand, which was then printed onto a postcard. Some lucky postcards were instant prize winners of small prizes.

To think we could have been pushing communism instead!

References:

I made this link while reading this excellent book: Influence by Robert Cialdini