Mueller & Co.

A Study in Social Media Power Dynamics – The Results of Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day

This post discusses what we learned about power dynamics in social media as a result of Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day. In summary, Ashton Kutcher was partly right — the little guy does have a voice, no matter how many followers they may have. And this voice has the potential to engage and influence others to take action. It is just that the voices of a “popular few” have much greater reach. The fact that we were unsuccessful does not mean that an individual with relatively little influence cannot generate a social media groundswell that could have viral impact on a mass scale but rather that this attempt did not succeed in achieving its stated goal. This was an imperfect experiment but nonetheless I believe we succeeded in demonstrating both the amazing democratizing effect of social media, as well as, its inherent power imbalances.

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