Virality

#29: Citizen Marketers and the Bernie Sanders Campaign on Social Media, with Dr. Joel Penney

Dr. Joel Penney, Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University, discusses his new book “The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age“. The book explores how everyday citizens actively assist in the promotion of political messages through their social media activity, following logics of viral marketing to enact persuasion at a peer-to-peer level. Dr. Penney shares his research on the Bernie Sanders campaign and the role that citizens played on social media, and Facebook in particular, to help the campaign get out its message through official and unofficial channels.