Dune: This theory is based on the roles of mass media, leaders opinions and also the audience. It gains popularity over time. This theory believes that the mass media had a tone of impact on people and that the diffusion of information goes through opinion leaders before reaching the audience. So the mass media are maybe not the only to disseminate information. So what happened concretely? It’s simple, the mass media inform leaders opinion who follow the news on politics, economy or any subjects very closely. Then they decide what is important for them and they talk about it. So they spread this information and people listen to them because they simply trust them. More and more people prefer to listen to someone in whom they trust but there are less and less people who really follow the mass media. The problem is that leaders opinions picked up in the flow of massive information what they judged good to reveal or not. For example, you can think to influencers sphere. These people have a lot of followers who listen to them. This is how we can see the success of Fortnite. The creator of the game going to spend a lot of marketing money to make influencers promote the game.
Alison: The Two step flow theory highlights the fact that people are not sensitive to media messages especially when the message is from a media and not other people. For example, voters choose to vote for a candidate for nomination because of their entourage and not for the speech candidates can make on TV.
So information handover by speaking can be good. People can relate information to other people who don’t know. But sometimes, information can be biased by the opinion of the transmitting or the person can forget some details. So the information is skewed or totally wrong.
The whole idea of social media is based on the fact that people can relate information around the world especially on Twitter. Young people are always on social media, that permit them to be informed of what happened with one hashtag. Which goes to show, social media can relate information from person to person or from tv to social media.
Direct information transmission is less efficient than when people give their opinion. We can note that with the black lives matter movement. Indeed, people posted photos and videos and they explained their anger and their opinion about this subject. So the movement was more important and impactful on social media than on tv.
Marie: The Two Step flow theory is a huge matter in politics, including elections for example in the 2017 UK general Prime Minister Teresa May did not take part in an election debate with six other party leaders. An opinion leader may have watched the debate and then told their friends who did not watch the debate that the Prime Minister bottled out as she was scared to debate with the other leaders. During the American election this theory was also something to take into consideration, indeed after Barack Obama election back in 2008, a survey showed that Oprah Winfrey brought 1M votes for Obama. Needless to say that this is to take with caution, but it can show the power of it.
To conclude, this theory is important to public relations professionals because they must take opinion leaders into consideration while creating campaigns. They must also work with the opinion leaders and use them to help bypass the media. Audiences and opinion leaders are two of the most important parts of public relations and the two-step flow theory affects them in a way that cannot be ignored.