Social Media Marketing

Content

• Social Media versus Industrial Media
• Social Media Advantages
• Social Media Difficulties
• Literature

Social Media versus Industrial Media

Numerous media experts have pointed out that we're witnessing a democratization¹ of the media landscape. Consumers have turned into users and producers — and web 2.0 technologies enable everyone to cheaply or freely create their own media channel — facebook profiles, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, microblogs. Industrial media placed media power in the hands of few people — newspaper owners, broadcast companies, national radios. The democratization process leads to proliferation which, in turn, leads to clutter.

Technorati analyses have shown that in three months periods last year (2008) 7 million blogs were created — the blogs contained 900,000 posts — in one 24 hour period.

Attention has become a scarcity. If one subscribes to a mild kind of linguistic determinism, it could be argued that by changing how we communicate — and how information can be aggregated, syndicated, dissemminated & analyzed — we change society.

A McCann survey has shown that 83% watch video clips on a regular basis. 78% read blogs. 57% are members of social networks. The percentage of RSS users has grown from 15% to 39% in a year. Podcast have become mainstream.

The attention battle is going on between the search engines, offering contextual and relevant results, the social networks offering collaboration & social proof platforms and the recommendation engines offering powerful endorsement platforms.

Industrial Media

• Writing writers.
• Limited number of media channels.
• Editorial control.
• High barrier of entry.
• Passive consumers.
• Expert proof.
• Expert intelligence.

Social Media

• Writing readers.
• Proliferation of media channels.
• Messages take on lives of their own.
• Low barrier of entry.
• Active user producers.
• Social proof.
• Collective intelligence.

Keywords — social media, traditional media, industrial media, web 2.0, media channels, democratization, clutter, attention economy, information dissemmination

Social Media Advantages

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Social Media Difficulties

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Literature

Benkler, Yochai The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom 2006.
Gilmore, Dan We the Media, 2004.
Rosen, Jay The People Formerly Known as the Audience, 2006.

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More about social media marketing here (in Danish) - Social Media Marketing

Footnotes

1. "What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action - specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies - plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy" Benkler, Yochai (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.