Whither Traditional Media?

I can bet that if you are to ask a business owner where to find people with expertise to help their business, they are likely to trust a recommendation by a friend rather than an ad in the newspaper or on the yellow page listings where everyone claims to be the best. Word of mouth. That’s the best way of getting business nowadays. That’s the term that that, in my opinion, is the main distinction between Social/New Media and Traditional Media.

Time and again it has been said that social media is word of mouth on steroids. An umbrella name pulling together blogs, wikis, online discussion fora or chat rooms and a host of other internet communities, Social Media indeed brings with it the power of community: trusted friends and contacts from whom you would take advice. By merely logging in to any of the internet sites, I can find people I trust (and choose from a broad range of them, depending on the topic).  I can vet them and test what they have to say to see if they meet my criteria for meaning. I can hardly do this with traditional media which stuffs information for me and leaves with virtually no choice.

A hard fact it may sound but in this new digitalized world, monologue has given way to dialog, professionals to amateurs. You can agree with me that nowadays we seem more likely to trust in the words of bloggers than in any 'official information' we receive. Authenticity seems to be the key.

It is little wonder that in 2010, the Internet passed newspapers for the first time as the platform where Americans “regularly” get news, according to survey data from the Pew Research Center. The research further found out that forty-six percent of adults say they go online for news at least three times a week, as opposed to 40 percent who read newspapers that often. Only local television news is a more popular destination, at 50 percent.

This was also followed by a recent survey by Gartner Inc Analysts which said that newspapers are faced with declining circulations, falling offline and online revenue, and competition from digital sources, but are failing to capitalize on their biggest supporters, their readers. Food for thought, huh?

But does the above come as a surprise to you? Not very much to me especially considering the apparent fact that while Traditional Media is still busy pushing content to consumers, Social Media does the opposite as consumers pull the content they want. With an effective social media plan in place and if you provide a product or service that interests people, they will find you; that is if you make yourself available, hence the term “inbound marketing” was coined.

Traditional and Social Media both aim to communicate, do they differ that much?

Definitely yes. Loads of information is available now, especially when it comes to benefits of using of using both traditional and social/new media. But I would like us to further compare and contrast the two by looking at their characteristics and limitations.

A good starting point should be to point out the fact that both have almost the same structure as the goal is to communicate. Both use a channel hence fall under the mass media category; both strive to serve almost the same target audience; both rely on content/source of information and both are influential to various degree.

But make no mistake; Traditional media still remains the king because of its trustworthiness. Recent studies have indicated that about 40% of consumers don’t trust online news, until they see it in traditional media and this is a staggering percentage. But the owners of traditional media can’t sit on their laurels because an emerging study has also indicated that technology giants such as Google, Apple and Microsoft are becoming more trusted than traditional news media. Otherwise traditional media remains informative and educative; it always has rich content and yes, reaches a lot of people, more than social media.

The networking nature of social media

However, the other side of the Traditional Media coin is that it is mostly one way delivery; it has high level of noise; it is expensive to operate and consume and is obviously less engaging than Social Media as it still sticks to its old-fashioned top down approach, mainly because of having numerous gate-keepers.

Social media on the other hand is credited for encouraging participation and having a specific community where it is easier to exchange ideas online. This means that it follows the bottom up approach as the gate-keepers are mostly eliminated and it’s the users who set the agenda, hence it is always said that social media creates opportunities for people and companies to listen to and engage an audience in a two-way conversation.   

It should also be pointed out that much as there is shared content with social media as information can easily go viral, you need to have an authentic voice as part of community, you need to be part of the conversation and you also need to be extremely creative if your product or service is to go viral. But the good thing is that social media is cheap and creates opportunities to communicate in personal, authentic and transparent ways hence others have coined the expression “it allows you to lift up your skirt a little bit.”

In general, the gap between social and traditional media continues to widen, often in favour of the former. Social media engages hence it’s a community of like-minded people that believes that “together, we are smarter, stronger and faster.” It allows collaboration and communication with great people across the country that you likely may not meet. BUT it should always be noted that social media is not an answer to everything. It is just a channel and should be one element of a larger and integrated communication strategy.

Check the following link and video for more:

Using Social Media in Public Relations (PR 2.0)

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