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Social Media’s Impact On Marketing – Part 2: Re-Focusing Marketing Activities

February 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I talked about social media causing marketing to shift from messages to experiences. Today, I’ll take a closer look at how two very typical marketing activities—PR and advertising—have fared with the advent of the social web and how such developments underline the need to re-focus marketing activities.

Public Relations

PR is exactly what it stands for: Public Relations. It refers to people, relationships and a long-term commitment to building reciprocal value. Despite developments in the PR industry and a number of worst cases, the underlying premise of PR has never been about creative spin, email blasts with press releases or begging for publicity whenever a new product/service is launched.

In fact, the negative spiral in which some parties find themselves in will be detrimental to them. The increased levels of transparency and interactions spurred on by social media will force these parties to change their methods of working as “broadcasting to” becomes “interacting with”, “message” becomes “experience”, and “audience” becomes “conversation partners”.

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The “New” Media Cycle

January 18, 2010 By 7 Comments

This post is a response to a post by Lauren Fernandez where she argues that there’s no point in having “traditional media” and “new media” square off against each other. I agree, but this would be my shortest blog post ever if I kept it at that.

Instead, I’d like to focus on what the true relation is between various media. First of all, I don’t want to distinguish between “traditional media” and “new media” much–and as Lauren pointed out, they influence each other–but there are some clarifications needed that help set up the framework:

  • Traditional Media Television, radio, newspapers, et cetera. The relationship between these media and their consumers is mostly uni-directional, they send, you receive.
  • New Media Blogs, social bookmarking sites, video websites, et cetera. The relationship between these media and their consumers is mostly bi-directional or even multi-directional. They send, you reply or you send and they publish.
  • Reach This is not significantly different between either “traditional media” or “new media”. Whether it’s circulation, RSS readers, followers, fans or ratings, media has reach.
  • Distribution This is a similar story to Reach, where the first-degree consumers are able to distribute the content from the media source to second-degree consumers–and second-degree consumers can pass it on to third-degree consumers and so on–regardless of which type of media we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a retweet, an email forward or a mention of “Have you read today’s headline?” or “Did you watch the 8 o’clock news last night?” at the water cooler.

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Filed Under: Musings Tagged With: , ,

The Evolution of Content

January 20, 2008 By

We’ve come a long way in how content is being presented. Whereas content used to be published by predominantly professionals, consumers are now able to publish content themselves. The form of content has also evolved from a more broadcasting-oriented form to a more dialogue-oriented form.

Traditional media, such as TV stations and print publishers, are seeing consumption decline as consumers choose consume their content from a more diverse set of channels. Traditional media agencies, such as advertising agencies and PR agencies, are scrambling to keep up and justify their value/existence/involvement. Sometimes, the old business models won’t work in this new day and age, sometimes the talent isn’t available to deal with new media forms or the current regime is reluctant to change or in denial about the consequences. None of these are good reasons to continue “business as usual”. The world is changing and it requires a new approach.

Start preparing yourself to cope with the evolution of content.

Filed Under: Musings Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

The Future Of Press Releases

September 16, 2007 By

I’ve recently been given a book which describes how to write a press release. I have to admit that—until now—I never paid much attention to press releases. Maybe ignorance was bliss, but I do feel grateful for realizing that most of them are basically full of crock.

This is roughly the basic layout for a press release:

  • First paragraph: Provides answers to the questions who, what, where and when
  • Second paragraph: Elaborates on the why and the how
  • Third paragraph: Adds more context/history to the press release subject
  • Fourth paragraph: Contains quotes from involved people
  • Fifth paragraph: Provides some additional (non) essential information

It’s all very elementary but the advent of a more consumer-powered media culture makes the press release seem old-fashioned. While press releases are sent to the media, the media aren’t the target audience. The consumers are and the media are only a channel.

There is a case to be made for renaming “press releases” to “community releases” that spark both consumer (community) involvement and interactivity. People will have questions about your press release. Why not open up a channel towards them and start the dialogue with them? This might sound like more work, but think of it this way: you can focus a large part of the conversation to a single point, a single point that you control.

Empower your consumers to talk to you. Empower them to talk about you.

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