After working in domain of digital media for some time now, friends do ask me what am I actually doing! According to some people around me, “Social Media is a fad and a hyped terminology”. My suggestion to them is rather than asking whether its fad; assume that it is. And then reframe the question as “why is it a fad?” This will help get deeper into the social waters.
It has changed the way content is produced and distributed.
Production
It used to be that the ability to create content and distribute it to an audience was limited to individuals and organizations that owned the production facilities and infrastructure to do so. In other words: ‘the media’.
If you were in the video creation business, you were called TV. If you were in journalism, you were called newspaper. Moreover you need to employ thousands of highly skilled individuals to write, film, edit, design and broadcast your content through a relatively small number of channels to the public.
With the advent of the internet, precisely social media, it became possible for people to create their own content, be it images, words, video or audio. It was still beyond most people’s technical skills to maintain their own content creation only a few years ago. Today, individuals have power to start a content factory.
Distribution
While there were lots of content factories around, there were limited mediums of reaching out to relevant people. People didn’t bother to visit several blogs in a day and revisit them for some new and interesting content.
This is where Social Media did majority of its part. Distribution is today; managed through email subscriptions, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Facebook fan-pages, Twitter feeds etc.
People follow their favorite content factories via these beautiful distribution mechanisms which keeps them updated real time.
If, say, you have been selling and blogging about dogs for a good few months, and your posts have attracted links from other blogs, then a story about new government legislation on pet ownership on your blog may earn similar ranking for searches on that subject as the local newspaper or even national media. That’s when your business will reach levels where it may get difficult for you to manage cash inflows. Social media takes care of really penetrated distribution if you can create a remark-able content.
What’s your take on this ‘Social Media v/s Media’ topic?