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Redefining ‘Media’ in the Social Web

April 22nd, 2009

Great article in Advertising Age today discussing the fact that brands need to continue to be creative and open with paid media.  Product advertising has evolved from companies ‘pushing’ a brand message to their customers through a one-way exchange to a model where the customer plays a formative role in a brand’s success.  With adding the ‘social’ label/ability to traditional media and advertising, companies are giving their customers a ‘voice’ in the advocacy of their brand – thereby relying on loyal customers to continue to elevate the status of that brand through word of mouth and their personal network.  In effect, by creating openness in paid media efforts, companies are leveraging unpaid customer advocacy to make those paid branding efforts work harder…Best said in the following quote:

Putting the “media” back into “social media” allows us to reconfigure our priorities from merely reaching consumers with a message to providing them with enough value to augment that message’s quality. By rethinking our media planning and buying strategies, we can make initial impressions work hard to engage the consumer, while the secondary, organic impressions work even harder to create more organic engagements. And when we become comfortable with our paid media generating organic media, we will then realize that the social web is not the enemy, but the best friend we could possibly ever have.

Done right, an advertising campaign that leverages the promotion of it’s customer’s ‘voice’ can scale the reach of a modestly funded advertising campaign to levels it never could have afforded through relying on paid media alone.

Advertising, Social Media

  1. Jmatt
    April 22nd, 2009 at 14:50 | #1

    +1. When media & marketing can transparently add value good things happen. “Good things” in this case meaning additional earned (free) media from people who connect with the execution and share it with their own voice.

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