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No Mo Social Media?

Steve Rubel declares "social media" is dead. Long live social media!

Steve's post makes the case that there has been so much convergence between "mainstream" and "social" media, that the distinction is no longer meaningful.

He is a bit extreme in saying there's no longer a distinction, but the trend is absolutely correct. Which means that it makes no sense to focus on blog analysis to the exclusion of "traditional" media. To understand the full set of influences that shape peoples' opinions, marketers and PR people must track the full spectrum and understand the interplay of influences.

Posted by Jim Nail on December 29, 2006 at 03:39 PM | Email this post Permalink

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Comments

Matthew,
I agree they must be tracked separately. One of the main reasons is that the sheer volume of CGM usually means orders of magnitude more mentions in CGM than mainstream media. Our Orchestra platform classifies each type of media individually, rolls them up into broad classifications of "CGM" and "MSM", and provides side-by-side charting to compare trends in each.

Posted by: Jim Nail | Jan 2, 2007 9:21:49 AM

Jim,

Saying that both are important is not the same as saying that they are one and the same thing. The sensible way to track these to spaces is to do so individually and provide perspective on the two different set of results. To take an extreme example, imagine if you showed a trend of mentions of a brand over time and didn't distinguish if those mentions came from blogs, message boards or news sites. It would be meaningless.

Posted by: Matthew Hurst | Dec 30, 2006 9:25:33 AM

Absolutely - no one would/should ever suggest that looking at anything but the whole package is sufficient. What really gets under my skin is the assumption, by many of us residing in the social media echo chamber, that social media is "mainstream".

Not by a long shot. Just stroll into the executive suite of any major corporation and ask around - everyone's heard of blogs, MySpace, YouTube - but do they understand them? Do they understand the business problems that these things solve? Rarely. And social media will not be "mainstream" until we can interact with most of our favourite brands via corporate blogs, etc. (and there's precedent for this - it was called a "website", and I can remember when companies thought that the Internet was a fad - like CB radio).

Steve's way off on this one.

Posted by: maggie fox | Dec 29, 2006 9:47:27 PM

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