If you pay attention to trends in marketing and communications seminar topics, you might easily conclude that traditional media are dead. Today, countless professional development seminars are focusing exclusively on how to put social media to work for your company.
Financially speaking, it’s certainly true that many print and television news operations are in serious trouble. But don’t assume these old-school media outlets are without influence and impact in this age of social media.
It is critical to remember that the social media world is not a world unto itself. In fact, much of the information dispersed via social media originates in the traditional media world. Why does this matter to marketers and PR professionals? Because it means you can feed the insatiably hungry social and non-traditional media channels – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, You Tube, etc. – by feeding the traditional media.
Consider a recent Pierpont client experience. A simple announcement through a news release was picked up by the San Antonio Business Journal for its daily e-news blast. Nice. But then that news brief was picked up by a San Antonio blogger who summarized the Business Journal item in a video segment. This blogger has thousands of readers/viewers.
This channel-jumping example is repeated constantly as news coverage by a “traditional” media outlet is used as source material by other social and web-based media. Think about how often your Facebook friends post links to articles or video clips from a newspaper or broadcast news outlet. That’s traditional media feeding social media!
Social media channels are huge in the marketing and communications world – but so are traditional media. Don’t forget this when you’re creating plans for 2011.