Before my very eyes, I am seeing the shift happen from the clout and reach previously enjoyed by traditional media to new and social media.
Your campaign, project or company is not a success unless it is also a success online. And there are many ways to measure that success, that reach.
What I find is that traditional industry leaders and business owners mostly don't understand the Internet and Internet culture as well as how to do this properly. A lot don't even know what are the benchmarks that are available.
Nowadays, businesses all want to 'engage' people online, because at the core of anything, is people. You reach out to the right group, communicate the correct messages and your campaign or project will be a success.
It used to be that you can do this by pushing your message on print or billboards, TV and radio. While these media are still influential and relevant, the clout online has grown faster than I ever expected.
Consider the birth of the newspaper. It was done because it would be easier than shouting your message from the back of a wagon, at the top of your lungs, everywhere.
The first newspapers were done for convenience. It was easy, direct and simple. As an industry gets more complex, revenue models increase in sophistication and eventually, it reaches a plateau. In the last cycles, as processes become more convoluted, revenue is decreased as resource focus is more on the operations aspect rather than the product.
Online is just at the beginning stages here in Malaysia, but I foresee that we will follow what has happened in the US, where online media is poised to generate more cash than traditional media.
How this will be done? Well, new media companies such as the one I'm working at are figuring this out and establishing procedures, protocols and structures.
In essence, having worked at both old and new media, I can say that online media is more challenging as it is complicated to nail things into something more nebulous. It is also more fun.
All the skill sets and expertise, lessons and mistakes learned from traditional media is very much valid online. Because at the core, everything is communication.
Everything.
Now, I shall go and take a dump.
