UCM3: 8th Excercise - Traditional Media vs. Social Media

I think the main difference between and tradtional Media is that social media has a significant impact on brand awareness and popularity, this medium cares less about financial aspects of a product and more about the product itself, its usability, and the voices surrounding it.

Nowadays it seems that most of traditional media are integrating the social media into their traditional way to keep up-to-date, to create brand awrness and to gain competitive advantage over other traditional media.

Main diferences between traditional, also calles industrial media and social media are: Reach - both industrial and social media technologies provide scale and enable anyone to reach a global audience. Accessibility - the means of production for industrial media are typically owned privately or by government; social media tools are generally available to anyone at little or no cost. Usability — industrial media production typically requires specialized skills and training. Most social media does not, or in some cases reinvents skills, so anyone can operate the means of production. Recency — the time lag between communications produced by industrial media can be long (days, weeks, or even months) compared to social media (which can be capable of virtually instantaneous responses; only the participants determine any delay in response). As industrial media is currently adopting social media tools, this feature may well not be distinctive anymore in some time. Permanence - industrial media once created cannot be altered (once a magazine article is printed and distributed changes cannot be made to that same article) whereas social media can be altered almost instantaneously by comments or editing.

A social media ranking for different companies can be done by comparing each brand's "share of voice ranking". This ranking is determined by how successfuly the brand is using the various social media or how social media has embraced the brand. The different social media looked at can be: Blogosphere, videos implemented on YouTube, Studivz- Groups, Facebook Groups, Photobucket, Clipfish and many more. One of the brands/ companies which most successfully integrated the use of social media to create Brand Awareness is Google and also BMW by looking on the "share of voices" obtained. BMW is also in the top because it has a lot of Video spreaded and also many existing communities in the whole world. You can see one example for its successfull vieo spreading (viral Marketing) below.

To conclude we can definitely say that the truth shows the integration of social media no longer is a "could have". Nowadays it is a "Must have" to survive the croud.