How "Social" Has Changed Media, Advertising, Public Relations

"Until recently, the history of digital has been about data, direct response, sales and
commerce," says eConsultancy. One might argue that, until recently, media has been substantially supported by advertising, while public relations has assumed the existing of significant gatekeeper media whose attention has to be won.

One might argue that social media is changing all that, that fragmentation of voices has important implications beyond the "mere" fact of an exploding universe of voices. One might argue that "social" content, adding to a flood of new content, puts more emphasis on reputation, authority, emotion and values, eConsultancy argues, after interviewing scores of brand communications professionals.

"We found general agreement that a company’s reputation and brand identity are increasingly defined by viral ideas rather than media buys, eConsultancy says. That will come as a bombshell for firms that historically have founded their businesses on the notion that advertising was essential to their plans to establish and promote brands. As brand spending on social media increases, the typical result is that advertising starts to dwindle, since social projects are funded out of the budget formerly allocated to "advertising." Of course, that trend has been underway for some time. Many smaller companies and businesses years ago began reallocating budgets from traditional uses to building up their websites, for example.

The upshot is that brand "storytelling" is shifting from traditional means to new channels. And that is going to cause all sorts of shifts in the broader media, advertising and PR landscape.

"Even forward-looking organizations are just coming to grips with the fact that they don’t own their stories," says eConsultancy, "They can tell the original version but can’t control how it evolves, spreads or ends."

"The single greatest need expressed by the executives we interviewed was for a better capability in creating content," says eConsultancy. "They see the necessity for exciting, engaging and often entertaining content which can build and sustain viral momentum."

If none of this strikes you as unusual, that's understandable. People in the media business like to talk about themselves, even when real people don't much care. But these are huge shifts, with important ramifications for the financial health of all companies that traditionally have been part of the media ecosystem.

People sometimes like to debate whether Google is a "media company" or not. Google always denies that, but the existence of the question shows how new things are happening. These days, it is increasingly likely that brands will be operating, to some genuine extent, as "media" in their own right. What will be quite different for existing media is that where advertising has supported "media" in the past, to some growing degree, "commerce" is going to support many new forms of media.

Some have noted in the past that the "business function of a newspaper or magazine or TV network is to aggregate an audience so advertising can be sold." In the future, the "business function" of some new forms of media will be to sell products and services. That's a huge change.

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