Why New Media Isn’t New Anymore
I’ve been meaning to write-up some more notes from the recent Online Marketing Show for a while now, but just haven’t had the time. But what I can do, is look at how some of the issues it raised are reflected in the real world.
One of the speakers at the OMS, on the Highly Recommended panel, which looked at how social networks and review sites were changing business, was blogger Russel Davies. He had some very interesting things to say on the role of brands/companies in social networking (he doesn’t think that they have a role) and on the internet in general.
One of his most compelling comments was to do with the difference that age makes to how we view digital. Essentially (I didn’t have a dictaphone, so apologies to Russell if I’ve misquoted him), he said:
New media is only new if you’re old
This matches the idea of digital natives (anyone under the age of 25); if you were born after 1982, then the internet started when you were about 12. It’s not new media, it’s just media. It just is.
This comment keeps coming back to me, especially when reading articles on the growth of digital in the mainstream media; this includes the Guardian’s Media 100, released today, which is forward thinking enough to put Eric Schmidt of Google at #1, but (rather quantly), marks his business as new media. Google’s business, of course, is, more than any other digital company’s, simply media.
The Observer had a very interesting piece yesterday about how YouTube is shaping the US election campaign. What’s interesting, other than the fact that an anti-Hilary, pro-Barrack video which was created with no official link to the Obama campaign has now been seen over 3.5 million times, is that most of this is being done by these very digital natives.
Asked whether his campaign had anything to do with the anti-Hilary ad, Barrack Obama answered
it’s not something we had anything to do with or were aware of and, frankly, given what it looks like, we don’t have the technical capacity to create something like this. It’s pretty extraordinary
This of course highlighted Barack’s own status as a digital immigrant, as it turns out that the video was made on a MacBook using an editing programme called Final Cut Studio.
Whilst it is almost certainly too early to tell whether YouTube will have a serious impact on the election in the US, all of these different little events & comments serve to highlight something that we covered last week.
With the ever increasing amount of content available (much of it, contrary to the opinion laid out in the new book The Cult Of The Amateur, of a very high quality), it is incumbent on brands, companies, politicians and anyone looking to gain the public’s attention, to raise their game if they want to be noticed.
