Traditional Mass Media vs. New Media
- All these theories have been traditionally developed thinking about traditional media and how they effect the consumers. But the role of mass media has changed dramatically in the age of social media.
- Three key developments are:
- the Internet enables publication of massive user- generated content;
- social media enables one-to-one communication, as opposed to the one-to-many communication structure of traditional media;
- social media users appear to voluntarily join and participate in branded social media communities instead of avoiding or dismissing them.
- Marketeers believe that social networking sites offer vast marketing opportunities through amplifying word-of-mouth advertising; Facebook’s real-time news feed feature allows users to see their friends’ updates, including when they join advertiser-sponsored groups (Hansell 2006). Creating branded social media accounts to freely connect with consumers has thus become a prerequisite for today’s marketers.
